Ubisoft Is A Good Company

[J Tyran]

I think Ubisoft have a lot of talented devs working for them, that want to try new things or do things a little differently. They explore the world and history with their games too, they are hamstrung by terrible corporate decisions though. Like splitting a game between a dozen or so developers or cramming in attempts at extra revenue streams and DRM.

 

[RJ 17]

It's ok to be a fanboy of a company, no matter how crap a game company is there will always be loyalists. If you truly like Ubisoft games then good for you, I'm glad they're making games that you enjoy. The trick about being a fanboy, though, is that you have to acknowledge that their shit does stink, just like everyone else's. I mean good lord, you're talking about DRM like it's a good thing simply because they hand out some token trinkets.

What's really funny though is how you cite Jim Sterling as though he would support your belief that Ubisoft's DRM is DRM done right...when in reality Ubisoft is generally his primary target when it comes to anti-DRM conversations.

Oh, and just a friendly tip: when attempting to make an argument such as this one, it's best to steer clear of entirely subjective arguments such as "quality of games." You look at a pile of Ubisoft games and see a pile of games that you thoroughly enjoy. Truly there's nothing wrong with that, everyone has their own tastes. However any number of other people could look at that same pile and say "Those are all games that I literally want to shit on."

 

[jklinders]

Ubi used to be a go to for me on the grounds that were the only ones making some of the kinds of SIM games I like. IL-2 Sturmovich and Silent Hunter. I was enjoying the Assassin's Creed games for a few years as well.

As a PC gamer, U-Play is a game breaker for me. it is literally the only platform for launching a PC game out there that I can think whose primary focus is to punish me for being a PC gamer and that clearly makes me a pirate. I cannot fathom why they sell their games on Steam given that it forces you to use U-Play anyway. That puts it on par with fucking Microsoft games for fucking windows by forcing the use of more than one gaming client.

They have lost the plot on their Ass Creed games to the point where they are clearly milking the franchise, pulling a Call of Duty by recycling the same engine over and over and charging for the next game full price instead of the expansion pack it actually was.

The quality of their Sim type games has fallen into the toilet to the point where I felt betrayed in a couple of the purchases. They need new management and a new focus. Also they need to get rid of their contempt for the PC gamer, or stop attempting to sell to us. We don't care any more.

 

[loa]

So I bought blood dragon on steam recently and it slapped uplay which is the ubisoft proprietary storefront onto my pc without asking, I had to unlock the game with a key there and need to juggle 1 more password to log into there so I can play the darn single player game.
The uplay storefront window also pops up every time I start blood dragon and remains in the background when I play in steam big picture.
If I try to return to the desktop, uplay breaks the big picture controller support so I can't confirm quitting to the desktop without using a mouse.

So that's really annoying and a bump in the road of me using my pc like a console!
That's the extent of bad experience I have with ubisoft.
I don't buy all that many assassin creeds and farcries though and am not really all that interested in online multiplayer so it's kind of limited that way.
I much prefer games that don't bring annoying baggage like uplay to the table though and uplay is inseparably tethered to everything ubisoft so that's definitely a factor when deciding if I should buy a thing that has an ubisoft logo on it!

 

[chikusho]

A company can be really bad, and still make great products.

 

[loa]

Oh by the way after talking about uplay I just went to change my uplay password so it's not the same as steams password and you wouldn't believe how hard doing that is!

It's not even something you can do from within the client they force onto you and on the uplay site you will be greeted with popups that go "pick one of these bullshit avatars now! There is no cancel button and you are blocked from doing anything else on this site until you picked one!".

Also if I make uplay start in offline mode, it'll always ask for a password (and thanks to that specific popup, blood dragon will always start windowed. Neato) until you enable pass remembering (it doesn't ask if it is allowed to go online for whatever reason) and it will use the old password if you change your pass on the site until you go online again.

So thats neat I guess.
That's something fun to shove down every customers throat.

 

[Dalisclock]

I always used to think the reason no one ever gave Ubisoft shit was because unlike EA, they manged to put up some pretty good games, great games even. As far as I know, widespread disdain for Ubisoft only really happened after Watch_Dogs.

Well, a lot of people didn't like ACIII either, and I'm pretty sure nobody who isn't a Ubisoft suit likes Uplay. If Ubisoft decided Uplay was going away tomorrow, my respect for them as a company would increase. Not a whole lot, mind you, because they kept it place for a decade despite the fact everyone hates it, and also because I'd have to be sure they weren't going to replace it with something worse.

 

[SecondPrize]

Seemed that for a while they couldn't open their mouths about PC gaming without lying like a dog on a rug. Either way, uplay is a deal breaker for me. I love company of heroes, which I bought after uplay was removed from it. I think it's been three times now I've backed off from buying a game in a sale because I saw it required Uplay on its info page.

 

[Flutterguy]

Their big steady releases suck.

The smaller releases like Child of Light, From Dust and... well I avoid buying them cause uPlay really is a pain in the ass, not even a big problem, just an unnecessary one that actually prevents games from working unless put in online mode.

Farcry is fun though. Easy drunk mayhem kind of fun.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I'm not saying Watch Dogs is bad because it was downgraded, I'm just mad they lied, just like other devs with bullshots (see Epic games for their incredible bullshot crap). I get it if it's early in dev and they put something out showing their progress, but it's weird to say "this is gameplay" then the actual game looks very different. It's like fast food burgers in commercials vs bought, the only thing is you say it's fast food what do you expect when you're paying 5-10 bucks vs 60+whatever DLC crap they're trying to harass. I played Watch Dogs and I wasn't wowed but I wasn't as angry as others with gameplay, I'm honestly just not buying Ubisoft games because I don't like their business practices. Their DRM history is enough where I'd avoid. If you enjoy 'em? That's totally fine, I'm not trying to sway minds on games. As I said, love me some Rayman but, bloody annoyed with Uplay and previous drm nonsense.

I don't feel Ubisoft lied about the Watch Dogs graphics; of course, the PR isn't going to literally say the graphics got downgraded. The proof was in the videos Ubisoft released after the delay and before the game's release, you can see for yourself what the game looked like. Plus, those files are there in the PC version to make the game look much closer to the 2012 footage so you can tell they had the game running at those graphics but couldn't iron out everything. It's not like they released pre-rendered videos and said that's how the game looked. An open world game graphically is going to change over the course of development because the game will be able to look better when the whole city isn't finished and not all the game systems are in place yet either. It's like scenes from movie trailers that don't make it into the movie. When any piece of art is previewed, it's not done yet. I found Watch Dogs to be a pretty good game; mix and matching between the stealth, hacking, and shooting on the fly made for some great moments. The shooting was the best 3rd-person shooting I've ever experienced in an sandbox/open world game. I knew going in that the characters and story were going to be bland as fuck just be the previews, I bought Watch Dogs for the gameplay, which was exactly what I expected (3rd-person FarCry in a city with hacking). The missions were much more open ended than say GTA, which is the whole point of a sandbox game IMO.

I think people need to cut Ubisoft (and others) some slack for the DRM stuff. The whole digital marketplace is rather new to everyone, even Steam sucked early on and still has its lumps. It seems like people are just now starting to warm to EA's Origin. I think Ubisoft is just trying to get their own marketplace going and there's going to be bumps. I'm not saying to just give them a pass but give them a bit of slack and see how Uplay evolves and changes before calling them a bad company. It is part of the reason I barely PC game because I don't want to have to deal with stuff not working (whether it's on my end or their end), I just put in the disc and the game works every time. I'm a PC tech and I can figure out all the issues but it's just not worth the time for the most part the better graphics (resolution and framerate) don't really improve the gameplay experience much.