Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Assassin's Creed and Bandwagons



Make no mistake, I am a fan of the Assassin's Creed games. I think they are really fun and well crafted, and just damn pretty to look at.

With that out of the way, the new Ass Creed as I affectionately refer to them as, was announced yesterday...to a SLEW of hate from gamers on nearly every board I looked at. This new Ass Creed is getting Call of Duty levels of online hate (yet still bought by millions) and it's not exactly sudden. This has been brewing for some time with fans lamenting how "samey" the games feel and I can understand the sentiment. It's never been quite THIS overwhelming though, so what changed?

Unity happened.

Even die-hard fans of the series bought Unity and it was practically unplayable for about a month or so. This is about the worst thing you can do to a gamer. Blue balling them by delaying the game is one thing, but when you have the game all lubed up inserted into your system for easy penetration and you're still blue ballsed? That's a slap in the dick face.

So it's no wonder really why gamers are so outraged and skeptical over the newest entry, but, I feel as though they are far too harsh if not riding a bandwagon of hate. Looking over Ubisoft's gaming career, when has something like Unity ever really happened before? Something on that scale of unplayability? I can't name another time this happened from them. They didn't have some awful track record like EA with its long list of anti-consumer policies that drove gamers away by the truck load. This was ONE game, ONE instance, unless you were one of those gamers who felt lied to over Watchdogs marketing the game wrong, there hasn't been too many instances where Ubisoft has annoyed fans...except for Uplay also...ok...ok so there's a bit of a list here!

I am getting a sense of bandwagon hate here, it just seems too overwhelming in the comment sections. Sales of the series still being fairly high indicates to me that I'm not alone in liking them. Same goes with Call of Duty or Madden, people do like them, but you'd never know it if you only read comment sections. I almost wonder if the lack of positive comments is related to people being petrified of the recent waves of internet bullying from people with holier than thou opinions on literally every topic. I feel like this is where the internet has gone, and the "conversation" has become extinct. Everything has to be blue or red, right or wrong, Chinese or Finnish (I'm obligated to mention minorities in every post now...yeah I know right?....thanks Obama)

I guess where I'm at with it...is I just don't care. I love the series, I love the settings, I love the adventures, and the music, and at the end of the day Ubisoft is giving me what I want as a gamer and I just don't feel entitled enough to ask for "more" when I barely know what that would be. I actually asked angry fans what they wanted, and MOST of them said they didn't want a buggy game. Beyond that, they couldn't articulate how they wanted the series to change or evolve, instead they're just tired of it, which is something I understand, but it's not something that ever happens to me. If they made Mega Man 1 million I'd be the first in line to buy it. What? I love Mega Man dammit!

The point at which I start actively hating a company is when they actively stop making video games I find fun, or selling me a broken game that they refuse to fix, and so far Ubisoft has yet to do that.

*Is it...is it in yet?*


2 comments:

UncleKrakken said...

The fun thing with all those comments too, is how many of those people buy the game they're bashing the announcement of anyway.

My only real problem with the Syndicate announcement was that I think we tend to be a little too applause happy for people who admit the previous game was lousy in order to sell us their new game.

Acefondu said...

lol! Yeah that was REALLY weird wasn't it? It felt like a political advertisement or something, like they knew they had to run damage control because they expected fans to react this harshly. I mean, it's not like they didn't already admit to their mistakes, and apologize by offering free DLC to make up for it. The better idea would have been to just not bring it up again probably. It's like if Nintendo used some its worst licensed games to preview a new one. "From the makers of Mario Typing, and Mario is Missing..."