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Ubisoft Embargoes Assassin’s Creed Unity Reviews Until After the Game’s Launch
Two big Triple-A games had their review embargoes lift on Tuesday. One of those was Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that game out a week from this Tuesday, which already has the overwhelmingly positive reviews that you’d expect from BioWare of old. The other game was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity, a game that came out on Tuesday with some early and midnight launches but had a Noon EST review embargo.
In the latest of a series of avoidable gaffes, Ubisoft has again insulted the consumer. This time, they embargoed their top franchise’s annual offering’s review until after the game was released in an abuse of the system.
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Ubisoft Dev Calls 1080p Debate a “Weird Echo Chamber”
Another week, another LOL Ubisoft moment. If WordPress let me run ads on this blog, I think that I could have put myself through university with all the foot-in-mouth moments coming out of Ubisoft over the last few months.
The latest LOL Ubisoft (LOLbisoft?) moment is from Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson. He told the Official Xbox Magazine that resolution is “certainly not something I care about in a game.”
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Assassin’s Creed Unity Runs at 900p and 30 FPS on Both Consoles
There have been a lot of complaints about the graphical fidelity and the smoothness of video of games on next-gen consoles. However, Ubisoft’s treatment of Assassin’s Creed Unity isn’t just upsetting one console’s user base but the whole of gaming.
In an interview with VideoGamer, AC Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand said that the resolution of ACU would be set at 900p and framerate locked to 30 FPS on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The reasoning behind that is so baffling that everyone has turned against Ubisoft.
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Watch Dogs Mod Brings Graphics to E3 2012 Levels
For all the talk that the E3 2012 teaser for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs was a complete lie after the graphical downgrade for the game’s retail release, it turns out that it may not have been a lie at all. Well, at least not completely.
Watch Dogs hasn’t been out three weeks but an early version of a mod has been released for the PC version of Watch Dogs that reintroduces the graphical tricks that made the original Watch Dogs videos look so amazing. What’s the most shocking is that the files needed for the mod were included with the game all along.
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Critics Corner: Watch Dogs
I’m not a fan hyperbolic hashtags but since it was announced, Watch Dogs has had enough #hype that it easily trumps the amount of hype that Titanfall had behind it. This game had a solid two years of hype from the initial announcement to buzz over next-gen level graphics, the release date announcement and subsequent delays. For these last two years, Watch Dogs has been held up as the gold standard for next-gen gaming. It was hyped as the first must-own game of this generation of consoles. Well, it might have been if it hadn’t been pushed back six months.
Watch Dogs is the second of this month’s releases that I saw in action at Fan Expo. Trust me when I say that Watch Dogs needed the time to fix it. There were clipping issues with bridges. The framerate was a bit wobbly. And the controls looked a little sluggish. Of course, that was just one tiny vertical slice that I saw nine months ago.
Did the extra six months of polish time make Watch Dogs worth the #hype? Let’s see what the critics think.
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Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed 5 Leaked
Ubisoft may not have been planning to let the cat out of the bag on two of their more popular franchises but that hasn’t stopped info from coming out. Late last week, word started leaking fast about the upcoming iterations in the popular Far Cry and flagship Assassin’s Creed franchise. In fact, Ubisoft was caught so off guard that they admitted that they weren’t expecting to have to officially confirm AC5 yet.
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Building (Critical) Consensus: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (PS3 / 360)
I’ll make an admission before we go on. I was so bored with the story in AC: Revelations that I stopped playing part way through. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t think I made it more than a couple of hours in AC3 either. I went about as completionist as I had this side of Mass Effect or the PS1 & PS2 Final Fantasy games in the first three AC games but couldn’t will myself to even finish the two most recent.
A lot of critics hail AC4 as a return to form for the franchise with a focus on an increase in the general fun in the series thanks to piracy and the pirate-themed story. Mind you, there were quite a few reviewers lamenting that little had changed mechanically in this game when compared to the previous games in the franchise. If you’ve played previous AC games and loved them, you’ll probably love this one too. For those who fell, out of love… Do you like pirates?
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Assassin’s Creed 4 Expected to Sell Less than AC3
If you’re an Ubisoft investor (or just a massive Ubi fan), the bad news just keeps coming. On the same conference call in which Ubisoft announced the delays of both Watch Dogs and The Crew, Ubisoft also announced that they were expecting sales for their flagship game Assassin’s Creed IV to be less than Assassin’s Creed III.
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Watch Dogs Delayed to Spring 2014
One of the most hotly anticipated games of the fall and what was expected to be the starting point of a new anchor franchise for Ubisoft has been pushed back by a few months.
Yesterday, Ubisoft made the surprise announcement that Watch Dogs would be delayed until the spring of 2014 to ensure that the game met their quality standards.
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Building (Critical) Consensus: Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Yesterday was the release of the standalone Far Cry 3 based game, Blood Dragon. The game really has nothing to do with Far Cry 3 apart from being made with the same engine and by the same development team. While FC3 was a survival-ish shooter set on a tropical island, Blood Dragon is a 1980s vision of a post-apocalyptic future. Apart from sharing a few things like the name and developer, you wouldn’t associate the two.
However, like Far Cry 3, Blood Dragon is a critically acclaimed hit that is a loving homage to / parody of 80s sci-fi.
et geekera 