Ubisoft has done a lot of damage to the gaming scene over the years and to their own reputation. Time and time again they’ve delivered severely rushed and broken games, yet they keep powering on year after year doing the same damn thing. Slowly, it seems that Ubisoft has been trying to mend its ways, and it has been working, but there’s still a long way to go, although their latest move could be one of their biggest improvements to date.
They’re committing to making the next Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games worth the wait. Ubisoft VP of Editorial spoke to Tommy Fancois of IGN, and he didn’t hold back on his feelings.
“I’ll tell you what,” François said, “We believe alpha for these games needs to be one year before release. We’re trying to achieve that. That’s super f****** blunt, I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say this. This is the goal we’re going for: alpha one year before, more quality, more polish.”
“So if this means biting the [bullet] and not having an Assassin’s game, or a Far Cry [in 2017], f*** it.”
To me this sounds a little funny, it’s almost as if they’ve realised they need to actually play test their games in the office before they ship them to the consumer. Either way, I’m glad they’ve hit upon this major step in game development.
“I do think we need to break that formula,” he said. “This year we’ve given Far Cry and Assassin’s some time to decant, innovate, and polish. The objective behind this is exactly that. You’d be surprised – there are so many prototypes of alternatives.”
“It’s always the same thing, the player is king, so we play-test it and people are just like, ‘What the f***?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh no! We just spent a year prototyping this new macrostructure for an Assassin’s or other type of open world game and people are telling us it’s s****.'”
Let’s hope this works out, as I used to love both these franchises and lost interest in the repetitive releases some years ago. What do you think, can Ubisoft turn this around?
