Ubisoft 'Assassin's Creed' Release Highlights Gaming Industry Embargo Problem (Op Ed)

[qlum]

I personally don't tend to preorder a lot as its just taking unnesesary risks for very little benefit, sure the 20% off on a preorder is nice but the 33% off during the first sale or just waiting a year and buying it for less then € 10 is a lot nicer. Multiplayer games dependent on friends playing it may be a different story as I know they may not be playing in 2 months but even then I tend to just buy it online retail at launch (because that is a lot cheaper) and after gauging who is playing it. At least on pc there isn't much point in playing a singleplayer game at launch when its only getting cheaper.

 

[red77star]

Ubisoft -> these jokers should not even exist.

 

[xenogen]

Don't preorder games! You vote with your dollars and are electing bad ports. Ubisoft has been the worst and other big titles suck

 

[Gryphon Serpente]

I wonder what will happen when publishers see the success or failure of Chris Robert's Star Citizen? If it succeeds.. Fans / reviewers / everyone will have been able to follow the birth of a AAA game until its release to the public. SC has the biggest testing group out there.. roughly over 300,000 players world wide providing real time feedback, pushing the systems to their limits, breaking them and showing CIG where the things need to be revised and tweaked. So far it seems like the process is working and each build is smoother and smoother.. yeah sure sometimes a fix here breaks something there.. but they are doing it all in front of everyone instead of waiting behind closed servers until release like all the big name publishers do so when something is broken.. its too late to get it fixed when its in the wild and bad reviews poor in.

 

[Gryphon Serpente]

I wonder what will happen when publishers see the success or failure of Chris Robert's Star Citizen? If it succeeds.. Fans / reviewers / everyone will have been able to follow the birth of a AAA game until its release to the public. SC has the biggest testing group out there.. roughly over 300,000 players world wide providing real time feedback, pushing the systems to their limits, breaking them and showing CIG where the things need to be revised and tweaked. So far it seems like the process is working and each build is smoother and smoother.. yeah sure sometimes a fix here breaks something there.. but they are doing it all in front of everyone instead of waiting behind closed servers until release like all the big name publishers do so when something is broken.. its too late to get it fixed when its in the wild and bad reviews poor in.

 

[ah]

Embargoes are not necessarily bad, they ensure that each reviewer has ample time to review the game properly, but alarms should go off if is release-day, as that would indicate serious issues with the game that the publisher does not want to make public.

Also, it seems it's the UPlay integration (micotransactions) that's eating much of the performance, apparently just disconnecting the gaming machine from the internet is enough double your framerate.

 

[ah]

If poor performance is linked to UPlay integration then it's reason enough not to buy the game, full stop.

 

[psiboy]

This is why I simply don't buy new release titles anymore! I either wait a few weeks and buy them if they get good comments/reviews on sites and in forums or if they get a lot of crap comments/reviews then I have saved myself money and the disapointment

 

[flip the day]

mostly bought it do to the other games and the starting game play is so glitched that not planning to play till i have no other choice

 

[OrumusST]

I figured out a while ago never to believe the first reviews of anything. Embargoes might be new, but the tendency for people to gush about something just because it is new and a "hot" title has been around for a while. Wait a week, see what the reviewers say then and then I make my decision to buy or not.

 

[yumri]

i agree buying a morden game on day 1 is a bad idea for PC or for console as each one will have a massive patch on day one probably adding in what they couldnt finish by the due date for the disc image and fixing bugs / fixing gliches that they couldnt fix before the disc image was due so they could mass produce the amount of disks but in this that is why i do not like the new way of how games are made there is a hard due date on when it has to be done by and alot of the story and/or gameplay just isnt there becuase of it because the game cycles are so short that either 1 they reuse aton of stuff from the previous game(s) and/or 2 they cut aton out of it because they couldnt shove it in by the due date thus DLC.
DLC and downloadable patches really was the start of all this mess and atm i am thinking that Ubisoft created their new engine with to high of a computer spec in mind for " future planning " but whatever in a few years the requirements for their games will not change and what we have in our PCs will be better than now to which it will most likely cost alot less too. This is simular to when Cysis 1 came out it pushed the hardware to the max thus why Ubisoft is trying to do just with excessive amounts of unneeded AIs now in combat it does make sense for that but for all the non-combat NPC walking around in AC: Unity which supposely also have that it does not make much sense unless Ubisoft will support like my 10 core hyper threaded CPU to cope with that as it is still sitting with most of the cores idle during gameplay thus Ubisoft did not do that well of a job making the AIs scale to the amount of cores and in that the preformance decrease is unneeded.

 

[OrumusST]

Anyone remember back in the day, when Publishers tried their best to release complete and quality games? as Yumri said this new era of DLCs and 0 day patching and then constant patches for bugs that for a lot of big games had thousands of free Beta testers to tell them about but then do not fix because of release deadlines.... For me its like they want you to buy a unfinished product then expect you not to complain when its broken. Games, while much more complex are products just like a TV or a car. If you bought a TV and could only watch 1 channel because the rest would be added soon!, that would probably annoy most people. And if the complexity is the excuse. Fine then take the time to get it right....

 

[n1k0]

It's only a matter of time until enough consumers become weary of these issues. I personally never expect PC titles to work properly for the first week anymore (be it server issues or some crazy bugs). Even early release reviews are unreliable in this regard - and there's a limited source of reliable reviewers... (and I'll stop here before I get way off-topic.)

 

[clumpybug]

Couldn't you just wait a day or two or three after the game comes out before you buy the game? Then there should be lots of reviews.

 

[skit75]

Couldn't you just wait a day or two or three after the game comes out before you buy the game? Then there should be lots of reviews.

Exactly. People who pre-order untested/un-reviewed games get exactly what they deserve. To continue with review embargoes means the publishers are perfectly willing to accept all the negativity that accompanies an elaborate AAA title, PC release. It is a blip on their radar when weighed against pre-order cash. Accept that you are an early adopter, paying to beta-test unfinished product..

 

[yumri]

Couldn't you just wait a day or two or three after the game comes out before you buy the game? Then there should be lots of reviews.

Exactly. People who pre-order untested/un-reviewed games get exactly what they deserve. To continue with review embargoes means the publishers are perfectly willing to accept all the negativity that accompanies an elaborate AAA title, PC release. It is a blip on their radar when weighed against pre-order cash. Accept that you are an early adopter, paying to beta-test unfinished product..

yeah but at least Steam makes Indie games have to tell you when a game is still in that state while the triple A studios do not have to and i personily think that is unfair to the ppl paying the money to help it along to the finished product. As ussualy the finished product is after most ppl have forgotten about the game and went onto whatever is next.