The first game won hundreds of awards before it was released. Of course, it was based on great graphics that never made it to the final version. This is typical Ubisoft.
I'm never buying another Ubisoft game, ever again. Don't feel bad pirating them, either. I have several friends that work for Ubisoft Montreal, they all tell me internally the company pirates all their development software. I wish they would get audited. Basically, they tell their employees "you need this software, that one, etc, but we won't pay for it". So either the employee has to buy thousands of dollars worth of software themselves, to be able to do the job they were hired to do, or they pirate it.
If a software company refuses to pay for software, why should we encourage them?