Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos

RogueyWon (735973) writes "The latest entry in the long-running Assassin's Creed game series, Assassin's Creed: Unity released this week. Those looking for pre-release reviews on whether to make a purchase were out of luck; the publisher, Ubisoft, had provided gaming sites with advance copies, but only on condition that their reviews be withheld until 17 hours after the game released in North America. Following the game's release, many players have reported finding it in a highly buggy state, with severe performance issues affecting all three release platforms (PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One). Ubisoft has been forced onto the defensive, taking the unprecedented step of launching a live-blog covering their efforts at debugging the game, but the debacle has already had a large impact on the company's share value and the incident has drawn widespread attention to the increasingly common practice of review embargoes."

Comments

Depends on Embargo Lift

[CajunArson]

It's one thing to prevent game review sites from playing one-upsmanship over each other by "leaking" early reviews (that are often incomplete and based on beta versions of the game). However, once you can buy the "finished" product, the only reason to have a continuing embargo is that you know the product sucks but you don't want to share that information.

Another strategy: Have game review sites flat out say that an embargo for a certain game is NOT lifting prior to the game going on sale. I know lots of NDAs have Fight Club clauses (you do NOT talk about the NDA).. but a clever game review site could probably get around that without actually saying "The Assassin's Creed Embargo Does Not Lift Until 11PM" or something similar.

Re:Depends on Embargo Lift

[dj245]

It's one thing to prevent game review sites from playing one-upsmanship over each other by "leaking" early reviews (that are often incomplete and based on beta versions of the game). However, once you can buy the "finished" product, the only reason to have a continuing embargo is that you know the product sucks but you don't want to share that information.

Another strategy: Have game review sites flat out say that an embargo for a certain game is NOT lifting prior to the game going on sale. I know lots of NDAs have Fight Club clauses (you do NOT talk about the NDA).. but a clever game review site could probably get around that without actually saying "The Assassin's Creed Embargo Does Not Lift Until 11PM" or something similar.

Its astonishing to me that anyone agreed to operate under such an NDA anyway. 17 hours is sufficiently long that you could aquire the game, play it for 2 hours to get a feel for it, 1 hour to record a video, edit for another 2 hours, and then post it with 10 hours left on the embargo.

Any game company having their embargo end long after the game is available is just begging for trouble. Or they know there is a very serious problem and they can't or won't delay the release.

Re:Depends on Embargo Lift

[nitehawk214]

If a publisher starts withholding games due to the embargo, then why not make that a story and publish a review of "We were only allowed to see the trailer, but based on the bad faith of the publisher we suggest that NOBODY PREODER OR BUY THIS GAME, because obviously the game must be crap if they feel the need to have an embargo."

If people stopped preordering games and buying on release day... this stuff would stop pretty quick.

Bennett!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Bennett Haselton agree with this assessment? I can't form an opinion until he weighs in on this. He's a frequent contributor.

live blog

[synapse7]

Why mention a live-blog and not have a link?

I think this is it, correct me if I'm wrong.

http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/...

Don’t really get it

[DumbSwede]

I’m not really a gamer, but while game review embargoes may be bad, how-about you don’t rush out on launch day to get it.

One of the highest correlated factors to success as an adult is delayed gratification as a kid. How about we all slow down and not have to be first. The game will still be available in a week and you’ll know if it is teh luz or not.

Re:Don’t really get it

[RogueyWon]

There's certainly plenty of evidence by now to suggest that games with review embargoes tend to be poor, or at least not as good as they've been hyped as. Aliens: Colonial Marines was the big example from last year - review embargo until launch, then reviews mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10 range (with a fair few even lower). More recently, Destiny (critical consensus "fairly good but not even close to justifying the hype") and Driveclub (barely works, and underwhelming even when it does work) have been good examples.

By contrast, when a game is sent for review well in advance of release, the reception is usually much more positive. Recent examples include Bayonetta 2 (reviews 3 weeks early in some cases, near-universal praise), Alien: Isolation (America hates it, rest of the world loves it) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (not actually released yet, but reviews near universal in their praise).

The lack of pre-release reviews is generally a very strong indication in its own right that a game is not going to be good.

Re:Don’t really get it

[Solandri]

More succinctly, if you're developing a game and you know it's good, why would you turn down free publicity before release?

Halo Masterchief Collection - same type of issues

[mzkhadir]

People are reporting same type of issues on X1. Reddit has a site going dedicated to issues people are reporting. http://www.reddit.com/r/halo/c...

No surprise

[Khyber]

They released a half-finished game and KNEW it was half-finished. They'd hoped to ride on the sales and issue a patch later. They accomplished this with the review embargo, and they KNEW that was the purpose of the embargo - to allow them to get those initial sales out before the shit hit the fan.

There should be a lawsuit on this fairly soon, I'd imagine.

Re:No surprise

[RogueyWon]

In fairness, while they'll probably get away with it this time, recent history suggests that with major franchises, you can fool people once, but you pay the price on the next game. Some examples here:

Final Fantasy XIII: sold extremely well on the basis of hype and the brand. Was a terrible game in almost every respect. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a rather better game. Lightning Returns (the third installment) is actually a very good game. Both sold terribly, due to reputational damage from their predecessor.

Resident Evil 6: near-universally panned. Sold pretty well on the basis of a massive marketing campaign. Resident Evil releases since then have had a much better critical reception, but much lower sales.

Call of Duty: Ghosts: Its predecessor, Black Ops 2, was actually a pretty interesting game, integrating RTS elements and branching storylines. Ghosts was a lazy, by the numbers pile of spunkgargleweewee. Its sales weren't fantastic by Call of Duty standards, but were still insane. The latest installment, Advanced Warfare, is much better, but is the slowest selling installment in the franchise in years.

So if Ubisoft put out another Assassin's Creed next year, expect it to tank in sales terms, no matter how good it is.

Quit buying games on day one

[MerlynEmrys67]

For that matter, quit buying them the first month or two. Let someone else debug them and when the game is worth actually playing, get it. Heck by then 1/2 the time the game has dropped in price 10-25% anyway.
I have given up on buying games before the first major patch, for that matter the first few if I am really interested and the reviews are that bad.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[Mashiki]

You mean the gamergate guys who found the brazillian "journalist" who was attacking and doxxing anita? But she didn't want to do anything about it. Or people like geordie tait(who's anti-gg) attacking gamergate by calling for a new holocaust

Like the GG-harassment patrol which goes after anyone on both sides? Yep, nothing at all. Then again, I could ask where is the anti-side denouncing people like Briana Wu, Lee Alexander, or Mattie Brice.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[Mashiki]

Oh you mean the article where Jimmy Wales had to step in and openly state that the article in question had no neutrality. Where he called out several senior editors for engaging in a edit war, skewing it out of neutrality. Where he had to step in to the Gamejournopros article, openly stating that there "was collusion, and at best it could be called denied not debunked." That same article, where he's now called on the pro-GG side to write their own article, because groups like project feminism and editors with no desire for objectivity have tainted the entire thing.

Yep, we sure do like facts.

Re:But let's remember

[Mashiki]

1) They weren't invented crimes. They did happen, she openly admitted to banging 5 guys while in a relationship. Using her own definition of rape, she raped her current partner that she was in a relationship with.
2) No, getting ads pulled because they lied about the movement in the first place. This then further followed by Nick Denton supporting one of his writers stating to "bring back bullying, that nerds should be bullied" and so on.
3) So, critique is harassment? By the way, how does one harass someone when they refuse to debate something.
4) No one in GG has "pushed or published" a gamers bill of rights. That was the anti-GG sides attempt. However, dozens of sites and youtubers have changed their ethics and disclosure policies since GG has started. Including Escapist+8 other affiliate sites, IGN is working on an updated ethics policy, and so on. Youtubers like Total biscuit have also been more open, you might remember him--he's the one who broke the story on the Shadows of Mordor stuff.
5) No one is defending #1 or #3. Though they correct people like you who are getting their information from very specific sources. But it sure makes for a tasty story doesn't it.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[Anonymous Coward]

It was outraged two days ago.

Here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku...

Kudos to IGN for criticizing Assassins Creed despite having advertisement for it on their site

Is the gaming media trying to hide behind the newest Assassin's Creed?

Assassin's Creed Unity press Embargo was, as expected, hiding significant performance issues on all platforms

Ubisoft make the new Assassin's creed embargo almost a full day after release (twitter.com)

Assassin's Creed Unity review copies featured no microtransactions in them whatsoever like the real game does for the public.

"I've told Ubi & will inform other PR: we won't accept a post-release embargo tied to a review copy again" -Stephen Totilo on AC:Unity

Why Assassins Creed: Unity matters to #GamerGate

On Twitter:
https://twitter.com/search?q=u...

Three primary places on internet for pro gamergate info:
1. #gamergate
2. /gg/ on 8chan
3. /r/kotakuinaction on reddit.

A lot of this was discussed two days ago.

It's not Gamergate responsibility to go after Ubisoft, it's the game press's. And there are plenty of pro-GG that responded favorably to Stephen Totilo pushback against the embargo.

Nvidia to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia plays the game every bit as dirty as Intel. In this case, Nvidia has created something called 'GAMEWORKS'- a proprietary closed-source library of routines specifically designed to collapse the performance of games on AMD hardware (or older Nvidia hardware). Nvidia pays shills to counter information like this in forums like this one, so let me give you one example.

The best current ANTI-ALIASING is a FREE, OPEN-SOURCE collection of methods from Crytek (the people behind Crysis and the original Far Cry). Their methods run with excellent performance on older hardware, and slightly favour AMD (because AMD hardware is always more shader-powerful than Nvidia at a given class). Not good for Nvidia. So Nvidia 'invented' TXAA- an horrifically bad AA method both in appearance and 'hit' on performance- but a method that runs far better on new Nvidia hardware than it does on new AMD hardware.

Nvidia actually PAYS developers like Ubisoft to NOT include the best, SMAA methods from Crytek (remember, they are free for any publisher to use). Instead, Nvidia only allows FXAA (also Nvidia created, but lightweight on all hardware, at the cost of not being so good), MSAA (the old fashioned hardware anti-aliasing that comes with horrible restrictions), and TXAA (hated even by Nvidia fanboys because of its impact on performance). EVERYONE is asking where SMAA T2X is on Unity- but as I said, Nvidia paid Ubisoft to exclude it.

TXAA is universally loathed (even HardOCP- the elitist PC gaming site that insists on benchmarking games with every possible setting set to max, regradless of the trade-off- stated that TXAA was such an atrocity, they'd always use SMAA in preference), but for Nvidia it is the perfect model for how they seek to ruin the gaming experience of everyone, in order to synthetically make Nvidia GPUs seem 'better'.

GAMEWORKS increases the number of TXAA like performance destroyers in a modern engine (Xbox One, PS4 or PC) exponentially. Ultra slow GPU libraries to handle trivial things like particles, AI pathfinding, occlusion calculations and the like. Remember, gaming PCs and new consoles are CPU rich- with CPU performance going begging across the commonplace 4-7 cores. No serious PC gamer runs less than a 4-core i5. The consoles have 8-cores a-piece.

Nvidia literally doesn't care if bouncing ten simple particles on your screen uses 30% of your GPU performance, so long as the same effect on an AMD GPU takes 80%. Nvidia is this dirty.

Disgustingly, Epic have taken a large Nvidia pay-off to make Gameworks the EXCLUSIVE 'enhancement' library of Unreal 4 (the current most successful licensed engine), and the team behind Witcher 3 (the most anticipated open-world fantasy game ever) have agreed to ruin the performance of that game on AMD GPUs (when it is released early next year) in order to gain Nvidia funding.

Remember how a week back, more than a decade after the crime, Intel got a TINY court punishment for paying sites like Anandtech to use bent Intel benchmarks 'proving' that the putrid Intel Netburst x86 CPUs were 'better' than the vastly superior (at the time) AMD CPUs? The owner of Anandtech himself made a point of informing his readers that one core was better than two (when only AMD had gone dual core), that 64-bit was pointless joke (when AMD invented x64, long before Intel licensed the tech from AMD), and that Netburst's intent to reach 10GHz showed that only Intel had the right tech and ideas.

Nvidia no more fears punishment (in the courts or court of public opinion) than does Intel. Nvidia relies on the vicious trolling of its PR teams to hurt its opponents, and to fool the public.

For how Unity looks (far, far from remarkable), it should run at least THREE times faster on given hardware, with the most pointless settings notched down. Or, it could be THREE times better at the current framerates- and truly appear 'next-gen'. Nvidia steals our possible, doable gaming experiences to enrich itself. Just as Intel loves bloated abstracted, buggy junk like .NET on Windows, because it synthetically needs a much more expensive Intel CPU to run well.

Re:Nvidia to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck nvidia.

They also downgrade their own older hardware using driver updates.

I caught them doing it to me once.
I was using tv output for various things. A new game comes out that REQUIRES their newest driver.
You simply can't play without this driver version. So i upgrade.
Tv output goes to black and white only. No possible way to fix this. I tried EVERYTHING.

Contacting them they pretty much claimed they never had color tv output. I was lying. That was unsupported and never should have worked.

(when the card would still do it correctly if i used an old version of the driver. OR if i never let ANY video driver load. the hardware itself worked perfectly fine. i would have color output for the bios and boot screens. right upto where win loaded their newest driver. and then black and white only.)

And their solution to my issue? "You should buy our latest greatest new video card!"

That was the last time i ever used nvidia. And i haven't missed them at all. Not one damm bit.
And no longer have to do the driver shuffle dance to make everything work right either.

So fuck nvidia. They were shit shady scumbags in the past. And i really doubt that has improved over time.

Re: THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is ab

[Anonymous Coward]

One side wants to address issues with the entire gaming industry. Yes that includes corruption, sex, bribes, etc.

The other side wants to scream sexist as loud as possible so no real conversation can happen.

Re:But let's remember

[Mashiki]

Having consensual sex with someone is a crime? On what planet? Oh and [citation needed] for claim about what she claims is rape.

Yep, according to her. If you're in a relationship with that person. Here's your citation It's long though. Really though, gamergate as a whole moved beyond this after about 5 days, when people kept digging and found exactly how much cross-collusion was going on. Anyone who's either in the industry, or has watched the industry has known for 20 years that there was "favors for friends" and collusion. This just broke the proverbial camels back.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[poity]

It's the JOB of the media to hold these companies accountable and to be transparent when they cooperate with these kinds of things. When the media does its job properly, as in this instance, you don't need Gamergate to do anything.

The fault in your reasoning lies in that you're expecting Gamergate to take over the job of these news outlets and to do their work for them. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Gamergate will continue to scrutinize the media for wrongdoing, and point them out when they abandon their responsibilities.

The Corruption is Already Getting Proper Coverage

[Kunedog]

Link to a single gamergate anything attacking this practice.

From this post and others, it's clear that you are horribly misinformed. But you should know that gamers weren't truly angry and forming a widespread movement immediately after Nathan Grayson's and Patricia Hernandez's journalistic corruption was exposed. There was still some good faith that the news sites involved had the shred of integrity needed to take responsibility and clean up their own houses.

Gamergate only exploded after the cover-up, week-long universal blackout, and finally the launch of the (still ongoing) coordinated smear campaign on August 28. None of that appalling gaming press behavior has happened with this embargo story, so there's nothing for Gamergate to point out.

In the unlikely event that almost every gaming site censors discussion of the embargos, enacts a news media blackout (a bit late for that), and then begins slandering anyone who even mentions the embargos as misogynists, harassers, and terrorists, then maybe a Gamergate-type revolt will be needed.

P.S. Similar AAA review "agreements" (for youtubers, etc.) were publicized by Totalbiscuit (a major pro-Gamergate guy) long before the journalists. No, Gamergate doesn't have any particular aversion to exposing indie or AAA corruption.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[nedlohs]

The worst example of this are the embargo dates. For those who don’t know, some publishers will put an embargo date for any sort of review. Usually this on a day or two after the release date, so all the pre-orders will go through first before the reviews start popping up. Breaking this embargo often leads to a legal issue and straining a relationship to the point of no return. There have been cases where embargo dates can be ignored if the review is a favorable one.

      - http://xgamejournalist.wordpre... from September.

2. Embargoes should be banned. Just make it so journalists cannot ever accept an embargo or non disclosure agreement, consequences be damned. They should be like in other forms of media, where they do their own research and publish what’s important, regardless of company opinions.

      - http://nintendo3dsdaily.com/ni... from September.

Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo

[ultranova]

Any game journalist who signs a review embargo agreement is a part of the problem.

But then again, so is any gamer who buys a game before reviews are available. It's doesn't exactly take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a company that doesn't want their product reviewed is probably not competing on quality.

That this is an AAA game and part of a succesful series simply makes things worse, since it means if the company wants to push some anti-consumer move - a new form of DRM, in-game advertisements, whatever - they'll do it here and trust the brand to overcome the backlash to normalize it.