Ubisoft Apologizes For Assassin's Creed

BarbaraHudson writes in with the latest in the Assassin's Creed Unity debacle. This time it's good news. "As an acknowledgment of the botched launch of Assassin's Creed Unity, Ubisoft has offered free additional content to everyone who purchased the title, cancelled the game's season pass and offered a free game to users who purchased the pass. The anticipation for Assassin's Creed Unity was such that the myriad of bugs and technical issues experienced at launch felt like an even greater slap in the face for gamers. In a blog posted yesterday, Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto said: 'Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues. I want to sincerely apologize on behalf of Ubisoft and the entire Assassin's Creed team. These problems took away from your enjoyment of the game, and kept many of you from experiencing the game at its fullest potential.'"

Comments

Unexpected technical issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? They were unexpected? Testing didn't bring ANY of these issues up?

I could understand a few bugs might slip through the cracks but I would have thought a game publisher would not have these kind of issues after launching many games without major bugs. (I have no citation on this, by I would figure that most of their games aren't this bad on launch day).

Re:Unexpected technical issues

[Chrisq]

Really? They were unexpected? Testing didn't bring ANY of these issues up?

You would be surprised at the number of so-called expert testers who ask for the latest, most powerful machines with the latest OS versions etc. as they claim that this will aid their testing. I've seen this in a company where the target machines that actual users were using were known to be older with less powerful graphics cards and some old software for compatibility with some products . I'd imagine the lure of a new machine is eve greater when they don't know what users will be using.

Re:Unexpected technical issues

[BarbaraHudson]

This is bullshit. Testers are like Mexican field workers. They turn up at the offices, sit in room playing the game sections over and over, then hit a log button whenever something odd happens.

Yep, One of my nephews thought it would be cool to become a game tester, so he applied to Ubisoft. He quit after (iirc) a month because it was boring, repetitive, and only paid minimum wage.

Bugs are DRM

[cfalcon]

The net effect of these ludic-buggy games is that the actual game disk itself is entirely worthless for playing the game. Pretend that while browsing for 8 bit NES games, you finally found a game you wanted- say The Guardian Legend, a truly top-tier title. You grab it for cheap, walk it home... and instead of instantly booting into Miria racing towards Naju, it instead needs an overnight update from a service that hasn't existed in a decade to work properly, or at all.

These bugs are a feature to companies like Ubisoft and EA. The apology is only issued because the launch was truly and shockingly ludicrous- enough to get mocked world wide, in articles such as Cracked's:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...

That are well outside of the normal area of video game journalism / forums / reviews.

I wonder if anyone here has actually played it?

[The Real Dr John]

I've put in a few hours of gameplay with it (PC version), and the game definitely has some bugs, but on a decent gaming computer it is the most ambitious game in terms of graphic content on the screen that I have ever seen. The number of rendered objects is crazy, and the number of NPC on the screen at once is astounding. Sure a few NPC pop in and out (before the patch) and some people go through the floor. But that happens in Borderlands the PreSequal just as much if not more, and it is a much less demanding and ambitious game. Ubisoft fucked up with the launch, and should have tested it on older hardware. But it is hard to believe they can get that much stuff on the screen with the lighting effects they have, and still have it run at all. It is not the buggiest game I have ever bought, but it does have the most graphical content by far, and the frame rates are very playable. (Intel i7 3.3 GHz with 12 GB ram and Geforce 7800 GTX)

Re:marketing and reputation

[Tridus]

When you have the hype machine going a year in advance aimed at a certain date, promotion contracts with Gamestop and such for a certain date, and even something simple like shelf space at Walmart for a certain date, changing that date is not without consequences.

Digital distribution tends to make this easier, but this is predominantly a console game and so retail matters.