Many gamers associate Ubisoft with frustration, from draconian and overly-restrictive DRM practices to games populated with mundane and repetitive tasks, and apparently so do employees who work, or at least worked, at Ubisoft. The creator of Ubisoft’s cash cow Assassin’s Creed, Patrice Desilets, apparently has no love lost for the company.
During a recent interview with Gameology, Desilets reminisced about his history as a video game developer. He talked about his inspirations, his first years at Ubisoft, and his recently-created indie company Panache Digital Games. When the interviewer, Hamidreza Nikoofar, asked about the difference between working for a big company like Ubisoft and a smaller indie company, Desilets had some choice words to say about his experiences.
“Me, my biggest struggle with being in an organization is that I was the guy at the end or in the middle also…I was the guy doing interviews like what we’re doing right now and I had to come up with political lying and I would receive comments and decisions made by other people and not me because it’s all about compromising when you’re in a big organization somehow and as my role, the creative director it’s tough to live by the decisions of others when being in front of the camera or Skype and I said I’m not a really good liar so I can’t do it anymore and then I also realized that when you do a really big franchise, you also make money for other people and they don’t really care about you,” Desilets said (in quite the run-on sentence). He went on to explain, “So I said, enough! if I do another Assassin’s Creed at least it would be for me and my guys and also for Quebec and for my people in Montreal.”
Desilets apparently realized too late that when Assassin’s Creed became a critical success, the higher-ups would demand sequels, but they would make all the critical decisions, not him. Desilets didn’t feel important anymore, not as important as he thought he should be, anyway; after all, Assassin’s Creed was his baby. The Ubisoft executives didn’t create the idea for a game where players leap from rooftop to rooftop in ancient Jerusalem, Desilets did. The execs didn’t design the iconic Hidden Blade, Desilets and his team did. It took some time, as well as a girlfriend who stated the obvious, for Desliets to realize he wasn’t happy working at Ubisoft.
Desilets went on to say that he is much happier working with small development teams. He and his team are already working on a game called Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey and will eventually move on to 1666: Amsterdam, a game Desliets has described as “the new Assassin’s Creed.”
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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