http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30040613

What do you think? I think Ubisoft would be a company that would actually benefit from a proper Beta program. Not a fake PR Beta, but an actual Beta where they crowd-source their bug finding.

From the article : "We are working to adapt our services and communications with consumers accordingly, both by changing the way we work with reviewers and by offering customers open betas or other early access to some games, all so that they have the information they need and want."

I understand that other developers have had some suspect embargo dates in the past, but I wonder is this finally the straw that broke the camels back?

Embargo's what?

Remember when developers didn't have to do this?

What strange times we're in.

Heh, you are right. It's quite late where I am and I am a little off grammar-wise.

Thank for point problem to me.

Thank.

I can't say I'm surprised by this in todays climate. I'm going to say the majority of games launch with major issues that are either solved by a day 1 patch or by a patch eventually and it saddens me that that is the norm now. At some point during development they should've delayed Unity as it wasn't ready to go and wasn't going to be finished by launch and just ported Rogue to the new consoles, saving face with consumers. I personally don't get the comparisons to Destiny and Driveclub as those are way more focused on the multiplayer and always online aspects where Unity (again, I'm going to assume) most players are going to play solo and some even offline.

This is another reason (in a list of many!) to not preorder and at least wait a few hours to pick up a game (especially a multiplayer focused game). I have no sympathy for those that preorder a game from a developer that has had major problems with games at most to all of their launches. It sucks but giving them money in advance isn't going to teach them a lesson. (I also think the more fucked up thing this week that happened is the Halo MCC multiplayer just straight up not working).

Next week I am really excited to get Dragon Age Inquisition, I work a night shift so right at midnight I'm going to be online in forums and twitch, making sure everything is good with the game and nothing too broken or fucked up (I assume there will be something but the fact that the press has had the game for over a week before it is released is a nice reassurance that it isn't going to be too bad) and then run to Walmart when I'm off and pick up the game if everything is good. At this point I will not buy the game if it is a complete mess OR the DA Keep isn't working right, I don't want to start a new game and not load in my "World State" which I've literally spent hours getting exactly how I want it.

@nightriff I will be paying very close attention to the FarCry 4 quick look. I wonder what platform they will be playing it on... I will be getting it on PC, which has me worried. The PC port of unity is a framey, buggy, un-optimized mess (TB has a twin-card beast of a rig, and it was running at 20 - 27 fps most of the time), and the same crowd have done the port for FarCry 4. My PC is pretty decent, but with these guys that does not seem to matter.

Nah. It's just PR damage control. Ubisoft is pretty good at that. They have to be since they put their foot in their mouth so much.

They mentioned this on Gamespot and I don't really believe anything substantial will come of it.

"We are working to adapt our services and communications with consumers accordingly, both by changing the way we work with reviewers and by offering customers open betas or other early access to some games, all so that they have the information they need and want."

What does that even mean? I mean, I know the words, but it's just nice words put together that don't really amount to anything. So... their response is to have more betas that gamers can partake in? I don't see how that fixes the problem of them releasing broken games. I can't complain (I don't have much of a problem with Ubisoft), but I'm just saying. This is meaningless.

You may be right. If developers actually started using betas to play-test their games instead of using them as promotional material, I think that would be a step in the right direction.

@splodge: I mean, they won't. They'll just "start" doing what most other publishers already do and have PR betas (which are now cool to call Alphas apparently which makes me angry).

See, it makes you feel good because they acknowledged the problem and said they would do something that you'd like them to do except they never actually said they'd do that in particular so when they don't, but instead do what everyone else does, I don't think you would be surprised, but no one can really complain because they did what they said they were going to do... technically.

It amounts to nothing haha

But I guess at least they are going to "adapt their services and communications with consumers accordingly."

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? haha. It's such awful PR speak it makes me giddy.

I gotta say, I've been playing Unity on PC since launch day, and I've put about 15-20 hours in so far, and I honestly feel like I've played a completely different game from everyone else. I haven't had any glitches (aside from the usual goofy stuff you see in an AC title), I haven't had any server/connectivity issues that weren't a fault of my terrible ISP (damn you Time Warner), and the game runs solid for me. My PC specs are a 4770k with an MSI GTX 970 and 8GB of RAM, so I know I'm probably in the high tier of system specs for the game, but I have been loving every minute of this game so far and don't understand what other people are seeing that I'm not.

@splodge: Was the PC port of FC3 at launch broken? I don't remember a lot of issues but I have a terrible memory nowadays.

@nightriff there was a lot of kerfuffle about it at the time, but as I recall any issues were fixed within a few days of release. The FPS went through the floor in places, but after updating drivers and a couple of patches it worked fine for me.

Embargo's away now if Ubi changes their mind.

It's all PR generispeak until we actually see some results. Until that point, Ubi's just another company milking the money cow.

@tazartheyoot I think you are one of the lucky ones mate. I have a friend who just gave up on it tonight. Nine crashes in a five hour play session, and his PC is a monster. I was skypin him and he was screaming at it. At one point he got stuck in the world, teleported under the geometry of a building, and could not bring up the menu. Im glad you got away with it though! Good that some people are having a positive experience with the game. It really does look gorgeous, some of the cathedral interiors are amongst the most beautiful things I have ever seen in a videogame.

@nightriff: No it was fine. I played it at release and had no issues.

I wouldn't lump Farcry with AC. It's a different developer (even if owned by the same publisher) and I've not known Farcry development to generally be poor. That's just my experience, though, which has mainly been on PC for both of those franchises (except AC2 which I played on 360 at the time and that one was fine. That was before AC started having bad development, though).

Is it really surprising that a big ubi launch finally blew up like this? I say this as someone who largely enjoys the Ubisoft design template of "huge open world with sync points and crafting" and has poured 20 hours into watch dogs this week. But if you look at all the games they have scheduled for just this Christmas (ACU, ACR, The Crew and Far Cry 4) each of them seem like massive complex worlds, even with the size of the teams putting these games out there's no way this timetable won't result in something going wrong sooner or later. Also releasing 3 major games (in different genres to be fair) this close to each other seems really crazy to me.

See, the awesome thing about the way this is phrased is it specifies exactly nothing. So, when they decide to do any range of decisions, from "what you expect" to "absolutely nothing", it won't matter. They've only promised to do... something, at some time, which may benefit some consumers.

Screw PR talk.

Though, to answer the question: yeah, it'd be awesome if they began public betas. That seems like the kind of thing that would put actual pressure on a developer to fix the more serious bugs (AC3 tunnels' freezing bug, anyone?). Rather than "naw, just fix those dozen or so A-class bugs with a patch one week in".

@poobumbutt I think that attitude is the biggest piece of the puzzle. "Whatever happens, we can make our release date, coz we can just patch it after the fact." With a lack of a beta, and lack of any serious playtesting, I think they did not have a full grasp on how buggy and sluggish the game was on launch. They probably knew it was fucked in certain places, but I just can't believe they knew the full extent of it. Nothing is worth this kind of negative international press coverage. That is the only explanation I can think of. At some point, bad press like this has to effect pre-orders of future titles, right? I used to pre-order games, but I stopped when I got burned too many times. I hope people are finally coming around like I did, after the spate of disappointing AAA releases we have seen this year. The only way I will ever pre-order another game is if I get something extra (not useless bonus bollocks), i.e. access to a proper beta test. If I gave a shit enough about something to pre-order it, I reckon I would be happy to participate in a REAL beta test.

I dunno... I am a tad worried about the way the industry is going with all this stuff. The more expensive the games are to make, the more is at risk for the studios involved, yet they can never seem to get it right. AAA releases are close to becoming an inconvenience at this point.

I'll believe it when an AC game actually runs well on PC or hell any platform.

It reminds me of a Simpsons quote. "I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try."

Embargoes that go on for even an hour after the game has already been released are incredibly anti-consumer, and should be treated with nothing but hostility and contempt.

If a company wants to put an embargo on something due to story elements, I can understand something like that. However, when a company is saying "we are rushing products to store shelves before they are completed, knowing good and well that the product is not fully functional, all because we want to hit quarterly numbers" is fucking idiotic.

Then again, we exist in the world of video games, where money is king. = /

Early Access is the future of this gen. I don't know how good that is but I think it's inevitable.

@tazartheyoot: Yeah you are pretty lucky. I've been watching my husband play on PS4 and the game has some jarring pop in, frame rate drops and other assorted quirks. Nothing that makes it unplayable, but it sure does make you scratch your head.

Also, there have been issues with connecting to Uplay, but that is par for the course with Ubisoft games. I would be shocked if there weren't issues with Uplay, to be honest.

Of course, I have no idea about the PC version specifically, so you can take what I am saying with a grain of salt, but the PS4 version is janky with a capital ANKY.

This just seems like a way to stop paying for play testing.

This whole early access beta movement is utter bullshit. I don't want to playing broken games, during the last year I played quite a few games that were in actual internal beta' and its just not fun to play (and it breaks the magic of video games when you realize video games are broken till 2 weeks from launch).The part about beta and early access for consumers is pure garbage and PR bullshit. Consumers don't want to play broken games; maybe instead of trying shove down a franchise down people' throat every year you can take a year or two off and polish up the game. Don't get me wrong, day 1 patches are a reality of the industry right now, but when you see games like COD, Shadow of Mordor, Forza, Sunset Overdrive and Wolfestein were largely functioning fine with a day one patch; shit like AC and Driveclub and BF4 are unacceptable

The embargo shit was just embarrassing, hope they will change things up on that front.

I wonder how much money they want their customers to spend in order to beta test their games.

I'm really hating the gaming industry these days so disgusting what these publishers and devs are pulling these days.

@kishinfoulux: i was actually impressed with smoothness of ac4 on ps4. Granted it was cold comfort compared to how it was on my halfway decent pc...

Also maybe i saw too little of it but watched my friend play Unitayy today and it ran fairly well, didn't witness any of the horror that's been alluded to recently.

Also this may sound ironic but people need to generally chill. This stuff sucks, but they're not "atrocities" or "slaps in the face" like so many people overdramaticize it as.

The one recurring theme from the last couple of years has been that going so strongly anti-consumer in gaming almost inevitably backfires. We have one of the most vocal, informed and connected consumer bases around, yet somehow these companies manage to keep forgetting that and trying to take the piss thinking they'll get away with it.

It's alright people giving the lazy 'newsflash, companies like money!' response -as though that's somehow an excuse- but go ask EA or Microsoft how that panned out for them when they went hard in this direction in recent years. They both got slapped down and have been desperately trying to recover from it ever since. The same is now going to happen to Ubisoft in a big way, and it was entirely avoidable if they had only been paying the slightest bit of attention to what was going on around them.

Glad that they are at least trying but I think the damage is done already.

I'm not impressed by every game outlet bitching about how shady the embargo was, but adhering to it, anyway. I understand "that's how the game is played", but it looks bad if you know how miserable a title is in advance and favor "don't wanna make master Ubi mad!" over "people should be aware of this so they don't get snookered".

On the other hand, given the current status of games during review often being "iffy, but pending a day one patch to fix everything", I can also somewhat see "we didn't want to risk pissing anyone off and just assumed there would be a day one patch to fix the problems seen during the prior week".

As for "duh, they're a business". So what? I'm not on their board and I'm not an investor. Nor am I an employee. I'm a customer. A client. A fan. Their quarterly fiscals are irrelevant to me and I still want value-for-value in my transaction; not a hand full of shit with a "well, I gotta makes a profit!" and a shit-eating grin given back.

Seriously who cares about embargos, it's product quality we should be more concerned about and so far this year has seen it's share of games being released in less than ideal states. As long as your game isn't fucked up you can set your embargo even a week after release.

This is only really a problem for stupid consumers. If you preordered game than you were already saying I don't care about reviews I'm in no matter what. If you're upset with game you got, that has nothing to do with embargo. If you are waiting for review to see if game is any good, what difference does 12 hours make? I enjoyed some AC last one was enjoyable. I wasn't looking to buy this game anyway. What I've seen this week is that game is a little broken and not that exciting even when its not. Even without spoilering any of the story I have seen enough to know the game isn't great. I think GB and other sites have done a fine job showing this. So what are people upset about? Someone selling something told me its the greatest thing ever, and I believed them. Who's fault is that? I bet sega was telling people sonic boom was greatest sonic game in years.

So a pretty standard Ubisoft statement then?

Just want to discuss your first point. There is likely a legal ramification to breaking the embargo, such that it would probably be an open and shut case with substantial penalties. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your post. No tolerance for the shit that is currently happening in this industry. Shipping stuff broken to paying customers, is totally bullshit and of course needs to stop.

I think Alex's mentality of not getting on board with embargo's to begin with is the way to go. But the hard part is getting everyone on board.

Releasing their games in early access is NOT a solution. In fact, it's basically telling customers to get used to playing buggy, unfinished content.