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The Official UBISOFT Thread

E3 is the place for announcing never before seen games. It's exciting, fast-paced stuff and we're all enthusiastic to start talking about all the new toys. But, please keep in-depth discussions about specific games in their respective forums. For more information about how to help us keep things organized, go check out the GB vs E3 Official Player's Guide!

In an attempt to keep the E3 shenanigans organized, the mods institute these official discussion threads for each conference so that everybody has a go-to place to discuss them before, during, and after the show.

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Keep Discussions On Topic

This thread is exclusively for the general discussion of the Ubisoft press conference. Discussion involving the other company's conferences should be taken to their respective threads (once they're posted).

Specific Announcements

To help you get where you need to go to talk about anything announced or shown during this press conference, we have created a list of them right here:

• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• Watch Dogs Legion
• ????

Where Can I Watch?

Monday, June 10 @ 1:00 PM PDT (Your Local Time)

• Giant Bomb Chat
• Twitch

Nice work @willin ! I'm pretty sure I've made that exact move in AC. Oh, memories!

I kinda hope Ubisoft get back to being uber-E3 like Microsoft seemed to this year. It's gonna be fun!

Well, that definitely felt like an 'in between generations' thing. I even feel they bottled Watch Dogs 3 by taking it super future instead of the comical brexit clusterfuck we inhabit.

I thought Watch Dogs Legion looked interesting. I still find it hard to believe that every NPC is unique with an origin story though.

Looked like there was a Rocket League and Breath of the Wild clone (not saying that's what they're going to be nor that it's necessarily a bad thing, just the vibe I got from two of their games). Watch Dogs seems interesting, and if nothing else I'm happy they actually showed some gameplay rather than just another CG trailer. I might have to get the The Division 2 DLC. Interesting also that they've decided to bring A.I. squad members back into Ghost Recon. I didn't know people were making a big fuss about it. It was cool that Jon Bernthal got to bring his dog up there.

Oh, and maybe two too many Terminator extras going on.

Ubisoft didn't have anything for me sadly. Maybe that rollersports game turns out to be cool though.

Like the idea that you can play as any NPC in the new Watch Dogs sounds neat, but in practice it will probably boil down to 3-5 different groups of characters that have similar abilities and within that group you have a bunch of different appearances. Cool for the first few hours, but eventually not much more than changing your outfit in a saints row or GTA game. Sadly, changing clothes in those games is something that i only do a handful of times and then steer away from.

All these characters being able to complete objectives also makes me feel like the missions will be fairly surface level. There's not going to be a high stakes mission where Nigel Farage has your wife & kids tied up in his manor. After all, you could be any of the 100 NPC's out there.

I missed this one. Was Beyond Good & Evil 2 here at all? I was thinking they might put it on the back burner now that vivendi isn't trying to buy them out anymore.

@mobiusfun: nope

Was Watch Dogs 2 actually good or are the GB crew looking back on it through a rose tinted glasses? It's discounted on PSN so thinking of picking it up. ($15)

@liquiddragon: As far as I understand it a good few reviewers liked it, but the general audience found it to be fairly average. It seems to me like a lot of the positive response stems from people liking it's attitude more than the first one.

@mobiusfun:

It was pretty crazy already that they pulled back Ancel from his first game at his own studio just to make BG&E2. Felt like a friend helping out a company in dire straits.

That all fits into the narrative that BG&E2 was initially not built as a BG&E game , but marketed to be one as a last ditch attempt to boost the stock prize high enough to make it very costly for Vivendi to complete the hostile takeover. I think you're totally correct that now Vivendi's threat is gone they've put the game on the backburner so that Ancel can work on Wild again.

I was really confused by this because Wildlands had AI squad members. Was Breakpoint originally announced as not having any?

I'm more interested in Watch Dogs Legion than I thought I would be, but I still have a lot of questions regarding the whole recruit/play as any NPC thing. Is it really as simple as tagging someone with the phone, pressing RB, and completing an origin mission? Because that...would be disappointing. Is there any sort of DedSec reputation that plays into it? Or what about a morality system? I feel like those really ought to be factors in who you can recruit. Some citizens should be anti-DedSec, people who appreciate the iron-fisted rule of an authoritarian government, or. at the very least, they should be on the fence about joining up until you've shown you actually have a chance of winning the fight. Similarly, maybe they believe in what DedSec is trying to do, but they object to the methods - specifically, tapping a dude on the shoulder and then, when he turns around, shooting him in the fucking face. In fact, that sort of shit should actively push some citizens to join up with whatever the opposing force is, feeling that DedSec are the ones perpetuating the violence in the city. Point is, not everyone should be open to joining, and potentially dying for, DedSec. It'd also be appropriate to have members of your crew leave DedSec if your body count rises too high, or abandon your cause because you aren't violent enough. If it's not nuanced - even if that nuance amounts to nothing more than managing meters - then, I have to admit, I'm way less interested.

Also, have they fleshed out Watch Dogs to an Assassin's Creed Odyssey size? Are there enough missions to actually warrant building a crew of dozens of characters? If the campaign is only 12-20 hours long...I can't see why you'd ever bother having more than a handful of characters, only recruiting new members when favorites die. Will there be missions that are varied enough that you want to have a diverse crew with a variety of skill sets? Will there be multiple ways to complete them, depending both on personal play style and on the skill sets you have available? And do the various NPCs start at different levels, do members of your crew all level up together, or do you level and upgrade each character individually? Still a lot of unanswered questions.

While I applaud the ambition and innovation, I'm left wondering if they were ambitious and innovative enough.

For those who come to this thread before finishing the Square conference, Brad had an appointment with the Watch Dogs team and learned several voice actors are handling many different character types with voice modulation technology altering their performances to suit the archetypes the voices get slotted into. There were dozens of variations of the script baked into scenarios that these actors would read, and then the algorithms will alter those voice samples seemingly on the fly to suit whatever the actor is supposed to be saying for a given character in a given situation. Still sounds ambitious as hell, but sounds like they gave it some clever thought.

I am super interested in this watch dogs game! I guess my favorite part of the old assassins creed games were recruiting other assassins, and they seem to have built a whole game around this. And if this voice modulation stuff works, this seems like some good fun to be had.

I never played the second game, and didn't care for the first one but this one has my interest piqued

@cursethesemetalhands: Brad went into a bit of this after the Sq Enix stream. Basically each character will have something like a "DeadSec Opinion" meter that you will increase by doing missions for each character. So you go wipe out a guy's criminal record, and now he's open to joining. That's one of the mechanical ways they're handling it.

Also, apparently Patrick Klepek asked Clint Hocking your exact question about how some people would benefit from the current regime or be totally against DeadSec. So we'll have to wait for his write-up on that.

@nateandrews: Yes. It was only going to have drones as your way of surveying the land and taking out other enemies. I think they wanted to make it feel like you're all alone against an army (that is unless you're playing with friends online). I thought that'd be cool, so while I'm not necessarily mad or disappointed they changed their mind, I guess I would have liked to see you go it alone.

Maybe it was just the sound setup, but did that orchestra sound badly out of tune and out of time with each other in spots?

Outside of musical critique, that conference was one gigantic "meh" for me. I've never been a big Watch Dogs guy and this new one isn't moving the needle for me either. The underlying idea is ambitious, but also seems like the kind of ambitious that is more likely to end up as a technical catastrophe than compelling gameplay. The tone of the game is also turning me off big time. It seems like peak-Ubisoft #itsnotpolitical. It's hard to escape the feeling that they are going to end up pulling whatever punches they might have had.

And Wildlands was just a big yawn. It's hard to get excited about another game involving yet more gruff white military men doing military things. Honestly, I thought it was a trailer for another Call of Duty until I remembered Ubi doesn't make those. It look unbelievably generic.

I'm sorry, but this Ubi conference was hot trash. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say it's the worst I can remember seeing. No, there weren't that many cringe moments, paid cosplayers, etc., but in terms of actual substance, hoo boy.

The conference opened with an Assassin's Creed Symphony. As someone who both enjoys orchestras and several of the AC games and is also well-aware that Jesper Kyd's AC soundtracks do have some quality tracks, I should have been the audience for this, but the arrangements here weren't even particularly great. Moreover, it was confusing because I think the expectation was that it was setting up some new game or AC collection, but instead it was an ad for the symphony tour, which felt oddly tangential. We'll revisit that later.

Watch Dogs 3 started to look fairly promising. Conceptually, the idea of all the playable NPCs is terrific, and granny bustin' heads was amusing, but I'm extremely skeptical of how fleshed out they'll be. They're likely to be husks, and there's a weirdly unsettling vibe in general about the "good guys" just carelessly throwing bodies at their cause that Ubi is unlikely to address. I wanted to get excited again by some cool-looking John Wick-style combat, but then as the demo quickly devolved into a standard Ubi third-person shooter, my excitement dwindled away. Additionally, the "British" accents were terrible. WD3 at least looks ambitious and theoretically kinda neat, but this appears to be a prime "most disappointing" candidate in terms of what we'll actually get as a game.

Then we have Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia show up for an ad for a TV show, which was a giant WTF. It's Always Sunny has had its moments, but I don't know that I can get all that excited about the actors' projects beyond that show, save maybe the always-great Danny Devito. Asking Rob McElhenney to carry a show seems like a lot to hope for, and the show itself didn't look particularly funny at all. Again, this felt like an odd tangent at best, with the only real tie-in to video games being that the show is apparently going for a Silicon Valley thing about a made-up game. I guess it's fine if they want to try something like this, but this is not the kind of thing that I hope to see at E3.

Next up came an attempt to hype the E-Sports scene for Siege and a "celebrity showdown", which was ugh. This was at least mercifully brief, but then there was the Adventure Time Brawlhalla thing, which definitely also wasn't for me. I'm actively trying to remember here that just because things aren't for me doesn't mean they aren't for anyone, and I genuinely hope people enjoy this stuff, but I'm just not the audience here, so it didn't move the needle for me even a little bit.

This was followed by a Ghost Recon bit that didn't tell us much more than their big reveal thing a while back did. Jon Bernthal is still being Jon Bernthal and at least seems like a good choice for what they're going for, and I guess it's cool that he showed up with his very good doggo (whose appearance may well have been the highlight of the entire show), but man, that sleepy dawg perfectly illustrated my feelings about this series at this point. It's another mildly confusing series where the "good guys" kinda unintentionally seem a lot like the bad guys. I think I'm getting serious fatigue with the "black ops badass" thing, and it doesn't help that seemingly the main good guy is this bearded, hulkish walking stereotype of a SEAL that feels like he fell out of a 2004 video game.

Then they had a girl come out and push their Ghost Recon fan forum, which, great, I guess? Maybe there's some amazingly engaged Ghost Recon community I'm not aware of, but this just seems like standard fare for most AAA titles at this point, so touting the existence of a message board isn't some mind-blowing thing. Then, as if that wasn't enough, they had another guy come out and tout the Ghost Recon website. These are not impressive things, guys. This is not worth stage time. Oh, and also something Terminator, because that franchise is apparently going to completely whore itself out.

Next up comes a lame-ass mobile RPG featuring characters from Ubi properties, which probably mostly aren't nearly as "iconic" as Ubi thinks they are. Here we reach the point where they completely lost me, because the one character that maybe is in Sam Fisher makes a brief appearance here. All that I and many other wanted from this conference was the announcement of a new Splinter Cell game, as perhaps Ubi's best property has been wasting away for years. Instead we get a borderline insulting reminder that yes, Ubi still has Splinter Cell, but sees fit to make Sam Fisher just another character in this throwaway trash mobile game. Fuck this.

(NOTE: The original three Splinter Cell games actually just became available on Xbox One backwards compatibility! Thank God I can at least play these classics again, because Ubi doesn't seem interested in doing anything with this franchise going forward.)

Then we got the annual cheesy Just Dance segment, which stopped being fun and amusing some time ago, replete with an overhype intro of the very concept of dancing. I genuinely couldn't tell if this was trying to be serious or not, and honestly, I don't really care. These games are what they fucking are and don't need to be advertised at this point. It was just more needless filler in a conference that was rife with it. Good to know I can still dust off my Wii to play it, though.

After that we get a short segment on a For Honor "limited-time event" that looks heavily inspired by Sekiro. My question is who the fuck wants a "limited-time event" for something like this? It ain't a goddamn elusive target; this is a thing that some poor devs probably slaved over that's apparently going to vanish into the ether soon for....reasons? Just add it to the fucking game and keep it there. Christ, I hate this "live content" shit.

Then Rainbow Six goes full zambies. Fuck off. Fuck right off. Take the Tom Clancy name off this right goddamn now. Anyone who remembers John Clark, Ding Chavez, et al. should boycott the fuck out of this on sheer principle. Well, at least that's what I'm going to do. I guess others are free to like or not like Rainbow Six: Zambies, but this is the icing on the fucking shit cake for me in terms of Ubi ruining their own franchises by turning them into shit that doesn't remotely represent the source material. They're just slapping beloved names on whatever their latest thing is, and fuck that.

As if I weren't angry enough, this is followed by the cringefest that is streamers, cosplayers, and characters emoting in a compilation that is everything I hate about the current state of videogames. Then Ubi goes into some Division 2 shit and the GB stream dies. I assume I didn't actually miss anything worthwhile here, and I honestly can't bring myself to care enough to go look. I'm guessing the Division 2 showed off its mildly different setting, which is meh.

Next up is a rollerball game that might have been cool in a world where Rocket League doesn't exist. Except Rocket League does exist, so anyone interested in this should probably just play Rocket League instead. Also, why the fuck did every game Ubi showed have a post-segment trailer for the same thing they just showed you and told you about? Oh, right. Padding. Following Ubi's Rocket League clone was their Breath of the Wild clone. Yay for things that don't need to exist!

Then it hard cuts to the "celebrity showdown" of some Twitch streamers vs. T-Pain & Lil Yachty, the latter of whom I didn't know existed until this very moment. GB is (rightfully) unsure if the conference is even over because everything else was so fucking haphazard that this somehow doesn't feel out of place. Once it becomes clear that the conference is actually over, GB thankfully bounces out.

Good Lord. Some of my annoyance with this show is admittedly personal preference stuff, but this was a bad time. On the spectrum of things getting worked up about, this should also probably fall way below how apoplectic I'm being about it, but for fuck's sake. It was like they made this specifically to be the polar opposite of what I wanted. Maybe I'm just getting to be a curmudgeon here at 34, or maybe Ubi really is shit now. Probably both.

Good show, dug the AC orchestra and WD3 is probably the most interesting thing I saw this year.