I kind of got burned recently by an unfortunate pre-order of Thief on PC, and I'm a bit apprehensive about pre-ordering Watch_Dogs, especially considering the somewhat rocky path it's taken lately. Still looks cool as hell to me, but then again, so did Thief. Does anybody know if the reviews for this will release prior to or after the release date?

Embargoes tend to lift on the US release date. So unless a publication has an exclusive deal with Ubisoft (with all its dangers), you're basically stuck until release day.

@gaff:

Thanks for the answer. Also, I don't have to worry about that, as according to the schedule, Giant Bomb will have an Unfinished: Watch Dogs segment. Close enough for me.

I'm surprised they are letting people show video of the game, we are getting an Unfinished in like 10 hours. I'm looking foreword to that over a review.

Why is it an Unfinished and not a Quick Look EX, there's no way that's not the final build of the game right?

I think there was a preview event recently, so it's probably a couch Unfinished with recordings from the event.

I'd say If you are interested in this sort of game your odds are much better for this than thief - which from early reports was always a gamble. If anything the longer development time has improved this game.

For the things ubisoft tends to fuck up, they still have a pretty high standard on their game releases - especially one with as much riding on it as this. I assume it was delayed mostly to avoid being unfavourably compared or overshadowed by GTA 5.

Correct me if i'm wrong but whether reviews go up a few days earlier than release tends to be tied into whether the score is above a certain amount. I mean they don't want to kill a release if it reviews poorly before store date. Seems to me that's why you tend to see metacritic averages start high and then drop as much as 20 points over a week of release.

Quick Look EX tends to have the developers present, walking the guys through a "vertical slice" of the upcoming game. I assume Ubisoft didn't send some developers to GB to do a show and tell.

There's still a month till release, so they are still within the acceptable time frame for a game going gold. Maybe they're working on a day 1 patch. Maybe they're trying to cover their ass if preview reception isn't great, then they could say "this isn't final. blah blah blah". Either way, QL:EX means they have game developers with them while playing. If they aren't calling it that, it's likely there was no developer present and they just have a random build of the game ubisoft gave them.

It's probably just some video provided by the publisher that they'll look at and talk about. Like they did with the Trials Fusion and South Park. A quicklook would be them playing it on camera. I hope it's a good sign that Ubisoft is providing more footage and allowing people to talk about it early. I hope it's a good bit of footage.

You raise a pretty good point. I'm actually having difficulty thinking of a game that Ubisoft has released that was garbage. Even for all the complaints about the 'spin-off' Assassins Creed games, such as Revelations and Brotherhood, those games at the very least attempted to put in new mechanics. They also seem to have avoided a lot of controversy as opposed to other publishers (outside of the whole 'uPlay is garbage/unusable' thing, often said by people who have never had to interact with GFWL). I'm probably just going to watch the entirety of the Unfinished feature, and base my purchase on that.

Pick it up a month or two after it comes out, for cheaper, and after seeing reviews, demos and video for it.

#informed

#buying

#decisions

I's gonna be awhile. Game doesn't come out for over a month.

There is something to playing a game when it's new and fresh and exciting and everyones talking about it. That shouldn't be completely ruled out.

@rowr: it's Ubisoft, so it's a pretty safe bet that it's shit.

well whatever. Personal taste is personal taste, but you can at least say from their history that they generally ship games of a certain level of quality. So if that's the thing your worried about, it's probably not worth the trepidation compared to something like thief.

Not that it really matters since the Unfinished is going up in less than two minutes, but Brad said on the podcast that this is going to feature a lot of capture footage from a preview event he went to last week, and it'll be him playing the game in the footage.

@fattony12000:

That works too. Fuck pre-order bonuses though, by far the worst practice. Could've done without the hashtags though.

Enjoy Thief then, I guess.

Well, this is Ubisoft we're talking about here. Expect all kinds of embargo shenanigans, including an embargo that doesn't lift until the day of release or the day after, exceptions to posting reviews early if the score is high enough, and other nonsense.

NOW

4 stars!

@alecofthewest: yeah because everything that company has ever produced is just shit right? I mean c'mon guys UPlay right? Let me see what else can my troll ass pull out....just give me a few minutes while I go through their entire game catalog and come back here and edit this over and over just to prove my douchebag point....

Every single argument I see against uPlay is probably stated by those who have never had to touch the abomination that was GFWL. Sure, it's no Steam, but if uPlay and Origin is what it's going to take for Ubisoft and EA respectively to continue porting games across for the PC, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Origin is even giving away games for free now! At least now you also have big central accounts for games released by those publishers, so you know if they release a MP game you won't have to make yet another account. The only complaint I have against uPlay is that downloading AC3 was a very unstable affair, kept on crashing on me, but it righted itself after a while.

I didn't buy thief.

Because I knew it had the potential to not be great.

Because I was informed.

I'm just saying, I don't think you need to wait two months after a release and read every review just to be sure you won't waste your money on a game you don't like. If the game is great your going to lose out on some of the release hype and discussion that comes with a brand new game. I don't think that's something that should be ruled out as important.

I am talking about @adequatelyprepared, really. For someone with that choice of username, their relationship with video game buying advice seems to be anything but their namesake.

I'm weird/have a problem in that I will both research a game for half a decade before buying it, as well as buy most of the mainstream stuff like GTA and Final Fantasy on day one and then just not finish them for a decade. I have still not finished my day one copy of Max Payne 2, for example. Nor have I started playing EVE Online yet, because I'm still researching it, despite being interested in that game for over a decade.

Whatever, just preorder the next Gears game six months ahead of time, get the guide, pound the Dew, live your life, EA Sports.

With a game like this, I feel like I'm just waiting for the release date to see if there are any game breaking bugs or not. Especially since it's ubisoft. I will never forgive them for AC3 and how broken that game was... 

To me, it's at least important to see how the customers react to the game. If they're reacting very negatively towards it on release day and forward on, then yeah I'm going to be pretty skeptical about getting the game.