Ares42

I'm just gonna say this, the "don't do the bad thing, the bad thing is bad" approach has time and again been proven to be a highly ineffective way of achieving societal change. I get that it's very a tempting approach, as it's an immediate and obvious change and we're used to dealing with issues this way in our day-to-day life, but on a larger scale where the stakes are higher it tends to lead to division and hostility.

Actual change usually comes through longer, slower processess where the tension gets to mellow out over time and people get to learn and understand things step by step. It might seem like confrontational events like this is part of that process, as they do lead to an opportunity to highlight and educate, but with all the aftermath it tends to end up being a one step forward, two steps back situation.

The reason the list is shrinking towards its later years and why there's no games after 2018 is almost certainly because of the criteria used for putting them on the list. "Best games of all time" lists are not standard content for most publications, as you can even see by looking at their source list, and then having to be featured on six separate ones makes it much more unlikely for newer titles to get on the list purely due to lack of new lists to be featured on. It only list 15 lists published in 2018 or later as source material.

@himsteveo: White Queen gives them a copy of the highest cost card in your hand.

@eccentrix: I mean, this misunderstanding is kinda what I was talking about. I'm not talking about how I want the game to (not) be, I was talking about how there's a miscommunication between what people said they wanted and what Ubisoft interpreted it as.

If they interpreted "non-AC Black Flag" in the same way you do the state of Skull and Bones makes a ton of sense. They very clearly made a more developed Black Flag without any of the more standard AC gameplay. But that's not what people really wanted when they asked for "non-AC", they just wanted the same game in a full pirate theme instead the pirate/assassin hybrid Black Flag is. So the reason this game is stuck in development hell is because every time they bring it to the test crowd they respond poorly because it's just conceptually wrong compared to what they expected.

@eccentrix: As already mentioned, the general consensus seems to be that people just wanted Black Flag 2 without it being tied to the AC IP. So yeah, build on the same gameplay, but write a pirate story without the hook of the animus, the present world characters and assassins and templars.

Think of it this way; What was the major differences between the current AC games at the time and the Arkham games ? While they certainly weren't exact copies they shared a ton of core concepts, and almost every gameplay difference could be attributed to the overall themes of Batman or Assassin.

ACs traversal and combat wasn't something intrinsically unique about those games, it was just their thematic spin on the same concepts you saw in a lot of action adventures. So to make the game less AC-like you don't remove those concepts, you put a different spin on them according to the theme of the game.

@thepanzini: If that was the case, wouldn't they at some point involve more studios to handle the scope of the game ? The game has literally been in development for 10 years now, so their other studios have finished and started other projects several times during the development. If they truly wanted the game to be bigger in scope they've had ample of opportunity to make that happen.

I just had a strange thought about how this game became the game that it is that no one wants to play. Could it be that when Ubisoft was told people wanted "Black Flag without the AC stuff" they internally have this prideful idea that what makes AC AC is the parkour and melee combat and campaign missions/storytelling etc ? So for them to make the game "without the AC stuff" they needed to remove all those aspects, not just make it a story unrelated to the AC IP.

It just seems like it could be a case of the typical pretentious artist that thinks all the generic stuff they do is somehow unique and special. A lot of people speculate that it's just Ubisoft trying to push the game into a more monetizable format, but after this long it's fairly apparent that there's a basic miscommunication between the developers and the target audience.

I'm with you man. It's one of the few games I've just learned to accept that people adore for some unfathomable reason to me.

Already talked about it a fair bit here when the game first launched, but yeah, Elden Ring is the game that proves that for Souls games less is more.

Establish a large publically funded developer union and establish a regulatory system for MTX. The only thing that needs to happen to "fix" gaming is for it to stop being the modern gold rush. Gaming was fine 25-30 years ago when it was still a niche industry and not driven by profitability. While this wouldn't necessarily solve everything, the only actual solution would be for videogames to become outdated, like radio or magazines. But that comes with another host of problems and only pushes the problem to another industry.

But then again, I come from a "socialist" scandinavian country, so ofc my solution is to not allow rampant capitalism.