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What was downgraded in patch 1.4?
The game was also originally intended to be used along with the AC Unity companion app which had a game with a similar style as the Assassin Missions from AC Brotherhood, AC Revelations and AC3.
The companion app essentially locked away rewards and side missions behind the companion app. Fans felt like Ubisoft wanted their products in every part of their daily lives, always consuming Ubisoft products. Problem was some budget phones couldn't play it, or at least not well. I had a budget phone and it really struggled.
Some fans were already grumpy with Uplay, Initiates website and then content locked away behind an app their phone can't run and now bugs in the game itself. I remember many journalists giving Ubisoft crap for releasing the game in the state it was in. It wasn't as bad as No Man's Sky but the general consensus was that the game needed another year of development before releasing.
Ubisoft did what many developers do. Release a game that is buggy and fix it after release because publishers want that money now and not later.
As they say, "Time heals all wounds." New people play the game and don't know how unpolished the game was on it's initial release.
i think biggest mistakes from Ubisoft was:
1)PC port with console release. thing is, PC ports of AC games since AC1 were few months late than console relese. sometimes even half of year. there a reason for that, cus they simply doesnt care much about PC ports in general. so NO WONDER that when they released PC ports at same time with console release = awful PC launch. in fact, 70% memes about bugs were from PC version.
they should have release PC port in 4-5 months after console release
2)game overloaded with online features. mobile companion, initiates awards, and some more things literally made game EVEN MORE unstable while it was already pretty unstable at launch. i mean, i turned my PS4 offline and 20fps with drops become 30fps with drops(which is ok for console gaming). so, offline version of the game were pretty much ok for launch. they just didnt tested much all online components. like it was forced and last day decision
they should have at least with first patches DELETE all online components, except coop
3)i think one more(december still holiday season) month of beta tests(which probably ended with some calm desisions like deleting most of the online components) would be more than enough. also they could have make open beta for coop missions. like they doing so with each release now
anyway Unity still WORST release in Ubisoft history. and they sertanitly learned much from it.
also i think this game NEED nextgen port. this game have many limitations of ps4\xone, and with ps5\xsx it would shine even more than PC port on modern hardware. honestly, its still most technically advanced AC game to date(and Valhalla is even crossgen)
I agree the game had too many online features. My personal opinion was that the development team had a lot of pressure put on them. Ubisoft is based in France, the game takes place in France. I'm guessing some creative and business minds wanted to make the game the best they could (because France) but they put a bit too much sauce on that burger, it got messy.
It needed more time to work out the bugs but fall season releases are important because a lot of people buy games as a gift for the Holidays. They need those day one sales and parents buying gifts count too. It's just about timing.
If AC Unity is the worst release of the franchise... why would they be in a hurry to port it? They'd need to spend a lot of money to make sure everything works correctly. I remember playing PS1 games on a PS2, sometimes there would be little problems. Usually small problems with audio/video being in sync but people on the internet take a small problem and treat it like the whole game is ruined forever because of it.
yeah. thats sad true of AAA releases. big franchises like AC really depends on that. but still, my 3 points(in #6 post) still fit holiday season(except pc port ofc). but hey, everyone can make a mistake. main thing that they learned.
yeah, there always many teams involved with AAA titles. saddest thing, that core development team done thier job good. offline build was pretty stable. thats almost a miracle, cus tech vise game was ahead of its time. i mean literally. look:
i tried AC Unity back then on my old PC, on min settings AC Unity. and i didnt played further than prologue(literally first 10 mins of the game) cus im falled through world space twice! :D but now, on my new PC even in 1.0.0 version(!!) it was pretty stable and playable. in fact, game really doesnt differ much, stability wise, from last 1.5 version. so it was really depended on hardware, not just patches
- Bugs, obviously. Lots of them.
- Poor performance on people's PCs.
- Typical British accents instead of French accents for a game that takes place in France. It was a missed opportunity to really immerse people in a French atmosphere.
- A lack of visual variety. The series had come from AC3, AC4, and Rogue, and it went to drab Unity that basically looks the same everywhere in the game.
- An uneventful story. After the intro, which was pretty interesting, the game kind-of just dies and is a slog with little narrative propulsion. The potential of the characters introduced in the start of the game was wasted. This hard shift after previous ACs.
- Meaningless side-quests. This again was a hard shift after previous ACs.
- Too designed like an MMO with throwaway content, rather than like an AC game.
Previous AC games could be said to be story-driven and character-driven. But AC Unity was the first game in the series that can't have that said for it. Instead, it feels like it's token, redundant, boring, uninspired fetch-quest driven. Syndicate somehow managed to be even worse in regards to being devoid of a notable and worthy story and meaningful character development.
Even if AC Unity released today with no bugs and good performance on modern systems, it would still be open to criticism for the bigger flaws in the title. People could overlook technical issues if they knew that a gem of a game was waiting to be played underneath after it got patched. But even if Unity is patched to perfection, it is still delivers a monotonous experience in a nonstop dreary environment without the support of charismatic and interesting characters.
The biggest draw in Unity's characters is the relationship between Arno and Elise, but the game also sorely disappointed on that front. While the game's plot and main villain amounts to a basic baddy-of-the-week setup.
Ubisoft Montreal's head clearly wasn't organized or in the right place for the development of this game.
Unity marked the death of the soul of the AC series. And Syndicate is just a lost empty husk of AC-ish gameplay without any of its mind, awareness, and heart. Origins and Odyssey are mindless abominations and complete abandonments of the last vestiges of what the AC series is meant to be.
But nothing about AC Unity's failure speaks to the potential and value of the authentic AC style of game - which was abandoned in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Unity and Syndicate did poorly because they are mediocre games due to their stories, lack of character and character-development, their monotonous and dreary environments, their lack of a connection to the things that make AC deep and meaningful. The authentic AC style of game is still 20x greater than the shoveled garbage that are Origins and afterwards.
Hopefully, everything after Black Flag will be retconned out of the series and we can get a true continuation of the AC series from where Black Flag left things off.
you have 10 games with "The authentic AC style" versus 3 "shoveled garbage" games. no real need to cry about new trilogy, fanboy
also "shoveled garbage" games are top 5 rated AC games. Odyssey even HIGHEST rated game by users
AC Odyssey 89% of the 83,933
AC IV 88% of the 39,450
AC Brotherhood 88% of the 10,940
AC II 87% of the 26,749
AC Origins 85% of the 57,741
AC Revelations 84% of the 9,029
AC 83% of the 9,689
AC Rogue 83% of the 9,007
AC Syndicate 77% of the 16,189
AC III 74% of the 13,677
also they two are MOST popular AC games in steam
AC Odyssey 89% of the 83,933
AC Origins 85% of the 57,741
AC IV 88% of the 39,450
AC Unity 70% of the 30,219
AC II 87% of the 26,749
AC Syndicate 77% of the 16,189
AC III 74% of the 13,677
AC Brotherhood 88% of the 10,940
AC 83% of the 9,689
AC Revelations 84% of the 9,029
AC Rogue 83% of the 9,007
AC III Remastered 52% of the 4,135
AC Chronicles China 73% of the 2,587
AC Liberation 56% of the 1,780
AC Freedom Cry 74% of the 1,404
AC Chronicles Russia 59% of the 677
AC Chronicles India 64% of the 581
true continuation? modern story on new triligy 10 times better than it was in AC4. but you ofc doesnt know about that cus you dont touching "shoveled garbage" lol
That change in Unity's review score probably-mostly, and likely entirely, comes from the changes Steam made to their review system - which I'll explain further on in my response. Tons of games across Steam have experienced the same improvement in their review score for the same reason.
Yes, compared to the last few non-AC games Ubisoft have pushed-out under the AC brand-name, Unity is a relief. But compared to the games that came before Unity, it isn't nearly as good.
Also, the people who revisit the game are going to be those more prone to have liked something about it before, so there will be a higher proportion of people who like it among those who revisit it compared to those who don't.
I've revisited Unity myself, due to missing the real AC style of game. And while it's nice to experience it again in Unity, Unity's flaws do emerge and stand-out while playing it again.
This video does a good job of pointing-out some of them, while aptly saying that the writing quality in Unity goes from a perfect 10 in the first hour, to a solid 2 for the remainder of the base game.
https://youtu.be/Z5dOporS8IY
Funny that you're calling someone a fanboy, when you're the one defending the bad games in the series and mischaracterizing stats to try to defend those games. That kind-of means that you're the fanboy. After all, fanboys are irrational fans, and not critics, of a game or series.
And despite their scores, Origins and Odyssey are generic open-world Action-Adventure games with terrible writing, bland and / or inconsistent characters, and uninteresting dialogue and quests - compared to the earlier AC games. They also have awful combat systems. The recent AC games have been targeting a more casual audience and haven't offered nearly as sophisticated an experience as earlier AC games.
And I guess you missed this, but 2 or 3 years ago, Steam changed their review system by starting to solicit reviews from people who were spending more time playing a game, resulting in a very significant upsurge in the number of reviews being left for games, and also in the rate of positive reviews. This gave all games a boost in their Steam scores, but it has mostly impacted games which released after the change was implemented.
This was a big deal when it happened: Steam made an announcement about it, and there was criticism from some people because it was making all games suddenly look a lot better.
Steam also started discounting periods of lots of negative reviews from the Steam score rating, calling them "off-topic":
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775
When a game has more positive reviews, more people feel like buying it. So, Valve implemented changes to make games have more positive reviews. That doesn't actually mean that games suddenly started being made better, or that games reviewed mediocrely in the past suddenly became better games.
Additionally, the games industry has been growly semi-exponentially since the early 1990s. This means that every year there are more people buying games, and so games, if they're decent, keep selling more and more copies. The PC market in particular has grown much larger in size relative to the console markets, compared to the previous generations of consoles. The PC games market is many times larger today than it was when, say AC3 released.
I've completed Origins (which was tough, I had to push through it) and I played far into Odyssey before stopping due to the repetitiveness of the game.
No, the modern story in Origins and Odyssey isn't better than anything in AC4. It's definitely far worse. AC4's modern-day story, as limited an amount of it there was, was very interesting and set the series up for major narrative developments... which weren't followed-up on in subsequent games. Origins and Odyssey's modern-day narrative made people hate the new protagonist and accuse Ubisoft of destroying the AC story.
In Origins and Odyssey, the modern story bastardizes and ruins the AC story - which is a major criticism of those games from AC fans. Black Flag and Valhalla writer, Darby McDevitt, even acknowledged the bad modern-day writing in Origins and Valhalla, saying on Twitter that people will start caring about the modern-day protagonists again with Valhalla (because it was known that people didn't like the modern-day characters and story in Origins and Odyssey).
https://youtu.be/yQk0QT0-6IA
Darby also acknowledged that the AC story is ruined in a Tweet by responding to criticisms of how Origins and Odyssey ruined it by suggesting there's no official canon anymore and canon at this point is just whatever people want it to be.
Darby McDevitt tried to salvage the story in Valhalla. But there's only so much that can be done to fix-up what has become fundamentally broken.
There are many videos covering the failings, incoherence, brokenness, and non-ACness of the newer AC games. Here are a couple.
https://youtu.be/HAtveVYzIi0
https://youtu.be/aCuXlPC6gsQ
so you literally admitted yourself thats not the case with AC Unity userscore...
im just COPYPASTED stats from steam userscore which everyone can see by themself. how it could be mischaracterizing? you sounds like im hurted you when i putted some reality here. well... yeah, reality usally depressing, im really sorry about that.
you right here, obviously numbers and % would be different for ac1.ac2,acb,acr games in steam if they released today(steam become really popular only in 2011-2012). especially for ac1, cus it was kinda hated back in 2007 by majority
aaaaaand, surprise, modern day story in Valhalla is actually better than in Origins/Odyssey...
but even them is still better at storytelling than AC4 which is basically just hacking minigames with reading emails and some worthless talking with managers... it only worth for Sage plot point in finale.
The "anti-spam" filter hasn't only been used to prevent review-bombing. Valve has used it arbitrarily to remove a lot of periods filled with negative reviews, even when those reviews are legitimate.
But, and as I said in my previous post, the filter system is only one of the changes Valve made to their review system.
Valve now solicit reviews from people who play a game, asking people to leave a review after they've played the game for a while. This has resulted in a lot more reviews being left for most-all games. And since people who keep playing a game tend to be those people who like the game, the soliciting of reviews from players who keep playing a game has resulted in a very-significant increase in the Steam score for games all across Steam.
You can see the same sudden increase in positive reviews all over, starting at the date when Valve implemented review-soliciting. In fact, looking at the review-history chart for AC Unity confirms that its higher review score is probably mostly a directly result of Valve's move to solicit reviews for games.
Here are two screenshots, one from a period before the change to Valve's review system, up until the month of the change, and the other starting from the change to the review system and going until today:
https://i.imgur.com/QZiPAJv.jpg
For a select period before Valve started soliciting reviews, AC Unity's Steam score was about 71% (though it was 52% if counting from AC Unity's release-date). But as soon as Valve implemented their review-soliciting feature, AC Unity's Steam score was then at about 84%.
So, there likely hasn't been too much of a change in how much people like AC Unity. It's just that Steam now collects reviews differently and in a way that has significantly increased the Steam scores for all games.
That isn't what I meant by micharacterizing. As I've just shown, the Steam review stats don't show what you claimed they do. The games released around or before the change to Steam's review system have significantly-inflated Steam scores.
So, while, for example, Black Flag, which released on Steam in 2013 or 2014, was given the overwhelming majority of its reviews before the change and so its current Steam score is based on that earlier review system... newer games, like Origins and Odyssey, which received a significantly bigger % of their total reviews after the Steam review-system change, are being scored on Steam by a different standard.
Origins' own Steam review history shows that before the Steam review system change, it consistently had an 80% positive Steam score. But immediately after the review system change, its Steam score for new reviews jumped to 88% positive. And now Origins has an average Steam review score of 85%. So, its Steam score is currently inflated 5%.
AC Unity received a much bigger increase in positive reviews immediately upon the implementation of Steam's newer review system. But its overall Steam score is still at just 70% - because there hasn't been enough newer reviews to significantly lift it up from where it was.
Although, there was a gradual increase in AC Unity's Steam score before the implementation of the newer review system - from 39% positive when it first launched, to overall 52% positive right before the implementation of Valve's newer review system.
Even if the quality of the modern-day story was measured by the amount of time spent in the modern-day, that comment still wouldn't be correct. Origins, for example, has basically no modern-day story - the stuff's that's done in the modern day doesn't take the story anywhere, other than to show that William Miles asks Layla to come with him. There's really nothing eventful about its modern-day story.
And while I haven't completed Odyssey, I haven't seen much of any modern-day story in it, yet, either. And I know from reviews that people were angered by Odyssey's modern-day story.
AC4's modern-day story is, by contrast, very significant and reveals new information about the Templars' operations, what Desmond's team are up to, and what Juno is trying to do. It reveals the existence of the sage / Juno's husband and that he's being reincarnated, and it reveals that Juno is aiming to inhabit a living human's body. It also shows that the Templars have samples from Desmond, and that Desmond's team have discovered that information. AC4's modern story sets the stage for very big things to come (things that weren't followed-up on).
AC4's modern-day story also isn't just contained in its modern-day scenes. The game is continually feeding information about the sage in the historical settings through the story and through the letters found in bottles on beaches - and through the . That adds a lot of depth to who John is in the present day.
AC4 is a very story-rich game and perhaps has more first-civilization lore in it than any other single AC game. And even though its modern-day time is limited, it does a lot with it. Origins' is also very limited - but it doesn't really do anything with it. And Odyssey's modern-day story seems to have primarily made people angry.
and consindering that in 2019 and later, average PC rig much more powerful than 2014 ones, so AC Unity become much more stable for majority of new players. no wonder it have boost in positive %, as i stated in my initial point.
also, i never asked for a review even after 100+hrs of playng some games
you also missing one crusial point. ppl who disliked game are more predispositioned to post a review, rather than ppl who are ok with the game - they just playing and doesnt really care. negative feelings usally more "active" than positive ones.
and i even doesnt mention that most negative reviews are hardware\software problems, which is pretty common thing for PC ports. im really wish we had two different rankings for "stability" and for "game itself".
you also missing that there also increase in % of negative ones. as i said, thats just more reviews(also you forgetting about sales). and more reviews = more accurate overall %
and THATS some micharacterizing here... there no different standard(except anti review bombing thing). thats just increasing numbers of reviews overall. also, as you said thats affected by ALL games. so, in fact ac4 and other ac games have some "boost" too.
only after Odyssey one
i didnt say that
but i must made it clear, since you totally missed my point. lore-wise modern day in ac4 actually good. but STORY-wise(or plot-wise) its completely worthless except plot twist in ending scene. in that terms, even random small cutscenes in Unity and Syndicate was better take cus at least they just dont take much time overall. and there also were interesting modern day lore information via in-game database. but my favorite take on modern day lore exsploration is AC Brotherhood and AC Odyssey. you just anytime can roaming own PC for information and also hideout too. really atmospheric! yeah, you can roaming office in AC4 and AC Rogue but i disliked "neo-office worker" thing overall.
I didn't say it's negative that there are more reviews for games. I only said that the Steam scores you've shown aren't accurate for comparison to each-other because some of them have been released for a longer time and a higher % of their total reviews were given before the change to Steam's review system was implemented, while others released much later received a more significant % of their reviews after Steam made the change to the review system.
If you use the large view for the Steam client, you'll see the suggestion to leave a review for a game you've played a lot when closing a game, on the client page for the game.
The effect of the change to the Steam review system has been that games everywhere are receiving a lot more reviews and a lot more positive reviews than they were before.
This isn't specific to AC Unity or any game, and it isn't merely hypothetical. It's demonstrated in the Steam review history chart for almost all games on Steam, and they've nearly all gotten a lot more positive reviews since the change in the Steam review system.
Since the Steam client suggests people who've played more in a game leave a review for a game, the result is that people who spend more time in a game end up being asked to leave a review. People who spend more time in a game likely do so because they're enjoying it. So, the result has been that games have gotten a lot more positive reviews than they used to.
There's been an overall increase in the number of reviews given, but there hasn't been an increase in the % of the reviews given that are negative. There has instead been a decrease in the % of reviews that are negative, with an increase in the % of reviews that are positive.
Whether the newer Steam score is more accurate or not is not related to the point that games which received a larger portion of their reviews after Valve made the change to the review system will have an inflated positive Steam score compared to games which received a smaller portion of their reviews before Valve made the change to the review system.
More reviews doesn't equal a more accurate Steam score if the increased reviews are being solicited from a group that is more likely to give a particular kind of review. When Valve asks specifically people who keep playing a game to leave a review, they're soliciting reviews from people who are more likely to be enjoying the game, which is why they continue to play it.
This isn't just a theory, as the Steam review history charts on all games show an increase in the % of reviews that are positive following the change in the review system.
Yes, AC4 also is receiving more reviews since the change in the review system. However, as AC4 released years earlier than some later ACs, a larger portion of its lifetime of reviews to-date were received before Valve made the change to the Steam review system.
A game receives most of its sales and reviews closer to the day it released. And the more time that passes, the more new sales and new reviews decrease. All games on Steam received an increase in reviews from the change in the review system, but a game that's been released for 5+ years longer than another game will have received a larger % of its reviews under the old review system than the newer-released game will have.