Please don’t forget that even when this company made “better” games and was more profitable, their management and executives were wilful participants in rampant sexual abuse of their workers. Ubisoft is, always has been, and always will be a pile of festering shit and bankruptcy would be too good for them.
I honestly don’t understand this situation and how horny people are to see ubisoft fail. I get it their games are not stellar masterpieces but honestly they are okay/good. It feels like they are incredibly overhated.
For me it’s a combination of them making games that all seem to represent everything wrong in modern gaming, coupled with all of the sexual misconduct among their leadership that they covered up and have still not been held accountable for.
I don’t really care enough to actively hate Ubisoft - I save those sentiments for companies like Nintendo and Disney. However, they did influence about a decade of horrible game design trends with the popularisation of the dreadful checklist-filled Ubisoft Open World^TM, and that is worth at least a mild dislike.
They’ve been releasing a lot of half baked games lately, coupled with lazy game design, where a lot of their open world games are the same thing with a different skin. And then the games themselves are the same first few hours of gameplay loops repeated for the rest of the game.
When their CEO said that players should get comfortable not owning the games they paid for I went from not really caring about their games to actively disliking the company
Far cry feels just the same since 3. Same gameplay, different story, different setting. While the story itself is usually good, I don’t think it has progressed gameplay wise or in technical or graphics aspects in any meaningful way. Car physics are worse than gta5 which is already out for 10 years or so.
For me it’s the arrogance. It’s the calling of themselves “AAAA” gaming and trying to push base prices of games past $100 and then making bland boring games. They think they’re amazing. This is their reality check. Their games are what I play when I have nothing, and I mean nothing else to play
It’s definitely a “you get what you deserve” situation, yet I can’t help but be sad, thinking that more than a decade ago, Ubisoft made some of my favorite games (e.g Splinter Cell series, Far Cry 3, AC Black Flag).
Though that Ubisoft is long gone by now, and I haven’t touched their games for years.
I was so looking forward to that game. Once I found out it was basically just a multiplayer experience, my interest dropped. Still haven’t played it.
The problem with many games and movies nowadays is that the gatekeepers are people who don’t really have creative/artistic background. They are business people who make decisions on whatever they think makes the company the most money.
A.I. has its issues and controversy, but I feel like creative people who can’t get through the blocked doors of these business types will go on their own and create wonderful things with the technology. I guess time will tell.
Brackets in a quote denote a change to what was actually said. In a perfect world, with quality journalism, they’re used to summarize or make the quote flow better in the piece without changing the intent or meaning of the quote
In this case, they very well could’ve changed “won’t be” to “will be”
I don’t expect that to be the case here, but it’s possible.
Also, using an ellipsis inside brackets like this: “[…]” Is an intentional omission by the author of the piece.
Usually, the brackets include a part of the sentence that wasn’t said but the interviewer believes the speaker meant or was implied.
In cases like this, maybe the speaker was speaking quickly (and, so, didn’t say the words during the interview) or were dropping implied parts is the sentence (like we all sometimes do when speaking casually; like if I say, “Quick thinking,” to someone. It’s implied that I was saying, “[That was] quick thinking”).
This also gets used often if the interviewee is talking about someone they know personally but we don’t so they’re usually just using the first name (e.g. “Yeah; me and [General] Howard [Zimmerman] go way back”).
I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.
For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.
One I’ve had to do super often is injecting a name back in a sentence. Why say
Mary said the following about Jane: “She went to the store today.”
when I could say
Mary said, “[Jane] went to the store today.”
I mean, I could just paraphrase Mary and do away with the quotation marks and brackets entirely, but when I am trying to prove something (primarily that I’m not talking out of my ass) I like quotes because you can easily just take it as direct evidence, an exact citation of what the other person said that you can use as evidence yourself, instead of a paraphrase by some random person whose reasoning and motives you do not trust.
Of course, that doesn’t get into how people can manipulate quotes and take them out of context, or even just straight up write something in quotation marks that was never said, but…
There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.
We generally don’t notice, but normal speech is basically a broken mess for anyone, with ahs and uhms, and sentences that keep enveloping other sentences, and you never get back to the point you were making in the first place. It’s a basic part of a journalist’s job to filter the word soup that you end up with from a face-to-face interview - in an honest way, that truthfully reflects the points and opinions that were stated, of course. Usually, we have no problem understanding each others’ jumbled verbal messes, when we’re right there, and have context, tone, body language, etc., to make up for when the words are lacking - but those things obviously don’t translate to written interviews.
In all likelihood, what Ken Levine “really” said was probably something along the lines of:
In the future, it will be - you know, what we really want to do, and now we have the technology, and because, BioShock really showed that there’s an real desire among gamers for immersive experiences like this, so we’re actually now fully able to to really realise that full, ahead-of-its-time vision we had with the original BioShock, it’s about agency, player agency, that’s really what it’s about, you know, it’s player driven - that’s where we want to go. Because that’s what makes our medium unique.
Man I had so much hope for infinite, remember when Elizabeth opens a year for that dying horse and they’re accidentally on a rain-soaked street in the 80s?
There should have been more secret tears for you to find throughout the game with all kinds of Easter eggs and shit.
The one you brought up, if I remember correctly, was supposed to be Paris in the 80s, because there’s a movie theater in the frame that says something about Star Wars.
The AAA industry has made some really great games but I see - increasingly over time - a lack of interactivity in the games in favor of heavy movie-like narrative. It is unfortunate that adding depth of interactivity in a AAA space requires an immense amount of work to polish those interactions to look good / real / natural. However, we’re running up against graphical performance issues. It’s time to bring back those interactions, perhaps sacrifice a bit of quality to polish these interactions up, and make games that have more player choice.
There were several deviations from System Shock 2 along the way. And even if this one plays like that, I hope they nail the story stuff they’re going for. Previews have seemed impressed.
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