That's all window dressing though. Sure unity is a pretty game to look at and has some interesting tech, but it's baked around a boring as sin game with the most cookie cutter aaa design imaginable. Sure far cry primal does some interesting things with the language but the story it's servicing is threadbare and banal, and yeah it got rid of guns but replaced it with what ended up being some of the most boring first person combat I've ever seen mixed with the same boring cookie cutter aaa game and world design for the heart of the game.
The biggest sin of ubi development imo is that they have the space, tech, and worlds to do the most interesting and awesome games imaginable and do boring cookie cutter games with it that release as if off an assembly line.
Supposedly they've learned they can't get away with running in place for generations at a time anymore and ac
and the new far cry are actually doing new things mechanically to try and break up the monotony a bit which is great, but after what a decade or so of them running on the same wheel year after year game after game I don't really blame any one for telling them to show first and I'll buy later.
Is it though?
With Unity there was an inherent idea to have that tech contribute to gameplay. The crowds were meant to act as a stealth tool. They failed, it was a crutch onto a game than a boon... but they tried something new. And I am so tired of people trying to push this narrative that they push out the same game.
Its not even a hot take. It's a take that is cold and stale, a dated joke that would have held water 2 years ago.
People like to keep harping on "lul towers, ubisoft games are all the same". But they are not. Structurally they share a framework that they developed with AC1 and iterated on.
They polished it up and refined it in AC2 and Brotherhood.
Far Cry 2, was considered a divisive game and thus they incorporated a formula they knew worked with AC into Farcry 3, and then iterated again on in 4, while primal was clearly experimental. You can say you didn't like how these games played because I also think Primal had a bad melee system and Unity felt like a mess to play.
But according to you it's all just set dressing. That entire naval mechanic they developed for AC3 and 4 is meaningless because the games shared a similar structural formula.
But this formula has shifted constantly and isn't the same in every game, with towers not being used as a way to reveal the map but instead as fast travel points, to their eventual removal from practically all ubi games. Fucks sake, AC:O is an action RPG now and Far Cry 5 has ditched typical linear constraints open worlds have and its story can be done non linearly.
Why don't other open worlds like R*'s get flack? They've been doing the same formula since GTA 3 of
1)Here is your open world to do fuck all
2) Here are you're hyper linear missions where you can't deviate from the intended path or else you will be punished
3)Here are all these distractions
According to you, everything in GTA and Red Dead Redemption is set dressing, because it's all using the same formula.
Or even Mario
You jump in Mario. You collect stars or try to reach a goal. They all inherently use the same formula, but have a unique gameplay tool such as gravity, or FLOOD or Possession.
All derivative because it's all basically using the rules they established with Mario 64.
Zelda has been using the same formula OoT pionnered until BoTW. Didn't stop them from getting praised with high scores and then hated on later into their life cycle. There are changes to gameplay, but I guess it was all just window dressing.
Trying to harp on their "open world formula", when series typically follow a formula is irritating. They might have maybe 3 games that followed this formula, but people act like these 3 are the only games they publish and then try to apply it to their entire catalog.
And it's bullshit.
You say their games are cookie cutter. Siege is straight up on of the best MP shooters in years, that does so many creative things with destruction. It is the one game I truly feel lives up to the "no two games are the same" marketing buzz put on MP games.
For Honor has a legitamately creative fight system and is an accessible fighter for people who can't do inputs.
So don't tell me "oh they have a cookie cutter formula". Other games from other studios took this and placed it into their own games. I appreciate that despite this, ubi at least understands when to change things or to iterate.
