Up next is the fact that the more you play, the more you feel manipulated. You don't really find out until later that there's no way to earn all the Skill points you require simply by sticking to the single-player missions. Co-Op missions offer way more Skill points and while you can play them solo, they're quite difficult without allies. In order to open Initiate chests, you have to have a Uplay account; in order to open Nomad chests, you have to download (and extensively play) the Companion App; in order to see all the collectibles on the map, you have to use Helix points to snag Time Saver Packs. And as nobody can seem to figure out how to reliably earn Helix points, Ubisoft unsurprisingly asks you to pay for them. Prior to this game, viewpoints unlocked these collectibles and optional missions; now, viewpoints unlock less than half.
Parts of the main game are closed off if you don't get the Dead Kings Expansion. This includes the Guillotine Guns, various pieces of equipment, and a different section of the map; you can see these when you play the game, but you're told several times that in order to access them, you have to get the DLC in question. Granted, that DLC is now free, but only because Ubisoft so badly botched the launch; they originally intended for the DLC to be premium. Except, that's not an expansion. That's something else you need to unlock more of what appears to be the base game. This is wrong. This is the kind of practice we really can't encourage in developers and publishers these days and again, it's not the kind of thing I really noticed until after playing for many hours.
I didn't realize how much Ubisoft wanted you to be "connected" or how devious they were in essentially forcing you to play multiplayer. I will admit that you don't have to do all these things if you wish to simply zip through and finish the game. But really, that's not what an open-world sandbox game is about; almost nobody races through and does nothing else. In this case, it seems like most every optional thing in Unity has a string attached. I've been reflecting on the game as a whole for weeks now. I've tried to convince myself that the original score I handed out is justified, for a number of legitimate reasons. But if I sat down to review it now, after discovering everything that I've discovered, would I assign the same score? The answer, unfortunately, is no. As such, I'm issuing a retraction for the score although not the entire analysis, as a lot of that remains sound.