Items tagged with Ubisoft
Did you read all of the favorable reviews for Watch Dogs 2 and still fail to hit the “Purchase” button to add the game to your digital library? Apparently, you weren’t alone, as sales for Watch Dogs 2 haven't exactly lived up to expectations. Sales of the game even failed to surpass that of its predecessor (it underperformed by a large margin), which surely had to ruffle a few feathers inside Ubisoft’s offices. "It is true that first-day and first-week sales for a number of big games, including Watch Dogs 2 and titles from our competitors, are comparatively lower than previous versions in previous years,” said Ubisoft in a statement in November 2016 shortly after the game’s launch. “There is...
Read more...
If you're a fan of game worlds that almost feel overwhelmingly expansive, then it looks like Ghost Recon Wildlands is a game that should be on your radar. Ubisoft doesn't just claim that Wildland's world is large; it boasts it as being the largest game world its ever created, period. Throughout their Wildlands adventure, players will battle 26 different bosses, which gives us the impression that the game is not going to be a breeze to finish. Perhaps even more impressive, the map includes 21 regions, each of which feature their own civilian population. Beyond that, there are 11 different ecosystems to add even more complexity. Wildlands sounds like a game that you're going to be able to sink...
Read more...
Forget the rumors, it is now official—Ubisoft has posted a website where fans of the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series can register for the Ghost Recon: Wildlands beta, an open-world first person shooter set in Bolivia sometime in the near future ("a few years from now"). The game will be playable as a single-player experience or with up to three others in a four-player co-op. In Wildlands, it's the players job to coordinate the infiltration and take down of the brutal Santa Blanca cartel, a network of bad guys (and girls) that rely fear, intimidation, and violence to rule the land. The game begins with creating and customizing a character. Customizable traits will include gender, facial features,...
Read more...
Virtual reality (VR) is starting to slowly take off on PC and console gaming platforms, but that also means that there is plenty of fragmentation going on as each platform looks to stake its claim on early adopters. This was especially the case during the early days of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, when attempts to “unify” the gaming experience on the VR headsets by the hacking community were initially thwarted. However, as least one game publisher, Ubisoft, is looking to allow all gamers using the three major VR platforms to engage in online multiplayer sessions together. That means that PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift users will no longer be relegated to playing in their own minuscule...
Read more...
Ubisoft has got Nintendo’s back. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot remarked that he was a huge fan of the upcoming Nintendo NX and is confident that it will put the company back on the console map. “The new Nintendo [console] is a fantastic machine," stated Guillemot. "It's really a new approach, it's really Nintendo, [which is] coming with something new again. We love it."Guillemot is partly supportive of the Nintendo NX because he believes that it will lead to greater creativity at Ubisoft. He argued that gamers are now more open to new hardware and therefore more willing to test innovative products. He insisted, “For us, a machine is a tool of expression, but when everything become stable it's less...
Read more...
Nintendo is going to launch a brand new game console codenamed NX in March of next year, that much we know. Beyond that, it's a big guessing game as to what exactly Nintendo is cooking up and whether it will be worth the wait, though Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot seems encouraged by what he's seen of the new hardware. "What we have seen is really great," Guillemot said during a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday. "We think having a new machine coming is going to help the industry to grow, and to take lots more casual players back to the industry." There's a lot of speculation about the NX, especially since Nintendo keeps promising something unique. Early on, some surmised it was going to be an Android...
Read more...
Goodbye Chicago and hello San Francisco! The latter is the setting for Watch Dogs 2, the second installment in the hyper-connected third-person shooter from Ubisoft Montreal. Watch Dogs 2 features a new protagonist, Marcus Holloway, who's brilliant, young, and of course fully adept at hacking. After being accused of a crime he didn't commit, Holloway joins DedSec, a powerful group of like-mined hackers who collectively take on the challenge of fighting against a corrupt establishment and ultimately attempting to give control back to the people. In other words, Holloway is a hacktivist, but he's also a different sort of character than Aiden Pearce, the main character in the original Watch Dogs...
Read more...
Online multiplayer through a broadband connection is one of the greatest luxuries of modern gaming, or at least it should be. Unfortunately cheaters threaten to ruin the experience for the population at large in any given title, and that's precisely what's been happening in Tom Clancy's The Division. Thankfully Ubisoft continues to make progress in catching and punishing cheaters. "Cheating players have been an issue for a number of you in the Dark Zone, and we’ve heard this feedback loud and clear. We are strengthening our efforts to address this problem," Ubisoft stated in a blog post. In addition to Ubisoft's prior efforts, the game publisher just recently implemented new cheat detection methods...
Read more...
Players who cheat are ruining online gaming and those who don't are fed up with it. So are developers and publishers, some of which have begun taking stronger stances against cheating. Count Ubisoft among the bunch, as with the latest update to Tom Clancy's The Division, those caught cheating could face a permanent ban. After applying the 1.1 update, players can report others for cheating in the PC version of The Division. All they have to do is type the /report [USERNAME] command in chat and the reported gamer's account will be flagged for closer inspection. If it's decided that the player is in fact cheating, the first offense will warrant a three-day suspension. After that, the ban becomes...
Read more...
Ubisoft has found itself in a bit of a bind. Ideally, the company would like to remain independent, able to be more agile, and not have to answer to some overlord. But as time passes, it looks more and more likely that Vincent Bolloré, Chairman of Vivendi, will get his way and absorb Ubisoft into his mammoth media conglomerate. A couple of years ago, Bolloré made an unsolicited takeover offer for Gameloft, a mobile-focused game developer that happened to have the same owners as Ubisoft -- the Guillemot brothers. Now, Gameloft is effectively under Vivendi's wing, and Bolloré would like to own a majority share of Ubisoft as well. While Ubisoft was founded in France, Canada has some pride in the...
Read more...
Ubisoft is trying out a new hype-building strategy. The company started a series of tweets yesterday, each with an image of cave drawings. This morning, Ubisoft tweeted “The writing is on the wall,” this morning, along with a link to a live stream depicting a cave wall with drawings. It’s a spooky stream, complete with moody music and cinders from a nearby fire floating into view, and it likely means one thing: that Far Cry is headed to the past. Thanks to a leak from IGN Turkey, we know that the title is likely to be Far Cry Primal. The artwork that appeared on the Twitter post shows an entirely different world than what we’ve encountered in past Far Cry titles and certainly fits with the cave...
Read more...
Games publisher Ubisoft raked in significantly more revenue than anticipated during its fiscal first quarter ended June 30, 2015. According to the company's financial report, sales came to €96,6 million (around $107.9 million in U.S. currency), as opposed to its previous forecast of €80 million (around $89.4 million). The bulk of those sales came from PlayStation 4 gamers. Ubisoft broke down its sales by platform. Sony's PS4 topped the list by accounting for 27 percent of all game sales, more than double the Xbox One at 11 percent. It was also more than double of any other game console, as both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 also accounted for 11 percent of game sales, followed by the Wii and...
Read more...
What, another Assassin’s Creed game is coming? Yup, that’s definitely the case and to prove it, Ubisoft has posted a new trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, which will launch first on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 On October 23, and later this fall for the PC. Syndicate is set in Victorian London in the year 1868. The story will revolve around twin gangster assassins: Jacob and Evie Frye. That’s right, you’ll be able to control either a female or male protagonist to create mayhem. Or as Ubisoft puts it, “You will recruit your gang to fight for justice on behalf of the oppressed working class.” Although there will be no multiplayer in Syndicate, there is still plenty to get excited about...
Read more...
Since Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s launch in November 11, the game has been plagued by bugs, glitches, and an assortment of issues that has resulted in Ubisoft releasing multiple patches to rectify these problems. This resulted in Ubisoft promising free DLC and, later on, a free game to those who have purchased the game’s season pass. But the offer of a free game to Season Pass holders wasn’t the developer being nice, but so Ubisoft wouldn’t be sued. With the free game offer, users have to agree to terms and conditions presented when visiting the Assassin’s Creed: Unity game redemption website. Unfortunately, accepting the conditions waives a user’s right to bring Ubisoft...
Read more...
In the last few weeks, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity has become a cautionary tale of how treating a franchise as a perfunctory once-a-year update machine while simultaneously stoking player expectations can catastrophically backfire. Once it realized how unhappy its player base was, Ubisoft snapped into action, stepped up to the plate, and courageously blamed everybody else for its own wretched game. Now that it's clear that this strategy has failed, Ubisoft is instead handing out genuine apologies, a promise to do better in the future, and free DLC. Yannis Mallat, the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, sent out the following mea culpa today: Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game...
Read more...
There are plenty of comical moments to be had in Assassin's Creed Unity, though not necessarily intentional. Take for example a bug that would remove textures on certain NPCs, leaving them faceless and creepy looking. Dubbed the "no face" bug, Ubisoft said it resolved the issue with its Day 1 patch, as well as all future patches. Several images showing the bug have been circulating on the web, though Ubisosft stated in a blog post that after conducting rigorous test, it determined the glitch only occurs on PCs with one of two specific graphics cards, and in both cases the issue is fixed following the first patch. Image Source: Steam (Retro_Apocalypse) Unfortunately for Ubisoft, the "no face"...
Read more...
Update: Ubisoft has amended the original forum post to include and acknowledge problems on Nvidia hardware as well. We're glad the company has explicitly adjusted the post and will update readers if any major performance patches push out. Life is hard when you're a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin's Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could've hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game's disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics -- suddenly, all of this is AMD's fault. An official company forum post currently reads: We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s...
Read more...
If you've been patiently and eagerly awaiting the launch of Assassin's Creed Unity, the good news is the game is now available. Whether you find it fun and entertaining is another matter entirely. Some users and review sites are reporting graphical glitches, performance problems, and other annoying bugs, and as it were, Ubisoft's share price in Europe plummeted 9 percent after the game launched. Are the two related? Yahoo Finance seems to think so, saying that Ubisoft would have been better served by delaying Assassin's Creed Unity the way Take-Two Interactive does with its popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. The site added, "The market has noticed the poor response today and punished the company...
Read more...
A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound, he [Pontbriand] said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. "We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and...
Read more...
As the latest Far Cry 4 trailer tells it, "The meek shall inherit the Earth my friend, but only the well-armed have a chance to survive in Kyrat," the fictional Himalayan setting that's been ravaged by war. But don't fret over your weapon selection, Ubisoft Montreal is making sure to include an assortment of lethal instruments that you can use to dispose the life from your enemies. The 2min44sec trailer is packed with violence as your guide talks about how you can rain fire on your enemies with destructive mortars or kill them silently and stealthily using auto crossbows and deadly Kukri knives for close quarter combat. Other weapons covered in the trailer include a Vector SMG .45 ACP, MG42 machine...
Read more...
Publisher Ubisoft is promising to release a major patch in the next few days that will fix a plethora of issues in Watch Dogs, arguably one of the most anticipated games of the year that unfortunately debuted with several bugs and performance issues. The fixes apply to all platforms, and in fact a patch for the PlayStation 4 version is already available. Ubisoft will address the PlayStation 3 and PC next, followed by the Xbox One and Xbox 360 within the next week. Among the major game fixes for all platforms is one that will automatically reconstruct corrupted save files that prevented loading to go further than 90 percent (some collectibles may remain unrecoverable). The patch will also fix...
Read more...
Ubisoft doesn't have the greatest of reputations among PC gamers at the moment, and it's becoming increasingly clear that the company's totally indifferent to it. When Watch_Dogs released, the company was widely criticized for reducing the graphics detail in the PC build, based on the fact that the game looked better at E3 two-years-ago. It's since been discovered that the same settings used for that E3 demo can be reenabled - the game will look better, and without much of a performance hit. The fact that Ubisoft could deliberately disable a setting that any PC gamer would want enabled is striking, and it's causing rampant speculation around the Web. A common belief is that Ubisoft is so invested...
Read more...
