The final presentation from this weekend’s video game event, which began with Summer Game Fest and continued through the Xbox Games Showcase, came today with the Ubisoft Forward. This one had less to show off than the other two, but it began with a pre-show that touted older games and a few “indies supported by Ubisoft.” There were also some announcements and launch trailers:
Then, the Ubisoft Forward began, and it focused almost entirely on two games: Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Both of those games had long videos showing them off to gamers, which you can see below:
Interspersed with the big releases were some trailers for other releases, which you can see below:
My takeaway from this is that Ubisoft really wants to get people on board for Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. And it makes sense; the company is not on a solid financial footing right now, and these are its heavy hitters. The problem is that neither one is getting people excited; Outlaws is a big ball of meh, and Shadows is mostly being talked about because of Ubisoft’s weird choice to make their Japanese game about a black guy who probably wasn’t a samurai. This is their pitch beyond the trailers to get people to believe these games might be fun and take a chance on them. We’ll see if it works, but the Ubisoft Forward feels desperate more than anything else.
If anything, the Monopoly game is another big brand name title and one that makes a person think about business, so that one looks good.
Star Wars usually put out good games, so that was one thing they did right. Here’s another point though, you don’t have to like every IP and every character all the time, and the girl boss thing is being forced. When a character of any gender clicks, it’s for more reasons than just gender. At this point, it comes off unnatural.
They have that other samurai game, Murasama, which looks good, but the AC Shadows title is so bad, that it could end Ubisoft. In the name of diversity and globalization, it really just looks like an excuse to attack and destroy smaller nations like Japan or Ireland.
In fact, I think the perfect tactic of corporate espionage and subterfuge would be to force radical diversity into projects, because it’s bringing down entire companies.