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Ubisoft Apologizes For Assassin's Creed 171

Posted by samzenpus from the mea-culpa dept.
BarbaraHudson writes in with the latest in the Assassin's Creed Unity debacle. This time it's good news. "As an acknowledgment of the botched launch of Assassin's Creed Unity, Ubisoft has offered free additional content to everyone who purchased the title, cancelled the game's season pass and offered a free game to users who purchased the pass. The anticipation for Assassin's Creed Unity was such that the myriad of bugs and technical issues experienced at launch felt like an even greater slap in the face for gamers. In a blog posted yesterday, Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto said: 'Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues. I want to sincerely apologize on behalf of Ubisoft and the entire Assassin's Creed team. These problems took away from your enjoyment of the game, and kept many of you from experiencing the game at its fullest potential.'"
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Ubisoft Apologizes For Assassin's Creed More

Ubisoft Apologizes For Assassin's Creed

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  • Unexpected technical issues (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28, 2014 @05:38AM (#48477977)

    Really? They were unexpected? Testing didn't bring ANY of these issues up?

    I could understand a few bugs might slip through the cracks but I would have thought a game publisher would not have these kind of issues after launching many games without major bugs. (I have no citation on this, by I would figure that most of their games aren't this bad on launch day).

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      Really? They were unexpected? Testing didn't bring ANY of these issues up?

      You would be surprised at the number of so-called expert testers who ask for the latest, most powerful machines with the latest OS versions etc. as they claim that this will aid their testing. I've seen this in a company where the target machines that actual users were using were known to be older with less powerful graphics cards and some old software for compatibility with some products . I'd imagine the lure of a new machine is eve greater when they don't know what users will be using.

      • Re:Unexpected technical issues (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:02AM (#48478041) Journal
        I suspect that this was not the cause of the failure to find the raging pile of bugs in the PS4 and XBox One versions, since there isn't much hardware variation among released models.

        Much more plausible (if still an example of terrible testing practice) with any bugs in the PC version that can be linked to a specific GPU driver version or the like. Even there, though, PC gamers(of the type interested in new-release action games) may not have the newest hardware; but tend to be fairly good about updating GPU drivers and DirectX runtimes.

      • Re:Unexpected technical issues (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:18AM (#48478113) Homepage

        Usually, testers find these things and management decides that they can be fixed with a patch later, because missing the ship date would cause marketing problems.

        Sometimes they get away with that. Sometimes the problems are worse than management thinks and a debacle like this happens.

        • Given what they are offering to customers as compensation this time [bbc.co.uk], I wonder whether a substantial backlash against this kind of substandard quality has finally started, perhaps even among the serious gaming community. It certainly seems like Ubisoft might actually be getting concerned about their reputation and future profits now. It's not as if they haven't had launch disasters before, but presumably you only get so many before people stop pre-ordering your next "must have" game, even if the limit is hig

          • It was by no stretch the first blunder on their side. UBIsoft is already pretty much synonymous with "the company that can't really release anything right". Their reputation among gamers is even worse than EA. And that's quite a feat in some twisted sort of way.

            Of course people who enjoy a certain franchise (aka fanboys) will continue to buy their favorite line of games. But only so long. I don't really see much of a preorder potential for the next Sim City game after the blunder with the most recent one. G

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          These days it's standard to write the apology before the game even ships. They know that the servers will buckle under the load on day one, they know you will have to download a 1GB+ patch before you can even connect, and they know there are still masses of bugs. A cheap apology posted on their website is far cheaper than actually fixing those problems, and these days total launch failure is so common that in a week all will be forgotten and everyone will be watching other people play the game on YouTube be

    • Re:Unexpected technical issues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:22AM (#48478127) Journal
      Let's put it this way: When a game doesn't suck publishers generally don't embargo reviews until 12 hours after release [polygon.com]...

      Even games that end up releasing in pretty dubious shape often manage to score fairly positive pre-launch press through some combination of assurances that 'those little issues won't be in the final version, just see the promise!' and the degree to which the reviewer depends on the goodwill of the publisher for future access, so if reviewers aren't allowed to talk about it even after it is on the shelves, you might want to run away. Maybe pick it up for $20 a year from now, if they actually do fix it.

    • Re:Unexpected technical issues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lennier1 ( 264730 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @07:33AM (#48478355)

      Unespected?

      Their news embargo basically equaled a goddamn GAG ORDER and they really want to convince us that this wasn't because they knew all along what a train wreck they were about to sell and to prevent he media prom warning the customers??? It was fraud, plain and simple and they now want to get people to accept some of their other crap as compensation so they won't be able to join a class-action lawsuit.

      • Their news embargo basically equaled a goddamn GAG ORDER

        No, it didn't. It was sleazy, it was wrong, it was something that we should not tolerate from any gaming company, but it was part of the deal for a review copy up front and every respectable gaming review outlet turned them down. Yeah, you read that right.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

          It was sleazy, it was wrong, it was something that we should not tolerate from any gaming company, but it was part of the deal for a review copy up front and every respectable gaming review outlet turned them down. Yeah, you read that right.

          So, none of them?

          Honestly asking. I haven't bothered reading any video game specific site in years, primarily because video game sites seemed to either be the corporate "blatantly in bed with the publishers" type (IGN) or "shitty blog not worth anyone's time" type (Kotaku). I'm curious if any gaming review outlet actually turned down the offer and insisted on reviewing a release copy.

          • So, none of them?

            That's my take. I don't know of anyone who did turn it down, because BIG SHINY. (Not just ooh shiny, but BIG SHINY.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Alumoi ( 1321661 )

      Why should they even care to test the game before launch? There are hundrends/thousands of beta testers who are more than willing to pay a bunch only to be among the first to have the new shiny.
      Oh, did I say beta testers? I meant users/players.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      well it was "unexpected" to the management that the patching team didn't do a miracle in 48 hours prior to launch. if they were even working.

      they knew it was buggy, what they technically might have not know was if the thing was going to get patched to good level before stores handing the copies out.

      (that they knew was evidenced by the launch day review embargo for people with advance copies, which doesn't happen with all games, rather it seems to happen only on games that are buggy)

    • I was thinking just that. Unexpected? Did QA take a collective day off when the game was to be tested? Not even the "there's just too many configurations" excuse holds any water because the glitches, bugs, freezes and what ever else you have happened not only on the PC version but also on the consoles. And please don't tell me there are too many different PS4 variants out there where it just so happened that you didn't have the one with the CPU/GPU where the game bugs out.

      The game was friggin' unfinished. T

  • Bugs are DRM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @05:43AM (#48477987)

    The net effect of these ludic-buggy games is that the actual game disk itself is entirely worthless for playing the game. Pretend that while browsing for 8 bit NES games, you finally found a game you wanted- say The Guardian Legend, a truly top-tier title. You grab it for cheap, walk it home... and instead of instantly booting into Miria racing towards Naju, it instead needs an overnight update from a service that hasn't existed in a decade to work properly, or at all.

    These bugs are a feature to companies like Ubisoft and EA. The apology is only issued because the launch was truly and shockingly ludicrous- enough to get mocked world wide, in articles such as Cracked's:

    http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-... [cracked.com]

    That are well outside of the normal area of video game journalism / forums / reviews.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Trepidity ( 597 )

      A corollary of that is that this style of development is a huge mess for game preservation. Imagine if you had a collection of NES games, but none of them really worked, because the original boxed game was unplayably buggy, and the update servers were discontinued many years ago. Pretty much the only hope for a game like this being playable in 20 years is: 1) the company itself eventually releases a self-contained, all-patches included version that works, or 2) some warez group does so.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        2) is what happened with Dungeon Keeper 2. I've got the original CD and all the patches but had huge problems installing and running it on three systems since. The warez version just worked, it applied the patches and removed the buggy copy protection that was responsible for many crashes.
        Awesome narration in that game. "You seem the have a lot of mistresses. There's a word for keepers like you."
        • I'd still be annoyed at having to re-buy it because the CD and all the patches didn't work correctly; but (as someone who lost their CD fair and square, by good old fashioned incompetence and disorganization on my part rather than theirs) I think it's fair to note that GoG thankfully has this one [gog.com], and it was worth my $6.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            Read review 3 as to why I use the warez version despite having a legal copy. That isn't me that wrote it but it may as well have been.
            • Going by the reviews, it looks like they shot the initial release to hell; but apparently fixed it by the time I noticed and purchased it. Still looks pretty retro on my giant modern pretty-screen; but no less stable now than it was back in the day(which, admittedly, wasn't perfect).
          • I was happy to re-buy DK and DK2 from GOG when they were on special offer for $2 each: for that price, it's worth not having to find the CDs. The fact that they had pre-packaged Mac versions and I didn't have to futz with WINE myself was a bonus.

        • Now if only Obsidian by Rocket Science were available...

      • The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?

        I assume that consoles do, if only because consoles are extremely touchy by nature about anything going in or out(aside f

        • The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?

          The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to store old games as virtual machine snapshots. Unfortunately, these are n

          • The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to store old games as virtual machine snapshots.

            Bah, humbug. If you want to replay the game in the future, download the cracked version that doesn't authenticate to anything. Then you can install it to a virtual machine with working drivers. Just buy it first, and make sure to buy the same SKU that the cracked version is based upon. That might not be an airtight legal defense, but at least it'll be clear that you were trying to do the Right^WLegal Thing(tm)

        • So is the question whether update downloads are encrypted? The ones for the Xbox and 360 aren't. Dunno about the 180. You can download them and unpack them with alternate tools. I would imagine that mostly the ones on the PC aren't either, but I haven't actually checked to see what it looks like when say STO downloads an update.

          Once the files are laid down, though, it's only a matter of doing any necessary authentication, if your game has that sort of thing. And in theory, that can be patched out. The game

    • I don't understand why "patches" are hundreds of megabytes and often multiple gigabytes to download. Isn't the vast majority of a modern game's data the assets? (Textures, images, sound, video,etc.). Actual code should be a tiny fraction... How do mere bug fixes weigh so much?

  • They haven't announced an Assassin's Creed game for next year, yet. Hopefully they'll learn from their mistake, and delay it until fall 2016. That'd give them time to fix up the performance issues and myriad glitches with the updated engine. Maybe at the same time they'll rethink the idea of the microtransaction-unlocked chests.

    • Maybe at the same time they'll rethink the idea of the microtransaction-unlocked chests.

      Oh, I'm sure they will. Perhaps they'll offer you the option to fill out surveys online to unlock them!

      Stop giving these assholes money until they rein it in. They're assholes.

  • unexpected technical issues

    Is this true? I often get the feeling from the gaming industry that Q&A gets ignored and execs simply launch the game for whatever reasons.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tridus ( 79566 )

      "Unexpected technical issues", as in "we knew there were issues but didn't expect them to become this big of a media story."

      You're right. Game company management and PR want to meet the ship date no matter what because of the hype train and various retailer contracts for shelf space. QA isn't that high on the totem pole when it comes to influence, and are routinely ignored if they're saying what management and PR don't want to hear.

      Hopefully, Ubi learns something from this.

      • The QA peons can make all the sad mouth-noises they want, to no effect; but "We released the latest iteration of one of our hot franchises and our stock dipped 12%" probably made it up to HQ...

  • Yet again - Preorders are for suckers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:25AM (#48478145) Homepage

    There is a reason they want you to buy the game before any reviewers or other users start commenting on it. It's what enables them to sell broken crap like this. They've already got your money.

    The hype train, preorder bonuses, review embargoes are all meant to allow them to get away with selling broken crap. That's exactly what they've done. All the complaining in the world won't do a whole lot about that, now.

    If you really want to put a stop to companies like EA and Ubi doing this - never preorder a game. Any game worth buying on launch day is still worth buying two weeks later, and you'll save yourself quite a lot of money by avoiding duds.

  • They seem to be just skimping on Quality Assurance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      These games are made by underpaid studios in Canada and others. They bank on all the poor peanut gallery devs who "OMG MUST WORK IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY!" in those areas. Even by Montreal standards, employees at Ubisoft Montreal are getting ripped off. Everyone knows it.

      You know, the stereotype of the teenager who goes in computer science thinking he's going to make the next big game, not realizing its actually hard? Well, some of them actually make it, and they end up there. There's a few bright stars in th

  • Brand un-value (Score:5, Insightful)

    by malx ( 7723 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:45AM (#48478203)

    I am loath to join the general chorus of hate for Ubisoft and EA. Complaining about these companies being too focussed on commercial success and not enough of user-entertainment/"art" seems futile: they are, first and foremost, commercial companies.

    Nonetheless, considering it strictly as a commercial proposition, should the senior executives of these companies not be worried that their brand has negative value?

    When I see news of a game, knowing that it is going to be published by Ubisoft - or, to a lesser extent, by EA, makes me shy away. I am less likely to buy. I am less likely to follow the hype, for fear of being sucked in by it, because I expect to be disappointed. I am less likely to engage with their product or marketing in any way, because of the poor track record that they have establish, the negative brand value that they have created.

    If they bought a small publishers, and published the very same game through that new label, I would be more likely to engage with and buy their product for that reason - as long as I was not aware that Ubisoft (or EA) lay behind it. Knowing that they are there, I expect to be disappointed.. That's negative brand value in action.

    This is not just a gamer whinge. I would think that was a customer reaction that ought to concern senior commercial management, and shareholders in these companies.

    • Challenge Everything!

    • I am loath to join the general chorus of hate for Ubisoft and EA. Complaining about these companies being too focussed on commercial success and not enough of user-entertainment/"art" seems futile: they are, first and foremost, commercial companies.

      I'm never quite convinced by this argument. Just because you can do something does not mean you must, and these companies are run be actual people, who can make decisions that aren't only following the dollar. Ultimately if you just want to make money then be a bank, everyone else has a certain amount of duty to provide their service, aswell as to being commercial.

    • It doesn't help now that 'brands' aren't just a sticker on the box. They increasingly (getting to the 'alarmingly frequently' and likely heading toward the dystopian future of 'forever, across every platform!') also tell you what (terrible) online 'service' you'll have to create an account for and what god-awful launcher/store/spyware/'social' clusterfuck you'll be forced to install.

      If it were just about the label on the box, I'd be cautious about EA, and really cautious about Ubisoft; but hey, if the re

  • I wonder if anyone here has actually played it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @06:58AM (#48478255) Homepage
    I've put in a few hours of gameplay with it (PC version), and the game definitely has some bugs, but on a decent gaming computer it is the most ambitious game in terms of graphic content on the screen that I have ever seen. The number of rendered objects is crazy, and the number of NPC on the screen at once is astounding. Sure a few NPC pop in and out (before the patch) and some people go through the floor. But that happens in Borderlands the PreSequal just as much if not more, and it is a much less demanding and ambitious game. Ubisoft fucked up with the launch, and should have tested it on older hardware. But it is hard to believe they can get that much stuff on the screen with the lighting effects they have, and still have it run at all. It is not the buggiest game I have ever bought, but it does have the most graphical content by far, and the frame rates are very playable. (Intel i7 3.3 GHz with 12 GB ram and Geforce 7800 GTX)

    • Looking at screenshots I don't see anything Serious Sam wasn't doing a decade ago, the only difference is updated graphics.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dave420 ( 699308 )
        Maybe the "updated graphics" has something to do with it... Naaah - your gut instinct and cursory glance would have immediately shown that to be not the case, as they are the most accurate analytical methods known to man.

        • Point being this isn't some technological leap, it's a high-res pack slapped over an old accomplishment. You want to impress me with a new technology show me Battlefield's destruction engine taken to the next level without performance issues. Show many raytracing that's feasible on normal hardware. Don't show me something from 10 years ago and say "LOOK, MORE POLYGONS!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by abies ( 607076 )

      It has one bug for me. Control lag. It many cases, there is over 0.5 second lag between keyboard and mouse input. Sometimes it works ok (still 100-200ms probably), but soon drops to 0.5-1s. And if I alt-tab out of the game and go back, lag goes up to 10-15 seconds before going down.

      Wonderful graphics and animation. Working quest system. Engaging story line. And entire game experience broken because I have to spend 15 seconds trying to jump down from 1-foot tall fence, because of 1 second lag misinterpreting

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      " The number of rendered objects is crazy,"

      Please. Back in the days of the Voodoo2/3 GPUs we had Kiss: Psycho Circus, with the LithTech engine that could spawn HUNDREDS of actors/NPCs and keep them rolling just fine along with everything else in the game. Back in the days of Serious Sam, same thing.

      " But it is hard to believe they can get that much stuff on the screen with the lighting effects they have, and still have it run at all."

      You must have never heard of the demoscene. They could get that much shit

    • I have it, and I have a really good computer with two GTX 770's in SLI. Regardless of whether I play the game in single or SLI mode, no matter what the settings are, there is a game-crippling bug that pops up randomly and forces you to restart the game to make it playable. Its every 4-5 seconds you get a masssive quarter-second stutter and your vision flips if you play with a mouse. People with low end hardware, high end hardware, low and high settings all have this problem. If you encounter it and try

      • So far that hasn't happened on my system, even with settings pretty much maxed out. But I do get big lag whenever I am being pursued and I turn a corner and leave the ghost image behind indicating the last place I was seen. It is at least a half second delay. Try setting everything to max, and then turn one thing down at a time and see if there is one specific setting that is causing the issue.

        • One anecdote does not make it a random bug, multiple reviewers have mentioned the bug as well and it is considered a serious issue for the PC platform by many, not just me. Some people seem to think it has to do with the physics calculations in the game or a problem with the game's lighting engine (which changes daytime based on the length the game has been open). It happens regardless of settings, you can play at high/high with everything else on and it happens, or medium/low with everything off (what I'

    • I wouldn't use borderlands the pre sequel as a sunny example. Of wait actually I would. It also had site stopping bugs with muffins individually because some object fell through the map, of the map, or refused to spawn at all. My other favourite is when two NPCs ran into each other and just did there starring. Unfortunately the mission was to follow one of them. Fortunately I fixed it by jumping off a cliff which seemed to shuffle the positions of the NPCs somewhat. Both games are examples of what not to re

  • I thought I read that this game had a review embargo until the release day, isn't that right? So they knew and they just tried to hide it. I don't see an apology to that.
  • The free game is a trick to get you on UPlay.

  • Admitting to this degree of incompetence should be considered negligence, not a defense.

  • EA did the exact same mess with Battlefield 4 and simply told customers " STFU you were stupid to buy an EA title!"

  • How exactly is that game free? They paid for a season pass. This a a crap publisher trying to hold on to money that does not belong to them while trying to spin it as a win for the suckers that got uh... suckered.

  • The way of the dodo (Score:3)

    by LordWabbit2 ( 2440804 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @08:10AM (#48478475)
    Just like video stores, and music shops are slowly dying out, big publishing houses like UbiSoft and EA will slowly lose ground to indie games and people publishing their games via steam. I say good riddance.

  • Will they also apologize for The Crew not really being "the size of the USA"? I've seen someone play the beta on Xbox One yesterday and he was able to drive through four states in under 30 minutes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      is it as big as Need For Speed: The Run?

  • If the game's so bad that it deserves an apology, (Score:3)

    by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Friday November 28, 2014 @09:38PM (#48482743)
    could someone please explain to me then why reviews like these [trustedreviews.com] aren't a major scandal [metacritic.com] all by themselves?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tukz ( 664339 )

      Let's for one second imagine the game wasn't filled with bugs, the game is still fucking horrible.
      They went backwards. The game is boring as hell, story bland, nothing new of value added to gameplay, they managed to make combat worse that previous iterations.

      That review is either a massive fan boy or paid for.

  • I'm still waiting for Canada's apology for Celine Dion.

  • The apology of a company willing to engage in such shitty business practices means nothing to me. You're so greedy for the holiday cash that you rush an unfinished game out the door with full knowledge it's unfinished, banking on pre-orders and preventing people from publishing reviews until everyone has already bought the broken game? And you expect that an offer for *more* of your shitty products is going to make amends?

    Hey Ubisoft: Fuck. You.

    You want to make amends? Give everyone who bought the game

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