First of all, let’s take a look at Ubisoft’s Open World.
Ubisoft is the representative of the open world: the Assassin’s Creed.
Masterpieces such as the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, watchdog and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon are all created by Ubisoft, a veteran French gaming company.
In terms of the number of masterpieces in the open world, Ubisoft definitely ranks first, but the Ubisoft series of open world games do not have the highest reputation among players, and many players criticize it as a “formulaic open world”.
What’s going on?
1. High-quality world construction.
Let’s start with the world construction of the Ubisoft system.
The Ubisoft series of open world games are absolutely world-class in the production process of “World Construction”!
For example, the “Assassin’s Creed” series, its reproduction of ancient civilized cities has shocked countless players. The oversized map and smarter NPC make the whole game world lifelike and linger, which is why Ubisoft open world games are called “travel simulators” by players, attracting a lot of players!
You may remember the news that after Notre Dame was burned in 2019, Ubisoft came forward and said that it had computer holographic data that could help the church recover.
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For people in the gaming industry, this is not surprising at all.
2.Limited “freedom”
In terms of “providing freedom”, however, the Ubisoft open world is less satisfying.
Here’s what it does:
Divide the whole world into different levels of defined areas, and only when you have cleared the main tasks of one area and reached the specified level can you enter the next high-level area.
Each area is composed of main line tasks and many branch tasks, but the types of regional tasks are few and repetitive, and the plot design is rough.
Mission guidelines all over the map, piling up in order to increase content capacity, so that users can not see priorities, easy to cause dense phobias, feel the pressure of suffocation.
Automatically generated game scenes, and even some tasks are automatically generated, no features, it is easy to make players tired and bored.
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In a beautiful and magnificent world filled with a large number of low-quality repetitive game content, even if players have more nostalgia for the world, there is really no more interest except to see the scenery. Ubisoft reuses the same model in one open world game after another, hence the name “formulaic” open world.
3. How to evaluate the open world of Ubisoft?
Does that mean that the Ubisoft open world is a failure?
Personally, I don’t think so.
From another point of view, behind this problem, it reflects the value of Ubisoft in the industry that other companies cannot reach!
As we mentioned above, building a “real” virtual world is a huge challenge to technology and design, and in the final analysis, the biggest challenge is production cost!
Ubisoft is not as deep-pocketed as American gaming company Rockstar Games.
Its business model, which relies on New year’s goods to maintain revenue and profit every year, forces Ubisoft to come up with profitable game works with low cost and controllable risk. Behind the “formulaic” production model is the crystallization of years of cross-regional and cross-jet cooperation among more than 20 studios around the world. For this reason, it has developed a mature production line to reduce costs and control risks.
It has produced one open world game after another with 10 million sales, which is a reference path for Ubisoft to show the industry to make open world games at low cost.
After all, there are too few companies with such deep pockets.
Of course, it can’t go far just by staying on such a path.
When players can anticipate the experience of Ubisoft’s next game and are tired of this kind of experience, this formulaic open world becomes a skin-changing game, which is much less attractive to players.
Ubisoft itself has been aware of this problem and has made a series of improvements in subsequent new products such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising.
Greatly reduce the proportion of content automatically generated by the program, invest more resources, and manually polish the quality of game content. I believe we can see more and better surprises and breakthroughs for players in the open world of the Ubisoft family in the future.