Who doesn’t love content? Content makes the world go round. Have us consume content until the climate crisis drags us all into the endless storm of oblivion. I c💖an’t believe it’s not content. You get the point - content is king.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed is a series that is all about content, drawing you into its beautiful worlds of historical significance to immerse you in a campaign and chase down icons for hundreds of hours. Each new ga🌊me grows larger and larger, with O🍃rigins, Odyssey, and Valhalla offering so much to see and do that it becomes overwhelming.
I tapped out of all three games after 20+ hours, content (sorry) that I’d seen all I needed to see and whatever remained wasn’t tantalising enough to justify such a huge time investment. Judging from Ubisoft’s recent earnings call, I'm an outlier in an audience who adores this sort of adventure, and who can blame them? There’s so much value for money here that I’d fail to recognise inside my games industry echochamber.
Ubisoft recently announced that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the company’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:second most profitable game ever, eclipsing all other games in the franchise while also boasting the most time investment out of all entries thus far. Given how much there is to see and do in V♔alhalla alongside generous expansions and extra years of post-launch support being implemented, such additional accolades are unsurprising. The game is massive, and the time required to conquer it reflects that ambition. Yet I can’t help but feel cynical about it.
Ever since it became an annual series over ten years ago, with a few exceptions since, Assassin’s Creed has grown into a product of diminishing returns. Regardless of whether you’re venturing to Ancient Egypt or Ancient Greece, the act of exploring a sprawling open world to gather loot, defeat enemies, and conquer outposts inevitably wears thin, and I can’t help but feel the series hasn’t implemented enough worthwhile changes since its inception to justify being as m꧟onolithic as it is. Ubisoft would benefit from making these games more focused, telling nuanced stories with meaningful characters instead of having each new experience become defined by needless bloat and an unreasonable level of commitment.
But as I said earlier, Assassin&rsq🌞uo;s Creed falls into the mainstream, and is picked up by Johnny Gamer on an annual basis alongside the likes of Call of Duty and FIFA. Boasting hundreds upon hundreds of hours of content without even mentioning its expansions, there’s enough here for the Average Joe to dip into throughout an entire year before the next one comes around. They’ll pick that up on release and the cycle starts anew.
These people aren’t aware of how those deeper in the trenches have begun to resent games like this in a way, groaning as major series pivot to a live service model wౠhere unique narratives and characters are put on the backburner to make way for engaging seasonal updates and an implementation of content that isn’t designed to be compellin🙈g, it’s designed to be engaging, to manipulate users to sign in day after day to complete daily challenges and maintain that sweet retention. That’s what big companies love to see, encouraging figures it can pop into spreadsheets to appease shareholders.
I imagine this is why Assassin’s Creed Infinity is on the way, a live service transformation of the series that aims to maintain its beloved gameplay in a new model. Part of me thinks this will result in more focused stories, since regular updates will make it impossible to make gargantuan open worlds on the level of Valh🐭alla. Either that, or each new game becomes a platform for experimentation, large areas of tℱhe map being changed to reflect each season as we come to learn exactly what makes it tick. It’s like Fortnite detached from the battle royale genre, with Assassin’s Creed poised to become a metaverse of its own we dedicate all our time to. If you’re into this sort of thing, more power to you, but goodness me it’s exhausting.
The artistic and technical achievement of these games shouldn’t be brushed aside. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a marvellous game, with its open world being one of the most accomplished in recent memory with gorgeous forests, towering mountains, and bustling villages to explore. Yet regardless of how wondrous its sense of place manages to be, i🌠t all serves an overly familiar combat system and an approach to mission design that make its gamified nature so abundantly clear.
Discovery Tour all♑ows us to switch this nonsense off and admire Odyssey, Origins, and Valhalla as the works of art they truly are, but this is discounted by a core experience that feels so corporately mechanical. I find it easy to see past that and find myself walking away, time and time again long before the credits෴ roll. Finishing these games feels like a secondary objective from Ubisoft, it isn’t bothered about you leaving with a smile on your face - in fact, it doesn’t want you to depart at all, not until you’ve seen every last inch of content.
I’ll hold my judgments until Assassin’s Creed Infinity rears its head in the years to come, since Iꦗ could be worrying about absolutely nothing. But Ubisoft’s trajectory in recent years has me confident that it will be exactly what I’m expecting. I’ll dive into it hoping for a change, for a worthwhile evolution, only to depart with a grimace as I realise it’s once again all the same. It pushes the boat out, but never far enough, happy to rely on a system that engages with the mainstream in a respectable way, but often forgets what the medium is capable of with its focus on player retention, microtransactions, and so much more. At least the name makes sense, be🧜cause content is infinite. Content is king.