Michael Does Life

Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2’s new ports have just managed to outpace GTA 6 in trending on the PS Store This is the first time GTA 6 has ever been dethroned since Trailer 2, it is likely these ports are the top selling games and have outpaced even GTA 6 pre-orders.

Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2’s new ports have just managed to outpace GTA 6 in trending on the PS Store This is the first time GTA 6 has ever been dethroned since Trailer 2, it is likely these ports are the top selling games and have outpaced even GTA 6 pre-orders.

Going forward, Ubisoft NEEDS to use Black Flag Resynced as their base line for quality for ALL of their future games. That means fantastic written stories with motion captured cutscenes that feature great facial animations. An action-adventure focus that avoids bloating these games with RPG mechanics and most importantly, an experience that feels cohesive and not scale for the sake of scale. Procedurally generated cutscenes simply do not cut it anymore, Ubisoft should be at the level to compete with Naughty Dog's presentation by now with their team sizes and insane budgets. It is time to bring these stories down from 90+ hour behemoths that lack substance to 30 hour LINEAR adventures that truly have something to say with a strong cast of characters just like Black Flag. A company as big as Ubisoft should not have only 1 strong writer with Darby and the rest be so mediocre, this franchise needs to bring in real talent that can write strong narratives consistently with each game just like they did in AC1-Origins. Features that are continuously improved upon, need to start carrying forward from game to game as they did here with Parkour and stealth. We should not have a Mirage to Shadows situation again where all the enhancements Mirage did to parkour and social stealth were just gone from Shadows until a year post-launch when parkour got fixed but social stealth was simply abandoned for no reason. And most importantly, Assassin's Creed needs to innovate again. Black Flag is such a breakthrough title because there really is no single player pirate game like it to this day. There is nothing like AC2, nothing like AC3 out there. but there are many games exactly like Shadows and Valhalla. Going forward, AC needs to push the envelope forward. It isn't enough to make a back to the roots game like Mirage, the formula needs to evolve. My hopes for next year's Assassin's Creed Hexe is that it does away entirely with procedurally generated cutscenes, and pushes the franchise forward with a new parkour system that finally replaces the one we've had for almost 10 years since Origins now. A game that seeks to tell a truly meaningful story with strong presentation and an open world that is focused on being fun to explore without the need of XP grinds. And most importantly, Hexe needs to have its own identity. It's easy to lump together Odyssey-Valhalla-Shadows into one gameplay loop, Hexe has to break away from that just as Black Flag Resynced did. It's not enough that Hexe ends up being an action-adventure game, it has to be a game that stands out as something truly unique in the franchise, just like how every game before Odyssey did. And these all apply to every franchise Ubisoft has. Far Cry got so big because of how incredible Far Cry 3's story was, FC6 turning its back entirely on good writing was a huge mistake and for FC7, everything I said about AC has to be applied too. I truly believe a Ubisoft comeback to their level of quality that was seen in the 360/PS3 era is possible, they have the money, they have the developers, all they have lacked all these years is structure. Something to aim these developers properly to craft a unique game. If Expedition 33 can come out of former Ubisoft devs, then I fully believe Ubisoft are capable of making games at that quality bar.

Activision has removed the live player counts in the Black Ops and Black Ops 2 ports