I usually get very excited about the Christmas shopping season when it comes to video games. Odds are that we as players can expect a number of AAA titles to sink our teeth into during our time off. Unfortunately, this year seems to be the first time I can remember in which every game, system, publisher, is releasing absolute junk.
The above statement pains me to type, but it must really be thrown out there. Assassins Creed: Unity has undone anything that all previous games have done to make the series stand out from the crowd. Entire forum threads are capturing the incredible amount of bugs that the game is suffering from. It’s almost as if Ubisoft decided to cut costs by leaving the QA process to a bunch of overactive jellyfish. Unity is by no means ready for primetime and the fact that Ubisoft has the audacity to say a patch is coming so soon after release tells me that they knew this game wasn’t anywhere close to ready.
Not only did they release a shoddy, bug-ridden game, but they also spent time from development, time that could have been used to fix the game, to implement a sort of pay-to-win system. You have to be fucking kidding me! You have the gall to charge full price for a game you know isn’t up to snuff and still have the balls to offer a $99, yes a ninety-nine dollar, in-game option for in-game money. This is appalling, not to mention that the balls it would take to okay this makes said balls larger than the damn comet we just landed on. When Forbes calls you the next EA you know your reputation as a publisher is in the tank.
But don’t think that this little rant is placed solely on Ubisoft (Oh, boy could it be though!) as every platform is having issues of some kind. Have a Wii U? Well, Sega is doing its very best to drive that system straight into an early grave with the release of Sonic Boom. I’ll keep it short (I said that in my review too but still managed to go off), but the game makes Sonic 06, considered the worst Sonic game ever made, look like a friggin masterpiece.
The game has graphics that resemble a terrible GameCube era game (think Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis) and is full of unfinished animations and terrible voice acting. If you want to see how bad the game really is you can check out my review here, but just know that this game essentially erases any goodwill and love the last two excellent Sonic games may have built. It’s a shame with what happened here, both for the fledgling Nintendo Wii U, but also for the new development studio involved in making the game (former Naughty Dog people…). The fact that Sega has turned Sonic and his games into nothing more than shovelware for some new cartoon show is a damn shame.
Okay, so that’s two major releases that have screwed the pooch, but what about things over on the lonely Xbox One? Things seem much better, considering the console doesn’t really have much other than Sunset Overdrive to talk about (It looks fun!). Wait…what about that highly touted Halo: Master Chief Collection? Hey, at least the single player game works great, right? Multiplayer issues have plagued the games launch, which is strange because Halo is the game that helped define what online multiplayer is for consoles. You would think that the online component of the game (something that I enjoyed even though I dislike online games) would have been rock solid upon release.
So this is where modern gaming has taken us. A world where games are created by a boardroom of old farts shoveling out games that just aren’t ready. Look, I’m still excited about games and this year has seen some exceptional titles, especially from Nintendo, but I just think we as consumers need to hold publishers to a higher standard. Let’s just hope that consumers speak with their wallets and demand better from publishers in the future and we see less shoddy games hit the market with 23 patches on release.
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