[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

We had some Good and Bad News, so here is some curious news to mix it up: More people started playing Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag after the release of Skull & Bones: usually (in Steam statistics) there were around 800-1000 playing it a any given day, but a few days back it spiked to three times that number, and similar spike was on the 18 of February, a couple of days after Skull & Bones release. Now it dropped to around 2700, though.



The last time Black Flag spiked like that was back in October 2020, when it was the only way for most of us to visit even a beach, let alone the Caribbean 😅 Goes to show that even after 10 years that game is still popular. Though in this case, I guess the reason may be that many people want to compare these two games. @GoLLuM13, you are a pirate expert, do you have an idea why this is happening?

Now I am interested in how things will turn out with that remake of Black Flag that Ubisoft is allegedly working on, codenamed Project Obsidian. If Black Flag is alive and kicking and even after 10 years manages to upstage the latest "AAAA-game", does it really need a remake? Ageing so gracefully, maybe it can wait 10 more years? 😅

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch I'm not an expert, but you guessed it right, many people want to play a pirate game with the release of "Skull & Bones" and seeing the price of this game is so expensive right now (on official market at least) I think it was easier for people to get their old copies of Black Flags and go for an adventure on the ocean 😜

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 Skull & Bones is not doing all that well, as far as I can see so far. I can see some people wanting to compare it to Black Flag seeing as they are in the same theme and by the same company, but I did not expect such an increase en masse. Could it be that Skull & Bones was a clever ruse to boost the Black Flag's popularity? 🤔😅

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch I'm pretty sure it wasn't a ruse, and they probably thought of doing another Assassin's Creed with boats, but they got criticized about the yearly release of Assassin's Creed games, so they probably just used another name. But anyway, now I can talk, for so long and so many times I talked about a game that disappointed me during closed beta phases and that I wasn't able to talk about because of NDA, it was Skull and Bones, the tutorial was too long, and so boring, the game doesn't make you want to come back unless you really hold tight on it and/or are super fan of pirates' world, so when you tell me that it's not doing all that well I can only believe you, one of my close friends tried it with me, it was even worse for him, some members of the French community tried the open beta and same result...
I guess Ubisoft should really focus on new games but with almost dead franchises like "Splinter Cell", "Rayman", "Rainbow Six" (with solo)...

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 That sounded like a load off your chest. Let it all out! 😅

Those NDAs can be tricky, I have one from one of my jobs that binds me for life. Which is a bore, but at least I can pretend to be a super spy with state secrets.

In the statistics that I came across, so far the sales numbers of that game are at around 850 thousand, so not even a million, which is really not good for a game of that calibre. Or, at least, for a game that was promoted the way it was. What does "AAAA" even mean? 🤨

This whole ordeal with this game and all the troubles it went through on the way to the release is odd, the rumours were that they knew it had its flaws, but they released it anyway. I don't really know...

You're right, Ubisoft in recent years has an impression, at least to me, of being very prone to resting on their laurels. They just keep milking their franchises. Though, in all fairness, I think that, with Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, the reason for "putting them to sleep" may have to do with the death of Tom Clancy back in 2013. He was the lead force behind the narrative there, with his name on the box and everything. Can't make more of those games without him.

All the more reason for them to try something new, but then again, I guess Skulls and Bones is that attempt to branch out? If so, it gives an impression of them being out of practice, I think. What's odd to me is, in the middle of all this, they also cancelled their plans for Immortals Fenyx Rising sequel, which was another attempt to branch out. I mean, that game was not fantastic, but not too bad either, they could have done something with it. Maybe the strikes are to blame.

Rayman may make a comeback. Crash Bandicoot is doing not too badly, maybe they will look at it and try to do the same for Rayman.

But what they really should do is release Beyond Good and Evil 2 already, I mean, come on!

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 Sorry, that turned into a small wall of text...

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch Tom Clancy's death is not really the reason, Rainbow Six Siege has been released in 2015, the amazing Ghost Recon Wildlands in 2017, the not that great Breakpoint in 2019, The Division in 2016 and The Division 2 in 2019 and let's not forget the Amazon series Jack Ryan (Amazing series btw, too bad it got cancelled). Anyway, as we can see, there is a lot of material for them to make games even after Tom Clancy's death, and there's still plenty of it. The real reason why they stopped Splinter Cell is that they are all afraid of touching this franchise, because if it comes back, the hype will be over 9000 and if they miss they can say goodbye to their job 👀
As for BGE 2, there were so many internal issues that Michel Ancel the father of BGE and Rayman retired

[DoctorEldritch]

@GoLLuM13 I thought the Rainbow Six Siege and Ghost Recon Wildlands still had some source material that Clancy managed to work on before his death, so they had something to work with for those two. Working on the narrative is one of the first stages of game-making, after all (or, it should be, in an ideal world, but we all know that it's often far from what is actually happening). For Breakpoint they ran out of exclusive material from him directly, so it turned out the way it did, and maybe that's why they do not make any more. Don't know about Divisions, though.

You are right, there is a lot of material in the form of books, but Splinter Cell is not based on books, Clancy designed it from the start to be a video game, and some tie-in novels came out later on after it became a success. I thought that the issue there may have more to do with legal aspects and who has the rights to his intellectual property now.

For example, after Terry Pratchett died, his daughter Rhianna (who works in the gaming industry as a writer, by the way) inherited the rights to the DiskWorld series, and right from the start said that there would be no more books by her or anyone else, and no games in the setting and the series would be left as is in memory of her father. This is why DiskWorld has but a few video games and all of them are old. Maybe something similar is the case with Tom Clancy, who knows?

But I can definitely see more sense in your reasoning of them being vary of the series popularity. And so they should be, in their current state they are right to be afraid of not meeting expectations. I am just surprised that, given how they love money (cough-Assassin's-Creed-micro-transactions-cough), they would not try to make some of that franchise despite the risks.

You know, at this point I find the whole BGE 2 rather ironic: rarely is a game named so fittingly and its name is so situationally accurate that it describes what is happening to the game perfectly. It really is a rare thing, when you think about it. 😅