Pick up your silly twig, you’re playing with the big boys now
The evening before Ubisoft’s E3 conference, we sat in the function room of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles and watched as a procession of senior staff laid out, one by one, the games Ubisoft would be announcing the following day. Rare, you might think; risky, even, in an era where leaking information is so easy. But Ubisoft does it every year.
With good reason, too. We weren’t just treated to trailers; indeed, we didn’t see many. Instead we heard about the thought processes behind each game, on how they were made and why. We were given context: something that is lacking amid the frenetic news cycle of an E3 or Gamescom, but which casts Ubisoft in a more accurate – and, yes, far more flattering – light.
Ubisoft, uncommonly for an organisation of such size, is forever taking risks, and it is not always solely motivated by its bottom line. No other big publisher has been so strong a supporter of virtual reality, for instance. OK, its VR games may be small, made by teams numbering in the dozens, rather than the thousands. But Ubisoft is investing in VR because it wants to see it succeed, and understands the power it has to help make it happen.
So for this issue, we thought we’d try and shine a bit of a spotlight on a publisher which is flawed, certainly – they all are. But it is fascinating, too, a colossal, multinational concern that makes impossibly vast games across timezones around the clock, while still finding time to take a punt on things that might not pay off. And so, throughout this issue you’ll find reports on one of the most intriguing, and most maligned, companies in videogames.
Yet if it’s risk you want, our cover game has you, well, covered. After a year on the sidelines – a feat of financial derring-do measurable in the millions its absence wiped off Ubisoft’s balance sheet – Assassin’s Creed is back, and it’s been substantially overhauled. It was the one game absent from that pre-E3 presentation, and with good reason: there’s simply too much that needs to be explained. The Origins story begins on p62.