BTW that blog was really nice, could you maybe write a little bit more about your experience at ubisoft? I really would like to read that.
If you haven't saw, here you go :
https://jfgnord.wordpress.com/ Great post, thanks.
It's really sad when you read stuff about Ubisoft and people almost never differentiate between the people who work for the company and their personal opinion about the games or even only some very top-level management decisions. Many people sadly fail to see that probably 99% of all people working at Ubisoft just want to create the best games possible and that criticizing the studio in the way it's often done on the internet must really hurt them. It became really "en vogue" in the past few years to just literally bash everything Ubisoft, on a level even Activision never experienced. It must be really a nice breath of fresh air for you to actually see people on the internet to appreciate the stuff for and the company you work in for sure...
Yes, it's sad that the workers, dev, designers, artists, wanting to make a good game, are pushed to create games that are ultimately seen as "crap" by the community... Sometimes because it's true, but most often because of a strong bias.
I was a big fan of Ubisoft for having some heart and the will to do things properly, but, one day, they started lying to the players - you know, the infamous visual downgrade of Watch_dogs, or the ultra-faked screenshots, the fake promises, etc. The leaders, the marketing guys, or some guys even above, decided they had to follow in Activision/EA footprints and start putting more of the money in advertising and marketing around a game, rather than in the actual game.
The last Ubisoft game I genuinely enjoyed was AC3. The heart and love poured into the game was real. The passion to recreate History, to take the time needed to tell a story, having almost half the game voiced in Native languages, a lot of innovative gameplay elements... But the public dismissed it because the hero was bland and a "looser". Obivously he was going to be. How could a Native/English guy could even have a chance in the post-independance colonies of America ? It was sad. I had a thought for the writers and researchers and designers.
But yeah, then came forth the era of WD and AC4, and all the sh!t they started to put together. I won't lie, the society, the
name, deserved it. However, sh!t falls downward, not upward. And so it's the workers who take the blame.
