[Vevster]

Originally Posted by Letum

Silent Hunter 5

Ubisoft rushed the Dev team into producing a horribly buggy, unfinished game with a horribly restrictive DRM.
It an attempt to appeal to a console playing audience, they dumbed down the content of the game, giving crew members super abilities like extra explosive torpedoes or the ability to make a soup that causes the sub to dive faster (I kid you not).
In addition, due to fear or licensing issues, no American plans where in the game. They where replaced by strange Franken planes.

This didn't stop them hypeing it up with a website and marketing scheme that was entirely disconnected from the actual game.

The released game was unfinished and covered in some horrid bugs. At first ubisoft told us that there would be addon packs to add the missing content, patches to fix the bugs as well as some basic tools to open the game up to modders. None of these things happened and ubi let the game sink. the only thing they did do is to eventually remove the DRM.

It was an utter disaster and SH3 with mods remains the best Atlantic subsim by a long shot, despite it's age.

It was shameful.

I totally agree that SH5 is quite a poor game.
I totally disagree that the Dev Team was rushed. To the contrary. The development team took too much time developping the game compared to what they had promised to deliver.
Ubi was putting money into more time for, it seems, not much progress.
Launching the game as it was though, may have been a bad choice.

Maybe cancelling it completely would have been better.

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

Well you have to give them credit for the amazing job they're doing to promote Cliffs of Dover. . . they have a "web site". . . . well, a front page.

Pretty much all the hype built up for the game is due to 1C and Oleg actually releasing content themselves and giving interviews. Ubisoft only cares about A++ titles that they can make for consoles and maybe do a crappy port to the PC.

Plus they like to "buy" a dev team, squeeze out a product as fast as possible, and then lay them all off as soon as the game goes gold. That's one reason why their patches suck, because they don't have anyone from the original team working on them.

Got some examples?
Because Ubi's development teams went up quite a bit between 2008 and 2009 for instance. And not many people seem to have been laid off.


About the marketing of CoD, Ubi can do only with what they have. Wonder if Oleg gave them much to chew on over the years, and even now.
But for sure, we cannot expect the same level of marketing they give to a AAA title. That would mean losing money. Let's not kid ourselves, sales of CoD will not reach the levels of Assassin's Creed, even if the marketing put on it on CoD was huge.

Originally Posted by Kikuchiyo

Ubi is loathed for their draconian DRM. They even attempted an always connected DRM that ultimately failed, and cost them and the franchises they did this with dearly. They aren't the worst publisher for seeming to hate gamers, but many consider them a very close runner up. I'm glad that Ubi's only involvement is publishing when 1C Maddox was ready for the game to be released.

That, I totally agree with