That’s not a good sign. I mean, I was expecting this, but it’s still embarrassing for Ubisoft.
I’d honestly prefer they just cancel it. People have wanted an AC in feudal Japan for ages, but not like this.
Ubisoft has always been a pretty miserable studio but in the past few months it’s really gone off it’s rocker. I’d suggest working with the assumption that they’re going to shutter before publishing another passably good game. Their CEO is giving Kotick a run for his money in the asshole olympics.
All the visible bugs in the trailers aside, they used a lot of non- Japanese things to make their game set in Japan, which upset many including Japanese viewers, especially when they claimed the game was a historically accurate depiction of feudal Japan (they have since backpedaled from this and course corrected to a “fictional depiction of history”).
The architecture they featured was Chinese, not Japanese. Yes they are similar, but Japanese viewers were very fast to call this out. They also talked about how the season was inconsistent with the cherry blossoms blooming, as in Japan seasons are very culturally and agriculturally important. The special trailer designed “only for Japanese audience” had subtitles in Chinese. Ubisoft stole a historic reenactment groups logo (they later acknowledged this and apologized but IDK if they actually removed it from the game since it is still on physical promotional goods), they are reselling a replica of a character’s sword from the anime Bleach as if it was a sword from their game. Characters in the game bowing to Yasuke would never have happened historically, as he was a foreigner, but more importantly at that time Japanese towns would have killed a person wearing war armor because some at that time were raiding those towns wearing war armor.
This game has a plethora of other problems I won’t mention. Point is, there are a lot of problems. Problems that could easily have been solved had they asked for input from real Japanese historians or even just Japanese laypeople which they clearly refused to do.
Ah, wow that sucks! The history is the biggest selling point of this series for me. I generally ignore trailers if I think I’m going to play or watch something, and AC games are always an automatic buy for me, but it sounds like I’m gonna be sitting this one out unless they make some major course corrections.
People also are increasingly realizing that Ubisoft games are all very bland and…the same. People enjoyed it the first time, but why buy a new AC game when you already have essentially the same thing in you library already?
