Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect Trilogy bundles reflect drastic changes in video game retail

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy and EA's Mass Effect Trilogy Edition are the result of a weakening video game retail market.

Video game retail continues to decline as casual and hardcore gamers alike move to digital platforms for their gaming purchases. GameStop is slipping away while Steam, iTunes, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and others continue to deliver content directly to consumers. What’s a major game publisher to do? Start releasing bundles of games with greater frequency. Both Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are releasing budget packages for two of their most successful franchises with the Assassin’s Creed Ezio Trilogy and the Mass Effect Trilogy Edition this November.

The first of these is actually a PlayStation 3 exclusive. On November 13^th, Ubisoft will release a PS3 only package with Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed Revelations included, just in time to capitalize on Assassin’s Creed III’s release. The package is just $40, an impressive figure considering that each of those games is sold individually for $20 or more.

EA’s Mass Effect Trilogy Edition on the other hand is for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. Out on November 7^th, this will actually be the first time the original Mass Effect is available on Sony’s system. No word on what DLC for any of the three games in the science fiction series will be included on the disks.

Both of these packages reflect a dramatic shift in how big publishers are approaching the retail video game business. In multi-million selling franchises, anthology collections are typically reserved for years when there’s no new entry in the series, for when enough time has passed that a standalone release has reached maximum saturation, or to promote a major new release. The Metal Gear Solid Collection for PlayStation 2 for example came out four years after Metal Gear Solid 3 and just weeks before the release of Metal Gear Solid 4 in 2008.

While that logic holds for Ubisoft’s Assassin’t Creed Ezio Trilogy—though the turn around for this is unusually fast—Electronic Arts’ release of the Mass Effect Trilogy Edition would never have happened even just four years ago. Mass Effect 3 has only been on shelves for six months, and the company is releasing a brand new standalone version of the game for Wii U at $60 two weeks after the Trilogy Edition. In the past, this would be seen as an insane move, destroying potential sales of the first two games through a renewed push  for the latest sequel through the holiday. Today, though, EA’s release is a reflection of the overwhelming competition in the shrinking retail market.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Ubisoft drops always-on Internet connection DRM from Assassin’s Creed, other PS titles

Ubisoft's stringent DRM policies are dead according to the company, at least for single player PC games.

 

Assassin’s Creed 3 director Alex Hutchinson described himself, his team, and his game as dinosaurs in a recent interview with Edge Magazine. “We’re the last of the dinosaurs. We’re still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out.”

The disappearance of “the middle,” B-list games like Ubisoft’s own Beyond Good & Evil that could succeed without selling millions of copies at retail, is really only one reason that the triple-A release is an increasingly rare bird in video games. Piracy, at least according to Ubisoft, has crippled its PC gaming business so not only do triple-A releases have to duke it out in the risky, competitive console market, they face impossible odds earning a buck on PC. How bad is PC piracy? Ubisoft claims that 95 percent of its PC players don’t play illegally obtained video games.

For the past few years, Ubisoft has combatted the problem by bolstering its triple-A games with aggressive digital rights management, namely through the Uplay network. Ubi was amongst those publishers that thought the key to protecting its intellectual property on PC was to require players to have a persistent Internet connection while playing. In other words, it tried to protect its dinosaurs with dinosaur anti-piracy measures.

It’s interesting then that, in a week where Ubisoft admits that the era of the blockbuster game is ending, it’s also abandoning its archaic DRM. Speaking with Gamasutra, Ubisoft’s VP of digital publishing Chris Early said that customer outcry has allowed it to change its policies.

“If you look back to early 2011 and before, we did at one point in time go with always-on activation, for any game. We realized that while it was probably one of the strictest forms of DRM, it wasn’t the most convenient for our customers. We listened to the feedback, and have removed that requirement from those games, and stopped doing that going forward.

For some games, but not all. “It depends on the type of game, but in a single player game, we require a one-time authentication, then we allow offline play,” continues Early, “Then for online multiplayer, obviously when you’re playing online, you’re authenticated and then you remain online. It’s basically as simple as that.”

Ubi’s change of heart could be construed as a feint though. Even more endangered than the triple-A game is the single player triple-A game. If all games require some kind of online play in the future, Ubi won’t have to worry about offending players that want to play offline. What will those Ubi games look like? Watch Dogs. That’s precisely what they’ll look like.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Choose your own bloody adventure: Hands-on with Dishonored

Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks have a winner on their hands with first-person assassin’s tale, Dishonored.

If there has ever been a good argument for developers to continue supporting E3, it is Behtesda and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored. Before the convention earlier this year, Dishonored was a curiosity. It was the second most interesting sounding title of what many considered a relatively weak Bethesda offering compared to previous years. Prey 2 was AWOL, Skyrim and Rage had both released, there was no Fallout news, and the highest profile title was The Elder Scrolls Online which is still a long way from release. 

It isn’t a franchise title, Arkane Studios is not a well-known developer, and the game itself had only been seen a handful of times. But then came E3 and everything changed. The previously unknown game was suddenly a game of the year contender and it won several Best of Show honors (including ours). The most often comparison was BioShock, which seems obvious since Arkane helped out with BioShock 2 and both games use a similar ability and weapon offensive combination. But it was more than just a similarity in the gameplay, it was a feeling that you were seeing something special. Both games featured a rich and original world and both offered a mysterious and compelling story, but beyond that they both offered choice.

How you approach the world is entirely up to you. If you want to go stealth, you have several tools at your disposal. If you want to take on the world, you can do that too. If you want to be a prick to the citizens of the fictional town of Dunwall, you can get incredibly creative and then ruin their evenings. The choice is yours.

In the demo that Bethesda is currently showing off, you are tasked with entering an exclusive party and assassinating an aristocratic matriarch named Lady Boyle — there’s a catch though. The target and her daughters are all wearing similar outfits that include masks. The game randomizes which of the three ladies is the actual target, which means you have to approach the mission creatively and put in the legwork. You could always try to kill everyone, but that be somewhat like ordering a steak from a fine restaurant and then covering it in A1.

Almost immediately I noticed that my game was progressing differently from that of the people playing around me. My game took me through the courtyard of the estate where the party was held, and an optional sidequest offered me the chance to fight a duel with pistols. Throughout the game there will be optional events within main missions, which shouldn’t come as a surprise for this type of game.

Even entering the house can be completed in multiple ways. Assuming you take the main door, you then have options. If you wander around and explore there are other side-missions to partake in, or you can focus on optional objectives that will help with the main quest.

I chose to complete the secondary objectives to help with the main quest. This sent me to the second floor to explore while dodging guards. It would be easy enough to take out the guards one at a time, but there is always the risk that the bodies could be discovered. So I decided to get creative.

The gameplay uses both weapons and powers, and you can bring these up on a selection wheel. From there you can map the weapon or ability to one of the d-pad directions. Using the ability to see through walls, I stopped time as a guard approached, then teleported behind him and went on to find a note that said who the target was. There were several areas to explore after that, and some were accessible through unusual means like possession of a rat that could then navigate the heating ducts to get to the basement. But that was for another quest, and I had an appointment to keep.

Due to my limited time, subtlety took a backseat to speed. I found the target and eliminated her with prejudice, then had to run for it. Once outside it took a moment for the confusion to settle and the guards to mobilize. As bullets ripped by, I froze time to escape the grounds. I sprinted to the sewers and slid into a covered escape route, but came out and was facing tallboys, guards walking on mechanized stilts. These guards can quickly ruin your day, so I laid a trap on a nearby bridge, summoned rats to attack another guard, and threw a sticky grenade into a crowd to even the odds. The tallboy then came at me via the bridge and walked right into my trap. As guards closed in, I possessed a fish and swam to my escape route, a waiting boat.

I immediately wanted to replay the section since I thought of at least five different ways to complete the mission that I wanted to try. When I eventually have the chance, I will be sure to do just that. And then I will probably do it another way, and then try another and another. And that alone justifies making Dishonored not just a game to watch, but possibly the game to watch this year.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com