reminds of that time i was talking to someone about undead hordes. Only for them to say zombies, as if you can only have a undead horde of zombies, no ghouls, no vampires or any other sort of undead. There are other kinds of undead besides freaking bloody zombies. you would think they might of gotten the hint from me sitting in front of them or one of my undead guards being a death knight but no. That character was a bit thick headed. A few fireballs later and sneaking out of the inn. everything was taken care of.

Read some of the "positive" reviews and wonder did they click the wrong "thumb" icon cos evensome of the positive reviews would have put me off.

I have most of the AC games on 360 (Black Flag on PS3), but never pay more than10-20€ for them, not a big fan of Ubisoft, so try to support them as little as possible, if at all..

TotalBiscuit talks review embargos. What are they? What is their purpose? Are they anti-consumer? What can we do about them or indeed, should we do anything? (watch from 5.17)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gavcvi19q1g

yay, a comrade. A toast for all the worrying about fictional terminology!

Watched that already, really good video... I'm glad to hear he refuses to be part of the cycle anymore and will instead warn anyone if there is such an embargo on a game, which hints at it's.... broken state.

Very good video, and well explained. I watched it entirely. It tells the obvious that people should do: to not support blindy these type of anti-consumer activities from greedy and dishonest companies. The consumers have the power, not the opposite. They should stop pre-ordering and paying for things they don't have yet. People should wait until these products are out to get the best reliable information about them. If they are not what they were promised, people should stop supporting the companies that lie and hide the truth from the consumers. And those promised and useless bonuses for pre-ordering aren't always exclusive, they're always available later as DLCs. But still, people keep buying these games before release and get burned later, like stupid zombies... (-_-)

Can you people imagine how corrupt this industry is if they accept this kind of crap? Even with that time limit release, they still had enough time to record, edit and give their insight about the game, but they didn't.

Are you referring to the Embargo?

Yes.

You didn't watch TB's video on Embargos did you?

*sigh*

Embargos are a good thing (when they don't censor information of a game until after it's release). Embargos are in place to not only make sure reviews are at a reasonable point near time of release, but they also make sure that if everyone agrees not to give reviews of a product until the same time, then they don't have to rush and make mistakes and errors in order to be the First site posting, instead they all post at the same time.

As TB said, quite often Embargos are verbal and don't usually require a signature or anything legally binding, but posting information and breaking Embargo although quite easy, you can only do once because companies will have very long memories, and very few will send you review copies of a game if they know you won't honor the Embargo date.



The problem is when the Embargo is set after the game's release, as it effectively censors critical information, but you usually have to accept the Embargo to get a review copy... Sorta catch-22. TB has stated if he sees games like this he will give a big warning regarding it, as it could be a hint that the game isn't any good (or released broken) and they are trying to maximize sales while there's no information out about the game.

When did his video appear? Yesterday. ... Since when this practice happen? Tomorrow nobody will remember it or talk about it. It's not like it's the first time Ubisoft is having a bad release or that is something new in this industry.

Just think about the embargo's time. 17 hours. In 17 hours you buy it yourself and review it yourself and advice all your followers not to preorder and wait for the review. Instead we have the same old bad comedy play: the publisher blaming the hardware manufacturers, the so called journalists deferring blame to whom they woke up hating that morning and the consumer who instead of asking for their money back they either swear like morons or kiss asses (depends on the side they are).

Yes, he was honoring the Embargo requirement, although his video regarding Embargo practices vs the 'lets not play' was quite a bit afterwards.

No, but enough crappy releases of something from a company that was trusted is going to leave a sore in people's sides and minds. Ubisoft has made several bad choices and actions, and this might very well be the straw the breaks the camel's back. Anyone who got burned on Unity is probably not going to instantly buy Far Cry 4 unless they see good reviews across the board.

No, everyone across the board is saying Unity has issues, graphical bugs, problems, crashes, etc. It's clearly Ubisoft's fault. The drop of Ubisoft's stock (was it 7% or 17%) state quite the story about how shakey they are at the moment. Article

People are comparing it to EA now... that means they are seriously making huge mistakes... And not everyone is going to be fooled, or allowed to be burned another time.

No. Far Cry 3 exceeded my meagre expectations considerably. While the storyline is not up to the standards set by the second one by a considerable margin, gameplay-wise it's a lot better. No getting clusterfucked by constant attacks for starters.

I really liked Black Flag. Shame to hear this one is a rushed and broken mess. Maybe next year...

When leading armies of the undead. its rather useful to know the strengths and weaknesses of your followers.

So, apparently three AC games have been released this year (source: Wikipedia): AC Liberation (it first debuted on PS Vita, but saw a Windows release in January), AC Rogue and finally, AC Unity. That's three major AC games in one year. Not to mention, there's AC Memories for mobiles plus the upcoming AC Chronicles: China and AC Identity. What the hell were people expecting was going to happen. Not even Call of Duty gets milked this much during one single year. Maybe if they spent more time actually developing the games, shit like this wouldn't happen.

I lost all interest in the series after AC Revelations (although I did purchase AC III later just see the end of Desmond's story), and frankly, if I decided to hop back into the series now, I wouldn't even know where to start. It's probably more plausible I'll some day drive my very own Aston Martin, than it is for me to be able to tie all the strings in the AC Universe together, story-wise.