Selling your soul to the Canadian Devil
While Assassin’s Creed Unity (ACU) has been in a the media spotlight lately for a lot of wrong reasons; glitches, not having playable female characters, review embargoes, frame-rate issues and more, the biggest problem I have with the game personally, as a massive fan of the series, is that the game is built as a freemium title, yet we have to pay $60/£40 for it.
Months before ACU was released, Ubisoft announced that the game would have micro-transactions, the publisher stated that these small payments would be an option for people who do not want to wait to unlock better equipment and the transactions would not affect the game for anyone else. While this sounds good on paper as it pleases both the casual and hard-core gamer, this new implementation instead altered the structure of the game for everyone.
It is quite noticeable that money is a lot less plentiful in ACU. Missions give far less cash after completion and chests are just as stingy (more on chests later). This is all designed in way to lower the amount of disposable income available to the player so it will take longer to accumulate enough funds in order to purchase equipment, therefore encouraging the player to pay with real world money for the equipment, the same equipment which makes completing some of the harder missions a lot easier. This kind of levelling up structure is seen a lot in mobile games such as Clash of Clans and The Simpsons Game just to name a few.
The currency problems are not limited to just chests and missions; ammunition is a big scarcity in ACU. Enemies do not drop ammo at all in the game, even the guards that carry muskets apparently do not have few bullets to spare. In other Assassin’s Creed games you could very easily live off the ammo looted from fallen enemies but ACU it is a must to find merchants and purchase ammo. While bullets are pretty cheap, the ammo for the Phantom blade however is not, both regular and berserk blades cost a fortune meaning that a lot of your earnings are spend stocking up instead of purchasing new weapons and equipment.
Unity does not have a heart, or a good chest
Another element of Freemium gaming is advertising. Usually in freemium games advertising comes in the form of small bars at the bottom of the screen which display a message about a product of service which has nothing to do with the game that you are playing. Ubisoft have decided to advertise plenty of their own products in ACU through chests. If look on the map there are plenty of blue chests to find, these blue chests are impossible to open unless you have played something outside of ACU.
Examples of this are the chests which require players to play Assassin’s Creed Initiates, an online web game from Ubisoft; another example are the chests which can only be opened if you have played the Assassin’s Creed companion app. The absolute worst chests are the ones which suggest signing up to the unholy U-Play. Just to make sure you know about Ubisoft’s additional products, the blue chests are strategically placed next to Assassin hubs, co-op mission givers and famous landmarks of Paris. The advertising does not stop with chests either, if you want to unlock certain outfits and weapons you will need to have been a user of Ubisoft’s other products.
Freemium games are not the worst thing ever, I personally am a big fan of titles such as Jetpack Joyride and PVZ 2, but the difference between those titles and ACU is that they are free, the barrier to entry is non-existent, ACU on the other hand shakes you down for cash even though you have paid $60/£40 for the product to begin with. ACU has numerous problems such as glitches, not having playable female characters, review embargoes, frame-rate issues and more, but the most insulting problem by far is the freemium build of the game. I’ve been a massive fan of the series, buying every console instalment since the original back in 2007, so to see Ubisoft ruining aspects of a great series is a hard pill to swallow.