The Rumour & Speculation Thread (BYO Salt)

The problem with a Days Gone sequel is how do you improve on perfection 🤔🤷‍♂️

That would actually make me buy an xbox finally..... and throw it straight into that bin Retro is listening to along with all the shyte jrpg games that wish they were final fantasy vii.

If they don't add a wagon painting mini game, they can sling one! 😆

As much as I loved Black Flag, I doubt I'd play a remaster of it. It was such a special experience, but starting all over again doesn't seem worth it, and there were a lot of issues with the non-pirate sections of the game where you have to do assassin stuff on land. The number of "eavesdrop on these people while moving from bush to bush to stay in range" was ridiculous, and most of the town settlements had such small buildings that going around rooftops was pointless.

Maybe if they'd put some effort into not making Skull & Bones a sh*tshow, a proper full pirate game trying to be more like Black Flag than Sea of Thieves could have been great.

Yeah I doubt it's anything even near the quality of RDR2 graphically. It'll likely just be a shine-up of the original game with a few new lighting and shading changes, maybe a few extra bushes around the landscape. Not as bad as the GTA Trilogy, but not as good as RDR2 or remade in that engine.

I loved RDR2. Would be great to get a remaster of RDR1. I've heard such good things about it but never played it. This would be a good excuse to remedy that!

What are the big differences?

At this stage I think I'll wait until the (heavily) rumoured remaster releases. I have the latest consoles so would like to play the game the best way I can.

I get that, but it means they're running headfirst into a completely different problem; oversaturation and diminishing returns of a franchise that has passed its heyday, and lack of innovation and new IPs which have potential. And by throwing so many of your eggs in the AC basket, if it doesn't perform as they want (which it never will as their "expectations" are always way the f*ck too high), they don't have as much to fall back on.

AC1 did okay, but it was AC2 and Brotherhood that really elevated the franchise. Taking what they learned from the first one to truly evolve the gameplay and story for sequels. Immortals also did okay. It was well received in terms of reception and seemed to do okay sales-wise (though I read part of the issue of why Ubisoft were disappointed with sales was because the game sold well but mostly when discounted, but that's a big issue Ubisoft have anyway because it never takes long for their games to start being discounted, and after that they're nearly always included in every sale).

To shift yet another team of devs off something they could continue to build a new franchise off, and instead add them to the other numerous teams just working on more and more AC games, shows a huge lack of foresight imo.

I was one of the biggest AC fans going, but they killed it for me with the annual releases and over-saturation, diluting everything great about the AC games. Odyssey was the first one I played since stopping Unity after about 4 hours and I enjoyed it and platinumed it. But Valhalla? Didn't even look at it. Even though it was two years between them, couldn't face starting yet another AC game. So I bought Immortals instead and really loved it. It was fun, new and felt like a breath of the wild fresh air compared to what Valhalla would be.

I don't have the figures, metrics, targets etc that Ubisoft have. But I stand by my assertion that to me, it's a stupid decision. Ubisoft needs innovation. Striving to make Immortals 2 be what AC2 was to the first game could have set them up with a new franchise to run alongside the AC franchise. Instead, just more and more AC games which people are already sick of, and if they fail puts a lot more of their dev teams at risk as they'd all be neck deep in a franchise that has jumped past the haystack and is hurtling towards the concrete.