The flailing Ubisoft hopes to capitalize on its most successful franchise. A new job listing is seeking a developer to introduce live-service elements into Assassin's Creed games. Gamers can also expect more microtransactions in follow-ups to Assassin's Creed Shadows.
I never really got into the Assassin’s Creed series, but I did enjoy Saboteur, which I understand is somewhat similar, albeit getting a little long in the tooth these days. I don’t think that there are going to be any new games in that series, though. Users might consider taking a glance at it.
On another note…the live service elements going in also highlights one major concern I have with games purchased on platforms like Steam or on console download services or whatever. Publishers can push updates. So, normally you sell a game once, and there’s no future revenue from it. But…if you go out of business or just want to sell the rights, you can sell it to someone else, who now has the ability to push updates to the software to the computers of people who own the game, and can include, say, ads, data-harvesting, live-service stuff, microtransactions, or whatever else might generate money.
Traditionally, that’s not how games worked. A player buys a game on physical media, he can always use that game. It won’t be worse in the future.
One of the reasons to make gog your primary platform. Download the installer, even older versions if you prefer. Voilà.
It’s the most friendly platform for consumers at the moment.
Or go with the No Man’s Sky model free update model, with slightly lower quality updates in a 4-months dev cycles, where one sprint could be a major update. Bug testing and marketing could be outsourced to the fanbase as an unwritten contract.
But since it is the developer’s only significant income, they have to keep the game going. Now, the game is quite bloated; too many ideas don’t fit the original idea, so it becomes your problem to ignore them.
That’s why I don’t play live service games; the product is never finished, and gets worse over time due to milking.