Ubisoft does not want to take risks, as well as disappoint players. Therefore, she plans to interact as closely as possible with the players, starting from the earliest stages of creating the game.
The company calls this its new strategy. Alain Corre, executive director of Ubisoft in the EBVA regions, told about her in an interview with the British edition of MCV.
Anno 1800
One of the first games that benefited from the chosen strategy was Anno 1800, which is currently in development.
Since the announcement of the game a year ago, its developers have been collecting and analyzing user reactions to the project as part of the Anno Union Program.
“As part of the program, we received more than 10 thousand reviews from fans who helped us improve the game, adapt it to their expectations, strengthen it, polish it,” says Alain about the project, which will be released only in February next year.
Ubisoft adheres to the same approach when working on Beyond Good & Evil 2: “Our fans can give feedback. We conduct test sessions in which they test certain gameplay elements. We give some exclusive information. All this is so that we can continue to improve the game.”
Beyond Good & Evil 2
At the same time, Alain does not agree that this strategy resembles early access to Steam.
He insists that today the Ubisoft community is involved in the development process long before the completion of work on the game.
“The moment when we ask our fans to give feedback occurs at very early stages of development. After all, we need time to implement the received wishes (…) So this is very different from early access, which happens months before the release,” says Alain.
When developing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is coming out next month, they also largely relied on player feedback. The director of Ubisoft assures that it is thanks to the fans of the series that the company has introduced more role-playing elements into the game and the ability to choose the gender of the main character.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
“In essence, we want to adapt our games to the tastes and desires of our audience,” explains Alain.
He is sure that the service model of game project support is in her interests.
“We know that our fans pass the games very quickly (…) Players spend a huge amount of time on our projects, they want to stay there, get more fans from games, find more interesting things, so our teams are working on new content so that players have this opportunity.”
The nuance is that most of Ubisoft’s content updates are paid. And Ubisoft, as far as it can be understood from the interview, is not going to change this situation. However, Corre notes that the most important thing for the company when developing DLC is not to change the core gameplay.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
“When creating new content, our task is to bring something fresh, something that you can play or buy, or you can skip, something optional,” says Alain.
At the same time, the company recognizes that such a support model should not apply to all games. It all depends on the type of product.
“We are looking at the category of games that our studios offer. Then we analyze which option will suit the players best and after that we build the game in a way that we think will please the players the most.”
“We create different games. They are aimed at different audiences. And what we really want is to understand all of our communities. So there is no general rule [on development],” Alain notes.
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- Source: MCV