Ubisoft's redemption

When Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed: Odyssey it was marketed (or came off as at least) as a fantasy action RPG at time when no one was releasing one. Think about it Skyrim, DAI, and TW3 were done and while you could still and many people still play them but after a while even with all the player mods for Skyrim and DAI it does become the same game no matter what gender, race, class, morality, and etc you play as and to be fair the DAI MP is kind of bland. There was nothing new from AAA developers that were coming out in that genre for YEARS. So either by dumb luck or design or both Ubisoft had just enough fantasy elements to rather stale and tired stealth action game series that needed a shot in the arm and released a beautiful looking, open world action RPG with a strong female character that had to make tough moral decisions and it used history to tell a great story, with great action set pieces, and while it's main story line quest was serious it still had enough side quests that had a sense of humor and easily some great DLC and expansions. It was also a great jumping on point for new players: like me. I feel like I could shape Kassandra's character and personality and her story more than the heroes in Origins and Valhalla.

Now I have played Origins it's good (I feel if Aya had been the main character and not her husband I've would liked it better because Aya is awesome while her husband is just cool) but overall IMHO it's still feels like a rough draft of Odyssey. But did the success and goodwill of Odyssey and Valhalla (which according to Ubisoft are the best selling games in the history of the Assassin's Creed franchise) along with games like Farcry series and the various Tom Clancy games redeem Ubisoft?

In my honest opinion: No. They did not redeem Ubisoft not one bit. 

While EA, Activision-Blizzard, and the others were raked and lambasted and rightly so for the lootboxes and MTs, they had put them in mostly in the MP modes of the games whereas Ubisoft tried a different tack especially with the Assassin's Creed Layla Miller Trilogy they put them in the single player modes while most are just cosmetic (weapons, armor, mounts, tattoos, hair styles, village decorations, and so on) they also added boosters for XP, money, and resources in the game to make the game less of a grind and I tried to play without them but playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey without the boosters is boring and it takes forever and these games are FUCKING HUGE and take a long time to play even with the boosters but they did it regardless. They've been called for it but nowhere to the degree that EA and Activison-Blizzard got. They've been called out for their use of political iconography in the trailers for several of the Tom Clancy games and the politics in the various Farcry and Watchdogs games while also stating that "Ubisoft is apolitical." which I think is bullshit if you're going to use political images, real-world events, and historical political references, you're not apolitical you're political so just own up to it! Or is lines in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey like "We're going to make Athens great again!" and one of the NPCs refer to one of the game's villains as "The orange ape" don't seem like apolitical to me, they seem like political statements that were created to make a political statement against a group and currently a former US President. Valhalla isn't as overtly politically but it does deal with the political machinations of Dark Ages England, Norway, Asgard, the Catholic Church, and the various Vikings Clans, and in DLC the politics of Ireland, and France and other Norse Mythological realms are also brought up and Eivor gets involved with the politics in all those places to a certain degree while in the present day there is an email that Layla Miller refers to Covid 19. But Ubisoft swears up and down there are no politics in their games so yeah tell me another lie. Then there is confusing as hell multiple and expensive releases of their games, their expensive season passes huge updates and patches. Then their is the sexual abuse scandals that came out a few years ago (around the time that Valhalla came out) that made Ubisoft a living hell to work for if you were a woman and crunch is a huge problem there as well.

Ubisoft makes some damn good hell even some great some games but like every major video game developer and publisher they have a LOT of problems both with how their company works and the games work (or in some cases don't work), and the marketing of their games. When they make high quality games like UNO, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Assassin's Creed:  Odyssey and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla we shouldn't overlook the many, many, MANY problems that plague Ubisoft and the same with EA, Activision-Blizzard, CDPR, Bethesda, BioWare, Capcom, Square-Enix and the rest.