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France's Ubisoft pushes back new 'Assassin's Creed' game to February - https://lnkd.in/gpaFb6RU The latest instalment of the hugely popular "Assassin's Creed" video game series has been delayed to February instead of coming out in November as planned, its French publisher Ubisoft said. The company also warned that along with lower-than-expected sales for its "Star Wars Outlaws" released in late August, it would fail to meet its financial targets. "Assassin's Creed Shadows will now be released on February 14, 2025," Ubisoft said. "While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," requiring development teams to be "fully mobilized" on rolling out updates to the game. "Our second quarter performance fell short of our expectations, prompting us to address this swiftly and firmly, with an even greater focus on a player-centric, gameplay-first approach," co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot said in the statement. The setbacks are the latest challenge for the French firm after slipping into the red in its 2022-2023 financial year before returning to profit last year. But it has already announced dozens of layoffs this year alone as it struggles with an industry-wide downturn. Ubisoft said it now expected net bookings, its preferred measure of sales excluding deferred revenues, of 350-370 million euros ($390-$410 million) in its second quarter, down from 500 million previously. © 2024 AFP Source

Assassin’s Creed Shadows gets a three-month delay for - as Ubisoft defines it - "additional polish". The delay only adds more problems for a game that already had numerous rounds of controversy on social media. According to Ubisoft , the reason for pushing the release date from November 15, 2024, to February 14, 2025, is the fact that the company learned from Star Wars Outlaws. This title recently came out but included a range of technical issues and other QA problems. At the same time, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been a magnet for numerous speculations and often politically fueled disputes about its historical accuracy and supposed social agenda. The intensity of these rose to a level where Yves Guillemot, Co-Founder and CEO of Ubisoft, had to respond. He recently said that his company is an entertainment-first business that has no specific agenda apart from reaching the broadest audience. Finally, all of this is taking place as Sucker Punch Productions revealed its sequel to Ghost of Tsushima. The game, titled Ghost of Yotei, is also coming out in 2025 and Ubisoft is more than likely taking that into consideration as well, among so many other things.

Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game: Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game. Engadget: One of the game's NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we've come to associate with these services. It's not quite Siri or Alexa, but it's close and certainly doesn't fit the game's Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and seems to be voiced by a TTS program that's available online for free and typically used by streamers. This isn't an "AI is coming for your jobs" type thing, but rather a mistake on Ubisoft's part, as each and every other NPC is attached to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn't have a voice actor in the credits. Additionally, Kalux only has a few lines, so it likely won't be a tough fix to assign an actor to deliver that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, but it won't handle the Kalux issue. Look for another patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game: Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game. Engadget: One of the game's NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we've come to associate with these services. It's not quite Siri or Alexa, but it's close and certainly doesn't fit the game's Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and seems to be voiced by a TTS program that's available online for free and typically used by streamers. This isn't an "AI is coming for your jobs" type thing, but rather a mistake on Ubisoft's part, as each and every other NPC is attached to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn't have a voice actor in the credits. Additionally, Kalux only has a few lines, so it likely won't be a tough fix to assign an actor to deliver that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, but it won't handle the Kalux issue. Look for another patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game: Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game. Engadget: One of the game's NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we've come to associate with these services. It's not quite Siri or Alexa, but it's close and certainly doesn't fit the game's Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and seems to be voiced by a TTS program that's available online for free and typically used by streamers. This isn't an "AI is coming for your jobs" type thing, but rather a mistake on Ubisoft's part, as each and every other NPC is attached to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn't have a voice actor in the credits. Additionally, Kalux only has a few lines, so it likely won't be a tough fix to assign an actor to deliver that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, but it won't handle the Kalux issue. Look for another patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Launch Pushed Back To February 2025 Ubisoft has announced that it is delaying the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Instead of its 15 November launch this year, the game will now debut on 15 February 2025. “Assassin’s Creed Shadow is a dream project for us; finally bringing the series to Feudal Japan with many features developed with our community in mind, such as parkour or the renewed stealth, brought by new technology, all set in a beautiful and immersive world,” Ubisoft said in its official statement on X. “While the game is feature complete, the learnings from Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title,” Ubisoft said in a earlier statement. Assassin's Creed Shadows will now release February 14, 2025. pic.twitter.com/J2ah7kkytW — Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) September 25, 2024 Star Wars Outlaws launched on 30 August, and was to be Ubisoft’s first open-world title based in the Star Wars universe. While the game was decent, it failed to hit the sale target the publisher had set. “As such, we’ve made the decision to postpone the release date to 14 February, 2025. The game will release on a broad range of platforms, including Steam at launch. Additionally, preorders will be refunded and all future preorders will be granted the first expansion for free.” The announcement about making Assassin’s Creed Shadows available on Steam on day one is certainly a little surprising, given its initial commitment to Epic Games Store; lacklustre sales, and underwhelming performance on Valve’s rival store may be contributing factors to the decision. Further, the studio also made a last-minute decision to cancel its appearance at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. Ubisoft’s about-turn may also be attributed to another factor: the announcement of Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch’s sequel to the wildly successful Ghost of Tsushima. It was, arguably, a game based in a time period that Ubisoft famously said it wouldn’t do more than a decade ago, only to make an about-turn. (Source: Ubisoft) The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows Launch Pushed Back To February 2025 appeared first on Lowyat.NET. https://ift.tt/TAyiV5a

France's Ubisoft pushes back new 'Assassin's Creed' game to February - https://lnkd.in/gpaFb6RU The latest instalment of the hugely popular "Assassin's Creed" video game series has been delayed to February instead of coming out in November as planned, its French publisher Ubisoft said. The company also warned that along with lower-than-expected sales for its "Star Wars Outlaws" released in late August, it would fail to meet its financial targets. "Assassin's Creed Shadows will now be released on February 14, 2025," Ubisoft said. "While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," requiring development teams to be "fully mobilized" on rolling out updates to the game. "Our second quarter performance fell short of our expectations, prompting us to address this swiftly and firmly, with an even greater focus on a player-centric, gameplay-first approach," co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot said in the statement. The setbacks are the latest challenge for the French firm after slipping into the red in its 2022-2023 financial year before returning to profit last year. But it has already announced dozens of layoffs this year alone as it struggles with an industry-wide downturn. Ubisoft said it now expected net bookings, its preferred measure of sales excluding deferred revenues, of 350-370 million euros ($390-$410 million) in its second quarter, down from 500 million previously. © 2024 AFP Source

Hello :) I wanted to #share some thoughts again Recently, Ubisoft came under fire regarding a new #starwars video game. They invited #contentcreators out to Disney land, gave them food, hotels, etc. People were quick to point out that the #press has integrity rules for a reason.. They don't accept gifts or other things when reporting on a company or product because then they will be viewed as "being payed for". People are debating that I think it is fair to compare the rules of the press to content creators because most reviews that people read these days are from content creators. Gamers Nexus for example is the go to review source for PC related products By this logic, I would go as far as saying that any Creator who accepted Ubisoft's "gift" has made their review of this new game invalid If people debate that then I would respond with Ubisoft's history. Ubisoft like EA Games does not have a great reputation overall. I am honestly surprised that when Disney pulled EA's star wars license and gave it to others, that they would pick Ubisoft as one of them To be clear.. I am only speaking of history and not blaming anyone. I understand that at any company, it is usually the higher ups that are the problem. Not the workers. The workers pour their heart and soul in these projects only for the higher ups to ruin it (sometimes) That is just my take as always

Excerpt: "When it comes to making a sale, there are very few developers and publishers that will say whatever they need to in order to make a dollar that can rival Ubisoft. Ubisoft, which has a history of lying to consumers so that they can sell a game copy. Whether it is regarding DRM in a game, discontinuing support for a game but still selling it on their store, removing a game from players’ libraries, or selling a half-baked game as “quadruple-A” quality are just some of the examples of what this company is willing to do. With the unveiling of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft has fully embraced DEI but, in doing so, has created an issue that is similar to Resident Evil 5’s “racism controversy” along with it being sexist and an example of real cultural appropriation. As gamers are well aware, video game journalists were outraged over Resident Evil 5’s fictional West African setting. Why? Because it involved a white protagonist mowing down hordes of zombies that were the predominant race in the region: black people. For some reason journalists declared that this made Resident Evil 5 racist, even though it wasn’t. There wasn’t any political message behind RE5 or any malicious intent to make a “murder-sim” for white supremacists. It was a game developed by Japanese developers who thought an African setting would be an interesting one in their franchise. Sadly, video game journalists didn’t look at it that way or voice similar outrage over Resident Evil 6 when that same white character was shooting down tons of Chinese people. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows a similar situation occurs as one of the main protagonists is African and he will be killing the predominant race in the region: Japanese people. Isn’t it awesome that a black man can murder hordes of Asians? So, by the same logic that video game journalists used, they should be outraged over this blatantly racist game right? Except that journalists won’t because, in their eyes, this game meets their DEI requirements, they hold a warped belief that minorities can’t be racist, and that Asian people are one of those races that is situationally a minority, white adjacent, or even white depending on what the narrative is at the time. Unfortunately for Ubisoft, this blatant DEI-developed darling is racist, but for a different reason." Continue Reading: https://lnkd.in/enb9pfhi #AssassinsCreedShadows #ACShadows #PCGaming #XBOX #PlayStation #Gamers #editorial #videogames #Gaming

🔓 There's no gatekeeping in accessibility. We share our wins early and publicly because our wins, are everyone's wins. A first look at Star Wars Outlaws accessibility features are now live! With three months until launch on August 30, read here to see how you can play: https://lnkd.in/gduTFzRi A sneak peek of what this article has to offer: "Audio descriptions for cinematics were identified as one of the most sought-after features during an accessibility workshop we had during development. Star Wars Outlaws will be the first Ubisoft game, and among the very first titles in the industry, to support this feature." It's always an honor to work with everyone within Ubisoft who take accessibility and accessibility communications seriously (and there's so many!). They're passionate about the industry and how we can positively contribute to its integration into the fundamental structure of games and marketing. Huge shout out to Adriana Sikiric, Jessica Roache, Chastity Vicencio, Mitchell Brown, Ian Hamilton, David Tisserand; and to our developers featured in the article Simon Koudriavtsev, Fredrik Thylander, and Damien Belleville. #marketing #pr #games #videogames #accessibility #communications #starwars