Take FC4, for instance: those Shangri La dream sequences were made by a completely different team at Ubi Toronto, with completely different creative options, from those at Ubi Montreal making the waking world of the game. (We've asked.) Their games are made in a very peculiar way, with different portions of a single game made by different studios. Of course, Ubi has to make everything confusing, and not even a hint of budget figures has been released for the previous games. Which is all to say, these are a couple of £100m games. Although it's likely this is minus the advertising budget, and since Sony was using the game to sell PS4s (just as BOTW was used to sell Switches), you can expect the same figure again or more to be tacked on. Despite a team of 250, plus another 100 outsourced, and at least four years development, they claim it cost €45m (£39m). HZD is slightly more confusing because the developers gave a figure to a Dutch magazine, and it's clearly far too low. At £60 launch price, that puts it at around £120 million. But we know BOTW took over 300 people five years, and Nintendo say it will take an extraordinary 2 million sales to break even. Zelda: BOTW and Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) are both expensive games made by enormous teams over many years. And I'd be willing to bet that would be Ubi's first instinct. I think the first thing is that the challenge won't be solved purely with money. It's with some cruel irony that they announce a Far Cry - surely the flagship titles in their map-icon formula - into the fray having been so recently outdone. But it's perhaps fair to say they couldn't have expected the degree to which 2017's two console-exclusive big hitters would so enormously lift from the open world model used across so many Ubi franchises, nor that these new games would utterly blast even Ubi's best efforts out of the water.īut that does make life tricky. Of course, development lead times meant that we wouldn't see this in 2016, and as mentioned above that year saw them put out a solid list of fairly standard examples of their format. It was clear that their open world toes were being trodden on, with other studios often outdoing their own efforts. 2015 had seen The Witcher 3, Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid V. No one can claim that Ubisoft couldn't have seen it coming. In the wake of being so astoundingly outshone, what can Far Cry 5 do to reclaim the crown? ![]() Two platform-pushing monoliths that schooled Ubisoft at their own games. ![]() And then this year we got Zelda: Breath Of The Wild from Nintendo and Horizon Zero Dawn from Sony. None was particularly at fault, but we were experiencing perhaps the sense of diminishing returns, and certainly the weariness of fatigue. In the last year, despite decent showings from Far Cry Primal, The Division, Watch Dogs 2, and Wildlands, players and critics were beginning to weary of yet another open map of odd jobs. They crafted this enormous open-world icon-riddled niche of their own, trod it into the ground while flogging it to death, and then other people came along, borrowed their ideas, and built superior games with them.
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