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I should have known something was very wrong when 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla didn’t have any cool new graphical effects stapled to it for the next gen console launches.
At the start of every previous console generation of the modern era, one hilarious thing was always a given: French publisher Ubisoft would truly show up with a number of new flashy titles. They were never one to let a good hype or marketing cycle go, and new hardware platforms meant new opportunities for growth and sales.
2020 was different, both for the company and the gaming industry at large. It was of course a rough pandemic year for everyone, and numerous game development cycles got crushed in their final months even as more copies were selling to home-bound fans than ever before. Still, it seemed like Ubisoft was poised to deliver some real winners for the newly launched Xbox Series X and PS5. They hit the ground running with four major titles inside the release window…but it didn’t go the way I hoped.
Only one of their games (Watch Dogs: Legion) was meaningfully enhanced for the new hardware, with some fancy additional ray traced reflections. The other three (AC Valhalla, Immortals: Fenix Rising, and Just Dance) were simply the PS4 builds running at higher resolutions. Loading them up…
