"WE Are"Ubishaft and were here to make you feel sad and stuff

Fear the League of evil execs

Warning Strong language

So I thought I’d be saving my rage till I could properly finish my article on “Damsels in distress” as like a good journalized I thought I should wait till part 2 is out because it might magically address all the problems I had with it. However it looks like my rage this week has reached a new dangerous levels so I’m releasing some of it to the wild and with the Sim Shitty controversy going on what better time to for a company to manage to pull some crap that’s almost the reverse of Sim City and its problems. Step up to the plate Ubisoft.

Now I’m a big fan of one franchise, just one. There’s seriously one lot of things I enjoy enough to get me to go mad over. Scott Pilgrim vs the World. That’s the one thing I just am mad about. I’m a guy who bought the film soundtrack on CD just so he could say he had it. So after seeing the film and Ubisoft releasing the tie in game I bought it immediately. The game is rather good, it’s an old school side scrolling brawler with some RPG stat levelling mechanics. I really enjoyed the game and still do, however there was one problem with it. At the time the game was competing essentially with Castle Crashers as its main rival being another side scrolling brawler with RPG style stats (Nothing against Castle Crashers as I own that too and do really like it). Scott Pilgrim however had one major issue. It was offline multiplayer only, no online co-op at all. Now fans of the game rallied Ubisoft about this as it seemed madness that they’d released a game competing with castle crashers but completely inferior online wise. It seems strange in an era where online was killing offline co-op for people to be up in arms about the lack of online multiplayer but it was about choice.



Ubisoft did respond, the response pretty much was It’s not going to happen the spin on it was “We wanted to bring back the old school retro feeling on playing with friends in the same room all on a Sofa”. Which is all well and good to justify including offline but didn’t explain the lack of online, as it’s simply taking advantage of a new resource and to not do it when your competitor has. It’s especially annoying with live allowing cloud saving and as such you’d have to carry profiles around (and this was in the days before the USB patch change to let you have your profile on USB). Fans kind of ended up drifting by as they and the game occasionally emerged and got played by people in Uni halls and shared houses but it was mostly just that.



Scott Pilgrim vs the World on XBL was released in July 2010. Today is the 13th of March 2013. So you can imagine my surprise when I logged into the Xbox website today to browse the indie games section to find more victims and found this sitting in the new add ons.



Now I immediately flew into a rage as they’re now coming back to a near 3 year old game and only now providing the thing fans asked for. They’re even charging for it at a whole 400 Microsoft points (approximately $6), now you could say oh it’s project $10, but no its not as those who did buy it long ago aren’t getting this unless they pay just like any other customers coming along. I took a breath and decided to read the description and found it was also another character DLC pack. The previous DLC pack I bought willingly was the Knives Chau pack for 160 Microsoft points ($2) and this pack is the Wallace Wells and online pack and is up for 400 Microsoft points.

It’s not buying a character pack and just that you’re having to pay for a feature Ubisoft at the time were too lazy to put in. You know the worst part of all this, I know I’m buying it. I feel rotten to be doing this but it’s the one thing I am mad over and while I’m outraged by this business practice and should be sitting here boycotting the thing. I actually can’t bring myself too. I’ve not bought Sim City, I avoided Diablo 3 despite friends trying to get me to play, I haven’t even bought Mass effect 3 yet because I objected to badly to the day one DLC with that. Hence I’m writing this blog, because it’s such a feeling of ambivalence towards this as finally the game has the one feature I was crying out for. The one feature that would allow me to play the game with friends who live the other side of the country, and yet I absolutely hate it to my core due to this business practice and laziness in initial development being turned into a quick cash grab against fans. If it had been 240 points I might have passed it as that’s what $1 for online and a character pack ? But oh no the one feature people wanted and was left out is now being sold back at an inflated price.

This is the kind of insane thing I’ve been trying to point out to people in the indie games community for a while after a huge controversy happened between me and the head of VVGTV over an indie game that I slated for not having even half the features of competitors and offering those features as sales milestones to try and get people to rope unwitting friends into this horror too. These were simple feature this was a zombie game which had one gun and no health packs and had as sale milestones that if it sold they’d add more guns and health packs to the game, you know the core features. In indie games I can just about forgive a developer for this as it might be their first ever game, especially with XBLIG developers, it doesn’t mean I won’t slate the game to the ground as that’s my duty as a reviewer, I will just give them a fair shot each time. However when a huge company does this it’s not stupidity. Are you really telling me it took nearly 3 years to make this and that it was such a huge costly thing ? Are you really trying to tell me Ubisoft that this is anything other than a plain cash grab ?

Ubisoft fuck you and take my money, but don’t think I won’t remember this in the future as I don’t like being made into a hypocrite and let me make this absolutely clear. I do not support this I am only buying it because I enjoy the actual franchise so much it seems so bad that one of the few good movie tie in games is being made to look bad due to the poor practices of a publisher.