I'm aware of Gearbox picking up the pieces. Still leaves 3D with an entire team laid off and millions down the drain. :yep:

Maddox maneuvred himself into the same situation as far as I know; either he releases before November, or it's vaporware. He'll simply be out of money at that point.

Certainly will be interesting to see what happens come November. :yep:

Think he was shooting for Setember 15th. If they don't make that, they'll likely shove it out the door because they have to, instead of being finished.

Have no interest in another buggy heap that even the biggest day-1 patch can't save. :-?

Has Oleg settled on a Publisher - Ubisoft or 1C?

Ubi announced that they had the title several years ago, but since then there has been no word.

1C as far as I know. Not really sure, but pretty sure he ditched Ubi, so that leaves 1C.

Actually, both may be involved. Ubi's involvement is unclear like Letum states. Perhaps 1C will handle Russian/English release while Ubi handles localised versions.

Thanks. He certainly seems to be playing his cards close to his chest.

I think it will still be both. Ubi's announcment is still on their website (saying it would be in stores Nov 2006! :har:) and it lists both of them pretty clearly in the legal stuff at the bottom. Have they said anything to indicate that has changed?

http://www.ubi.com/US/News/Info.aspx?nId=3950

My impression with the game market is it suffers from the same thing a lot of industries do. Think music and movies, for example.

Someone does something innovative and everyone else crowds in an attempt to score some cash. Usually they are hollow imitatations.

The irony is the $$ people become risk averse, forgetting the fact that the initial innovation involved RISK on something no yet done. That's why so many hollywood films are such tedious tosh.

Then there's the market. So many internet generation kiddies have the attention spans of hyperactive ferrets with significant cocaine habits. So it's all flash and sound. The underlying mechanic, the 'brains' that make a game complex (in a good sense), challenging and replayable are no longer held at a premium.

So Ubi will plug Assassins over and over? Yawn. Game is a major snore fest (don't own it but spent and afternoon trying it). Repetitive. Not even imaginitive. Frankly Deus Ex (original) laughs at most of these things. Consider what happened with Deus Ex II. Classic example of going to the well and pissing in it.

SHIII was significantly innovative. SH4 was a travesty, a bug-riddled, lazy piece of ****e. As I read about SH5 I was one of the "this sounds bad" and became a "DRM? Off you go, guys, I'm not entering into that idiocy". That I haven't I don't regret one second.

Game generations are remarkably like human ones. Some genius makes a fortune. They have kids, who inherit a name and a lot of $$. They might maintain it if lucky, but usually start a decline. The 3rd generation is the entitled ("oh, I'm xyz's family and demand respect, even if I do nothing of consequence to earn it"), bad-habit riddled losers who squander the lot.

Someone mentioned Total War. Oh boy. Talk about great example. Empire was a disgrace on release. Then they lied through their arses. Specifically, a paid arse called Kieren something whose responses ranged from the laughable to the deranged/deluded to the demonstrably deceitful (sorry, I seem to be in alliteration mode). So I bought Empire, ignored Napoleon, and won't touch Shogun for at least 6 months, if at all.

Quality wins out, ultimately. SH has a poor quality pedigree if you look at its recent past without rose coloured glasses. So do so many other games. Sadly, publishers rely on the rabid nature of gamers who have to have the latest thing no matter how inept it is. That works well for their crowd, but for those of us who want something substantial and thoughtful, it's a death spiral.

Rant over...(hey, I've not posted a while). :D

Sometimes I have the feeling that the humankind depleted his imagination and creativity. Or was killed by the technology. Everything is based on CGI and eye candys now, less on creativity.. no matter if is about movies, games, cars or whatever. Is what sell stuff, the shiny.. but empty box.

It's just to bloody popular and "mainstream" nowadays. It started with people making games because they wanted to. Nowadays games are made and sold for the money.

Not saying everyone working on a title is just there for the money, a lot of the programmers and artists truly love what they do. But ultimately it's the people they take their directions from that control the project, and especially with the bigger companies it's those individuals that are more concerned about keeping the shareholders happy than keeping their customers happy.


Just an opinion of course. How you can keep a studio going without delivering any quality is beyond me.

Many of us old farts have been down this road to many times and is why many of us never bought SH5 in the first place... after reading alot of the reviews it clearly spelled out how horrible the game was, not to mention the DRM at the time... So I chose NOT TO PURCHASE IT.

I own sh3 and sh4 but ubi lost my money on sh5.. And Im sorry, even with all the mods i refuse to load up 40-50 mods just to make a game playable and that was only after it had been released for months where the mod community had time to develop said mods...


This whole thread is interesting but pointless... SH5 was for a fact a failure... UBI now realizes that... lets drop it and hope to hell they do it right on sh6 and not rush it... trying to figure out who to blame page after page is pointless... SH5 was a failure from day 1 only barely saved by the modders.