Games

Discipline Sets Ubisoft In Different Light

By Eli Green
November 5, 2008 - 14:15

I recently came to a conclusion. Ubisoft is an amazing video game development and publishing company. Now, I know what you're thinking, “Eli, there are plenty of video game publishers out there that have development houses worldwide that produce original games from various genres and for different price points”. Sure, there's

Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Activision; but that's not my point. Any publishing company with enough money can head out, buy up a number of smaller development studios and manage their properties as their own, but Ubisoft is one of very few publishers out there that does so with such discipline.

What do I mean? Quite simply, Ubisoft is one of the few publishers left that still thinks in the long term when it comes to their original properties. A number of Ubisoft's franchises work with stories which are very continuity driven. Case in point, the Brothers In Arms franchise or the Prince of Persia franchise, the latter of which will feature a completely new storyline when the next installment launches this holiday season . In fact, those two franchises specifically, are what brought me to that conclusion, having played games from both quite recently (I just caught up on the Prince of Persia franchise by completing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones ). These two franchises both required a huge commitment to particular storylines, long and complicated ones at that.

In the case of Brothers in Arms , each of the three main titles in the franchise – Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood and, most recently, Hell's Highway – follow the story of a specific Staff Sergeant from the American Army and his squad (though the names have been changed) through different operations during World War II. This may not be much of a big deal on its own, as each operation can simply become its own story, and thus its own game. Ubisoft doesn't treat it like that though. Instead, Ubisoft and Gearbox Software, the development studio responsible for the Brothers In Arms franchise, made the games' stories episodic, with flashbacks, mentions of events from the earlier games and even a “Previously in Brothers In Arms ” at the beginning of Hell's Highway.

With the recently concluded Prince of Persia trilogy – The Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones – the Ubisoft Montreal team created a storyline that didn't just span a series of linear events, but traversed three different time warping storylines, each beginning from the same point. The ends of either of the first two games could have been a complete conclusion on their own, should the franchise not be able to continue, but the team found a point within the story of each game that would allow the next one to begin without creating any plot holes in the one before it. Even more impressive is the fact that the writers were able to bring the entire story back around, full circle, at the end of The Two Thrones .

Developer Diary for the new Prince of Persia

To work with two different franchises, both creating a game per year with a continuous, interconnected and flowing plot line takes a lot of work, and very few publishing companies let their development houses do that these days. It doesn't end there though. Other properties like the Tom Clancy's franchise (franchises really, since there are so many different types of Tom Clancy's titles) show the publisher's commitment to creating top of the line licensed games. The Tom Clancy name has been with Ubisoft ever since it acquired Red Storm Entertainment in 2000, two years after Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six originally released and continues to be one of the publisher's best selling brands, producing fan favourites like the Splinter Cell franchise, the Ghost Recon franchise, and further developing the Rainbow Six franchise, even 10 years after its creation.

With all this in mind, I finally understood why Ubisoft's games had been high up on my list. Ubisoft is quite impressive, not only as a video game developer and publisher, but as a business as a whole. As gamers, we can only hope that Ubisoft continues to produce video games, independently, for years to come, because companies like it are few and far between.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12