Everything Everywhere Once A Week (7/28/23)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XVI recently and, well, I’ll finish that game before I give final thoughts but man do the first 8 hours of that game write a check that the third act cannot cash. Maybe it picks up the ball before it ends, though.

Ubisoft Cancels Immortals: Fenyx Rising Sequel

This week, VGC reported that Ubisoft Quebec had been working on a sequel to 2020’s Immortals: Fenyx Rising. The open-world adventure game sold a decent number of copies in the few years since release, but a lot of them seemed to be a direct result of Ubisoft’s trademark drastically reduced prices a few weeks after a game comes out. According to Axios’ Stephen Totilo, the new game was intended to be about Polynesian Gods rather than the first’s walkthrough of the Greek pantheon. The original, and I guess only, Immortals game was — to put it generously — incredibly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. With Tears of the Kingdom seemingly smashing sales records earlier this year, there seems to be a healthy market for these kinds of games Ubisoft could safely slide into.

On the other hand, maybe that’s actually the problem. Perhaps the way Tears of the Kingdom dominated conversation here made Ubisoft feel like there’s not enough room in said market for an also-ran and they decided to pivot to throwing everything they can at Assassin’s Creed instead.

Ubisoft has definitely had the strangest journey of the last few years in terms of big publishers, unless you count Konami as a contemporary, but Ubisoft was miles ahead of the Metal Gear Solid publisher in terms of both revenue and games published. The French behemoth began scaling the proverbial skyscraper of the video game industry during the PS2 generation and was considered a towering menace of its own in the PS3/360 generation. Somehow since then, mostly in the last few years, the publisher has been kind of a confused mess, groping around in the darkness for critical hits. While old stalwarts like Far Cry continue to sell incredibly well, the pace of development has slowed down, with more cancellations than releases in the studio’s recent portfolio.

The simple reason for this is, well, games are more expensive and complicated to make. Ubisoft has more or less taken this problem to new extremes by focusing on 60-hour open world content-a-paloozas made to take up as much of your time as humanly possible. This isn’t every game from Ubisoft, but it’s a lot of their biggest hitters, and they’re consequently much harder to make because of it.

The more complicated reason is the international nature of their studios seems to be a constantly-shifting house of cards. They do good work, but few are ready to take on entire projects themselves outside Quebec or Montreal and the few that are ready can really only make one game every few years. I’m sure it would be way better for Ubisoft if the Mumbai studio could have handled the Sands of Time remake, but instead it got send to Montreal after falling into development hell, which means the opportunity cost is heavy.

Having Ubisoft Singapore working on Skull & Bones forever, a game that is just incredibly unlikely to be a hit in the mass market, when it probably should have gone to a more experienced team is just kind of poor planning on their part. But also, their more experienced teams were busy and, say, Quebec working on that when they could have been working on Assassin’s Creed would have been a bad choice too.

Then you throw in Ubisoft’s weirdly experimental stuff that either gets put out without care or concern for sales (a 2D Prince of Persia Metroidvania) or gets canceled before it sees the light of day (that Ghost Recon Battle Royale they announced, scheduled a beta for, and then rescinded the beta inside of like two weeks) and you have a portrait of a company suffering an identity crisis.

Final Fantasy XIV Coming to Xbox

At Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas this year, Xbox chief Phil Spencer came on stage with FFXIV producer Yoshida and Square Enix CEO Fukushima to announce that Final Fantasy XIV is coming to the Xbox. Square Enix has said for years that they want to bring the MMORPG to Microsoft’s console, but that certain policy limitations (read: most likely crossplay) were holding them back. In 2018, Microsoft made a big to-do about being for crossplay and Sony being against it and seemingly that was when Final Fantasy XIV likely got its greenlight.

During the on-stage appearance, Fukushima said that they are working hard to bring other Final Fantasy titles to Xbox without a lot of detail. That statement could mean a lot of things, like FFXVI or Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade/Rebirth or Pixel Remasters, who knows. There’s a lot of runway there for it to mean whatever a traditionally hesitant (though seemingly now on-board) Square Enix wants it to mean.

Earlier this year, while sitting on the Giant Bomb couch at Summer Game Fest, Phil Spencer says he takes Japanese support like Persona 3 Remake and Metaphor: ReFantazio to other Japanese third parties like Square Enix to convince them there’s a market there. By the same token, I wonder how getting Final Fantasy on board convinces any other hesitant Japanese third parties that still aren’t committing to day-and-date Xbox releases.

Then again, we don’t know if Square Enix is committing to day-and-date Xbox releases either. FFXIV is a welcome addition to the library, but it’s also years late. One would hope it’s a make-good and not a new strategy.

Sakurai Expects to Keep Making Smash Bros.

In the latest entry of Masahiro Sakurai’s video series, the former head of Sora Ltd. talked a bit about how Super Smash Bros. Brawl came together and that he was only asked to direct it after Nintendo had already announced the game. Toward the end of the video, he admits that he doesn’t really have anyone in mind to take over the reins for the series and does believe that he will be heading up the next game just as he has for the original, Melee, Brawl, 4, and Ultimate.

That next game, however, may be fairly far away. Sakurai also confesses that he’s not really sure where to go with the next entry. It is pretty hard to follow up a game titled “Ultimate,” which boasts a character roster that’s fairly unrivaled by other major fighting games. With Ultimate being such a success, and likely an unrepeatable endeavor, a lot of fans are going to go from the biggest something will ever be to a smaller downgrade in roster size for the next go-around.

Both Smash Bros. and Mario Kart find themselves in this unenviable position where there’s no real way to go up from here, you can only really go laterally. That isn’t to say these games are perfect, there are absolutely quality of life improvements you can make, but not enough small improvements can make for another 30-60 million selling game.

As more Switch rumors start swirling (many of which I don’t believe and you shouldn’t either, but a few that do give me pause), I imagine Nintendo has either figured out what to do about their evergreen titles and their eventual successors or they’re still puttering around in pre-production as they try to manifest what these things should look like. It’s never easy and it’s especially never easy to follow up success with more of the same.