Fixing Ubisoft’s
E3 conferences
Look, a really blurry and messy
composition photo made in MS Paint! You know what that means! It’s time once
again for E3 Month!
While we’re not quite at June yet, I
wanted to start a little earlier this year considering that this year’s E3
scheduling contrasts with my own, and if I’d stuck to my guns and started doing
E3 stuff in June I would’ve had to do this article late in the month when E3’s
been over for two weeks and no one cares anymore.
So it’s time to talk about a certain
company that seems to be begging for help when it comes to these things: Ubisoft.
If there’s one thing people dread
during E3, it’s the Ubisoft Conference. While I personally feel that last
year’s was an improvement and that Bethesda had a worse show than they did, it
was still a complete mess that few enjoyed watching.
So I thought, to start off this annual
event right, let’s play conference doctor and see how I would make Ubisoft’s
conferences as hotly anticipated as Sony’s. My one rule is that I can’t change
the games announced or add in new IPs of my own creation. They’re advertising
the games they make, and I’m the director that has to figure out how to present
them.
If we’re ignoring the games (and trust
me, I’ll get to those another day), there are two big problems with Ubisoft’s
conferences that need fixing: the emphasis on big personalities onstage instead
of the game trailers and demos being presented, and how the trailers themselves
are structured. So basically to fix these conferences, we need to burn down
everything and start completely fresh.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and
talk about what needs to go, shall we?
First off, it’s time to either retire
Aisha Tyler or give her a greatly reduced role. She seems like a fantastic
person and I love that she’s super passionate about the games despite being a decently
big TV star (and she’s definitely better than poor Mr. Caffeine), but she just
doesn’t add enough for me to justify keeping her around. After overdosing on
her in E3 2015, she took a backseat last year’s event aside from the opening
and closing and occasionally coming out here and there for interviews and the
like. I can justify having her there for stuff like that, but aside from those
if we need someone introducing the different trailers, have it be the
developers.
Speaking of the interviews, we’ll be
cutting those out as well. Ubisoft’s 2016 conference was the longest of the
five major ones last year, clocking in at a full half hour over the second
longest, Microsoft’s. They’ve reached the point where they stuff their
conferences so full to the brim with filler content that they go on longer than
the ones held by the Big Three companies!
Let’s look at Ubisoft’s 2016
conference and cut out all the things that need to go. First off, no opening
dance number. There are better ways to advertise Just Dance than giving ammo to people who argue video games aren’t
an art form.
Then, we cut out all the extended interviews that
don’t need to be there. The guy that’s always there to advertise For Honor is the gold standard for how
to introduce games at a Ubisoft conference, so everyone should try to emulate
his style: get in, introduce the game in an exciting and engaging way, play the
trailer/gameplay demo, and then get out to make room for the whatever’s next.
Next, we need to shorten the amount of
time every game gets onstage. Everyone wants their fair share of screentime,
but it’s so annoying to have to wait through up to ten minutes of a guy talking
about DLC for a game people forgot about after a month. Every game gets up to
three minutes of introduction, then their trailer/gameplay demo, and then
they’re done. No extra-long skits before the trailer, no bad attempts at
humour, just the game and whatever introduction it needs.
And last but not least, if it has
nothing to do with video games it doesn’t belong onstage, so no movies. This
was just a thing they did last year when the Assassin’s Creed movie was happening, but if I was in charge they’d
never do it again. I’m here to see what’s next in video games. If I wanted to
hear movie news I’d watch Comic-Con.
So that’s how I’d fix the staged
stuff. As for the gameplay trailers, there is one major thing I’d like to never
see again, and if you’ve been following Ubisoft for the past few years I’m sure
you know what it is.
A few years ago while promoting Rainbow Six, Ubisoft invented an
annoying little technique that’s since been come to be known as “the Mic
Trick”. For those who don’t know, the Mic Trick is when a trailer features
pre-scripted audio of professional voice actors pretending to act like gamers
playing the multiplayer matches. This is used to make a sterile game seem far
more engaging than it actually is through the power of audio, because if the
people in the trailer seem excited and interested, our brains usually pick up
that we should be interested as well. It usually backfires (usually thanks to
the script being laughably awful and sounding nothing like how a real person
talks), but this hasn’t stopped Ubisoft from using it several times since it
was first incepted in 2014. Since then we’ve seen the Mic Trick used in several
trailers for The Division and most
recently in the gameplay trailer for Ghost
Recon Wildlands. One has to wonder what multiplayer game they’ll stick it
to this year.
I think it goes without saying that
the Mic Trick needs to go, and along with it I also would like to send
Ubisoft’s nasty little habit of having E3 trailers looking far more polished
than the final finished product sent out the door for good. There’s a reason
why people are significantly more skeptical of what they’re seeing at Ubisoft’s
conferences than they are at even EA’s, and that’s because of the numerous
incidents where a game performing at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second
in the trailer releases oftentimes barely going above 30 frames. The most
famous example of this was the Watch Dogs
incident from 2014, but they’ve done it multiple times since then.
And that’s just a few ways I would fix
Ubisoft’s E3 conferences if I were put in charge. I really doubt they’ll
actually do any of these things, but if they decide that this year’s the time
to pull a complete 180 and take inspiration from Sony and Microsoft, I’ll be
pleasantly surprised.
Stay tuned, because next Monday I’ll
be giving out my predictions for what surprises we’ll be seeing at the six
major conferences this year!
Song of
the Week
Intro - Steep
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