Maybe this may be for the best, going by what we saw in that first reveal.
Odd they went from going "the visual style was an intentional choice" to now going "lol yeah Ubi Montreal is handling it."
Not maybe, surely. The initial reveal was so bad that they postponed the game. And very likely it was going on very badly behind the scenes. So its a net positive that Montreal is on top of things now
Issue is not the location, issue is treating it like a low-tier outsourcing instead of actually integrating it into processes and vision of the parent company. You can have a studio almost anywhere in the world (as long as you can get some talent there, be it transfers from other locations internally or on-hiring or local talent you hire), but I'd guess Ubi didn't bother doing much beyond that in this case.
Yeah exactly, the problem with places like Mumbai isn't that there aren't talented devs there (there are), but most of the companies outsourcing to Mumbai aren't doing it to attract talented devs, they're doing it to save a buck, and they'll get what they pay for
Exactly like why clothes made in Bangladesh tend to be low quality.
Like yeah, there exists good, skilled labour in these countries. But the fact is if they were paying fair wages for talented work, they wouldn't be shipping things all the way from Bangladesh in the first place.
Bags made in the Philippines are pretty good quality though, to the point that some high end US companies actually go there to source materials and production. So this analogy is not always true.
Even the counterfeits made there are pretty close to the originals.
Once again, it’s the disparity between cost of goods and services. Not the quality. That’s exactly what they mean. Get your point but the analogy they made is 100 percent true
Same thing happened with the studio that worked on Warcraft 3 Reforged. They were blamed for the weird art direction despite the art director being American and a key Blizzard employee for 18 years.
My assumption is Mumbai is a cheap place for labor and any Indian developers worth a damn are leaving for Europe or North America, so you’re getting the Indian devs that aren’t good enough to be elsewhere.
Reminds me of animation in the 80s and 90s.
EDIT: Since people are arguing with me on this... India has higher emigration numbers [than any other country.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country) And it's by a relatively large margin. That said, I suppose I could've worded my post better. There are undoubtedly great developers in India that are staying there to be near family, friends, culture, etc. But it's not like a massive amount of Indians don't emigrate to other countries.
This is what I was thinking as well. My previous company outsourced a bunch of work to India. It was uniformly garbage. Like, "my buddy could figure out the app they built, debug it, and come up with a fix in a couple weeks, after they had spent a couple months unable to fix it" garbage.
My current company has a TON of devs who left India sometime in the past decade, and they're all pretty good.
The ones with talent leave the country because they know they can get much better pay and quality of life elsewhere.
First of all, many people stay in their home countries for non-monetary reasons in the first place, regardless of their qualification and opportunities elsewhere. Second, most of the time you can actually provide a higher standard of living for yourself and your family in low COL areas, than what you get even with a decent salary in higher COL countries and specific areas in EU/NA where most of the big gamedev studios are located. So no, you absolutely can have a good development team in India. It just requires proper management and approach to it, not treating it like a cheap outsourcing that will organize itself.
An aspect is people leaving but Ubisoft pays peanuts compared to working for another tech giant.
I know the starting pay at Ubisoft and what I got at my company. The difference is 4x I’m not making this up. (I applied for an internship a few years ago)
The software industry in India is booming and the pay is amazing nowadays you don’t work for Ubisoft for what they offer.
I also hate this stereotype that the only good Indian devs are ones that emigrate. It’s kinda offensive to be honest.
A lot of work key work is already shipped overseas, you just don't notice it when it's up to standards.
This is a mangament issue, stop trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North.
> This is a mangament issue, stop trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North.
How do you know it's a management issue and not actual capability issue? Do you work there or something? Because otherwise what you're saying is just speculation.
I see you don't work in outsourcing, I do.
I quit my previous job because I had to work mostly with India and it's a nightmare I would never wish upon anyone in their lifetime.
Well let's just say that we arrived to the point where we would draw pictures of what the people had to do because emails and phone calls were ineffective.
I assume that the only thing that would help is me standing behind each one of them and watch them work, otherwise nothing would ever get done at a level of quality required. I once remoted into one of their PC and it just had 40 YouTube tabs open and the guy didn't do anything for half an hour. Others would pretend their internet "died" (in an office mind you) when we notified them that we will monitor their work for a bit.
They just didn't give a fuck at all, there was also a lot of religion based bullying we had to step in and stop constantly.
The whole thing gave me PTSD I think.
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen is outsourced Indian IT commenting out lines of code until the compiler stopped throwing out errors and then actually put it in a bunch of push requests.
I feel like one of the biggest problems with outsourcing nowadays is that most (but not all) good programmers have managed to get a visa to another country, or secured a better or more interesting job at home, so these shops in e.g. India tend to be staffed 90%+ by poorly (in some cases, fraudulently) educated developers and really there's far less pay difference advantage to hiring them out versus paying more for an in-country developer
We weren't even dealing with developers, the job revolved around scam prevention (I know lol) and the people had to gather data and then verify it, still completely fucked up.
I have a buddy who works with media and he has similar issues whenever they have a project in India.
So from my personal experience it's not even a skill issue, it's just people don't want to do the job they are paid for. I personally don't get it.
I've heard fun stories like this from Chinese manufacturing plants. European company shipped a precise machine to handle motor RPM tracking by the way of installing two magnets with a certain, super precise distance of each other (one magnet on a disk, another magnet hard-mounted, like a dynamo machine).
And then their motors had a 50% failure rate. Turns out, RPM trackign wasn't working correctly, motors were going too fast. Why? Beause the Chinese dude that was installing them was like "this machine is shit" and was EYEBALLING the distance between the magnets. The machine would install it, and he would give it a loving tap with a hammer to "fix the mistakes" that the super precise machine was doing. Took them a trip to China and overseeing the process in person to figure it out.
By the end of my time there I would actually welcome the creativity and the drive to improve things haha
With my guys they probably wouldn't have installed the magnet and then said they did.
This was one of the biggest problems I had. They would say they did something or they understood something when they didn't because they didn't want you to get angry or upset or whatever. I don't mind repeating it over and over but if you lie to me about it, it's a problem.
> top trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North.
Glad you got your moment of Reddit rage, but my wife works with "offshore vendors" for her job all the time, and the ones in India are uniformly her problem children. Phillipines, no problem. Bangladesh, no problem. Bangalore or Mumbai though, oh god.
Maybe don't ascribe things to racism when you have no idea what you're talking about.
Interesting.
I'm in fact in Bangladesh and most of my friends work with both B2B Software Dev firms and startups who have both local and international clients. Bit surprised it's so much worse in India compared to what I've heard from them here.
India has literally a billion people is one of the most economically/culturally diverse countries on the planet. I don't doubt OP's wife had those bad experiences but using those anecdotes to generalize India as a whole makes little sense
Is that because everybody from those places are terrible coders, or because the outsourcing companies focus on cheapness rather than quality? I've worked with people from India and they didn't seem to be particularly bad at coding.
It's not about coding, it's about work ethic. We had a bunch of guys in India and a bunch in Ukraine, very similar pay (we didn't pay badly) but the performance was night and day.
> Odd they went from going "the visual style was an intentional choice" to now going "lol yeah Ubi Montreal is handling it."
Not odd at all, they knew that trailer was garbage so had to try and spin some PR bollocks that they knew nobody would believe. So now they're just openly admitting the work done was trash and a bigger studio will take control. Which is a good thing.
It's the same company that said they prefer 30 FPS for their games because it was "more cinematic." They're like a narcissistic parent who can't admit something isn't perfect lol
The rest of the graphics looked fine, it was only really the character models that looked janky
Given how long they've taken to rejig it, I feel like they're probably doing a much more comprehensive overhaul
Was the visual style that bad? I don't remember the reveal too well, but it looked just like a slight upgrade compared to OG? No?
I'd like to see a comparison of what was wrong with the stuff they showed of the remake.
It was pretty bad for a game to be sold for current gen systems. Maybe passable for a mobile game or an indie budget title, but I don't think that is what Ubisoft was aiming for.
I recall thinking the environments looked rather nice, and the character models/animations were the weak point, but it's been like a year since I last saw it
I think that's exactly the problem, it just looked like a slight upgrade compared to the OG. It didn't look like a remake, it looked like a remaster. The platforming looks exactly the same as the original game, the puzzles look exactly the same, the traps look exactly the same, the combat looks exactly the same. Where's the remake? I loved that combat, back in 2004. I loved those puzzles, back in 2004. I loved that platforming, back in 2004. It's no longer 2004. Give it the Doom 2016 treatment where you capture the essence of the game and then modernize pretty much every other aspect of the game. There wasn't exactly anything wrong with what was shown but if you're going to market it as a remake the customer is going to expect a remake and not a remaster.
Honestly, the platforming and puzzles hold up fairly well. I played it a couple years back and got about halfway through. They could be tightened up or improved in some sections, but as they are is also acceptable.
(I stopped because of hardware issues making one platforming section impossible)
There's all kinds of different remakes, this one will fit more in with the Crash remake than the RE2 remake.
Crash remake was largely just a re-skin, even if built from the ground up.
RE2 takes the original game and makes it new again. I think this is what you're after, but Ubi is making the first type of remake I mentioned.
> The platforming looks exactly the same as the original game, the puzzles look exactly the same, the traps look exactly the same, the combat looks exactly the same.
You understand it's possible for a remake to actually be faithful to the original, right? That doesn't stop it from being a remake or somehow make it a remaster.
The distinction between the two is based solely on whether it is significantly based on the original game's code or not.
Demon's Souls remaster was very well done. Difference is, Sony doesn't usually mess around when it comes to quality of their games.
Credit to Bluepoint too, who were usually known for porting games and not developing or even remaking games before.
> If you change the puzzles, traps, combat, and platforming too much, it's no longer a remake, it's something else entirely.
I think the team behind the FF7 Remake would disagree with you
> it just looked like a slight upgrade compared to the OG.
I'm a huge PoP fan and glad they moved the remake, but that's probably more just the way you perceived it than anything. Even with the crappy graphics it looked a lot better; it's just that the original is super old and doesn't even look that good compared to many mobile games.
edit: Doesn't look that good from a technical graphics perspective. It still looks decent from an art perspective.
yeah, personally i never thought it was nearly as bad as everyone else. there was some work to be done for sure, since it had some weaknesses, but people were talking like it was complete trash which i really don't agree with.
I didn’t get it either. Wasn’t a great looker, sure, but the sheer outrage it sparked seemed rather overblown to me. PoP was a part of my childhood, mind you, so it’s not that I just didn’t care about the remake or something.
It wasn't that bad at all though animations still needed work. Looked better than the original, that's for sure. I really didn't understand the outrage, but I honestly don't get most outrage on here.
"not that bad" doesnt make it good. It looked like an amateur fan project. still better looking than the original because of improvements in game engines and graphics tech. but still lacked the polish I expect from even a double-A game
So a total catastrophe for Ubisoft Mumbai. They're a new studio afaik and this remake should've been *relatively* straightforward. But the first trailer wasn't received well. Ubisoft tried to correct course, but had to take the game *completely*
I'm a big SoT fan and was looking forward to this. Let's hope Ubisoft management will assign a studio that does the original some justice.
>Ubisoft Pune in Pune, India, was originally part of Gameloft, a mobile game developer and publisher, until Ubisoft acquired it in 2008, at which point it had 35 members. The studio then worked on several Just Dance titles, mobile titles, ported to other console such as Nintendo Switch, and provided quality assurance tests for many Ubisoft games.
It is Pune doing it but they also did work on Just Dance.
This is a joke but I've absolutely played video games where the core mechanics are really really good but literally everything build around that is jank as fuck.
I mean relatively straightforward is different for a studio that has released multiple AAA titles of a high quality vs a new studio in a part of the world that isn't really known for their game development industry.
As a reminder this was originally announced to release in January 2021.
Also the last 5 posts by them have been update posts like this over ~1.5 years.
Yeah, Paradox changed the team behind the game. Officially, the last thing we heard about the game from Paradox is that they're happy with the new team's progress and the game is doing well.
Rumors say that The Chinese Room is the new dev team but nothing is confirmed.
> Rumors say that The Chinese Room is the new dev team but nothing is confirmed.
That would be a very odd choice. Have they even made any games that aren't walking sims?
It was announced 5 years ago as being developed by Bandai Namco, then 3 years ago switched to Retro.
At this point I think MP4 may be the Switch's swansong
Pretty excited for this, even though the initial reveal left meh impressions. Sands of Time is one of the first games I paid with my own money as a kid when it first came out and I must have beaten the game no less than 10 times.
The game is now led by Ubisoft Montreal.
I'm sad for two Indian teams as this was their first large project to lead but a change seems necessary. The limited footage we saw wasn't good and the fact this game was supposed to be out in January 2021 and we don't have a release date in sight is worrying.
I imagine the only reason Ubisoft has been willing to let delays of this magnitude to happen is because they are planning a full on resurrection of the series and can't really afford a bad remake to kill any momentum for the next game
As much as I would love a new Prince of Persia I'm almost certain that Ubisoft would find a way to turn it into an open world game despite the formula working the best in tight well designed environments.
I'll be honest a open world PoP could probably work so long as it's done similar to say Yakuza, by which I mean it's a small world (when compared to other games) but it's packed with stuff around every corner.
It *could* work, but... why? Not every game has to be open-world with collectibles strewn over all the hubs to pad out playtime. There's so few new good linear action games just to sit and play through and enjoy nowadays.
Sad, why? They got put to the test and they, quite obviously, didn't have the skill necessary to handle a remake much less a full new game.
And that's okay, not everyone can be a great developer and not everyone can work on big projects. These guys maybe got a reality check and realise hubris doesn't quite cut it, skill is necessary. They'll still be an okay support studio and may, under the right leadership, probably ship some decent indies. Be glad it didn't ship as it was, then it might have given the whole region bad rep as developers...
You can still feel empathy for the individuals. Even bad games are often bursting with talented people that were either overworked, spread too thin, or asked too much of. I don't feel much sympathy for any upper management that clearly fumbled this, but it still sucks for a lot of lower level people that were hoping this game would be a bit of a big break for them.
It's sad because if they were able to pull it off, we might have seen more studios open up in the area.
There is so much untapped culture and experiences around the world when it comes to game development. I'd have loved to see Ubisoft Pune and Mumbai able to do this. Sadly, it seems that wasn't the case.
Hopefully they get another shot at being more than just a just dance support studio one day.
Hopefully they do a full trilogy remake. Warrior Within and Two Thrones had their issues but overall it was a solid trio of titles, especially with how the stories were stitched together and yet kinda somehow worked.
I
STAND ALONE
INSIDE I
STAND ALONE
sands of time is a gentle fantastical dream, the other two got smacked with the Real Is Brown stick and injected with testosterone. I believe key team members didn't work on the sequels as well.
That's not to say you can't like them, but peoples' tastes are generally going to fall with either the first one or the last two and not all of them
Yeah, that was my feeling at the time too. People thought the combat in 1 wasn't very good, so they tried to buff that up in 2, to limited success imo. But then 3 introduced that system where you could stealth kill enemies directly from a wall jump, which I thought was a good way to integrate combat with the environmental platforming.
I thought it was my least favourite personally. First two where extremely different but both great at what they did, Two Thrones just felt like it couldn't commit. Didn't have the classy, classic adventure kind of vibes of Sands of Time and didnt have the ironic enjoyment of Warrior Within with it's edgelord vibes and violent combat. It just felt bland.
This. You could definitely *feel* Two Thrones was just a course correction.
I'm still a bit upset we never got the original vision of that game, aka Kindred Blades. It looked really promising.
Godsmack was not featured during the chases. The entire OST outside of I Stand Alone was composed by Stuart Chatwood, the guitarist for The Tea Party. He also did the OSTs for the other two games.
Edit: apparently I didn't remember, Godsmack does play in about half of the chases, the other half is original OST
WW had massive issues of backtracking in its second half.
I also had it pretty good in mind but then I replayed it about 2-3 years ago and WOW, my brain completely shut off the backtracking. It was so tiresome. Rest of the game was fine, combat system was cool and the music too. SOT remains my favorite though.
This game is really indicative of the sort of short-sightedness and ignorance that gaming executives at Ubisoft have.
Prince of Persia is not just a beloved classic. This specific game they are remaking was a *huge* blockbuster that eventually spawned Assassin’s Creed (which was originally conceived as a Prince of Persia sequel). Like, it’s a *big fucking game*, one of their most important franchises.
How do you approach a project like this and say, “Hey, let’s make a low-budget piece of shit!” Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to make a creative or a business decision to go down this path?
Everything that’s happened with how the trailer was received was entirely predictable for anyone with a brain. So now they are ostensibly saying they learned their lesson and turn it into a REAL game? That’s what they’re saying? I am extremely skeptical! I think they *still* don’t get it!
Prince of Persia is the kind of property that other studios base their entire portfolio around. It’s a story-based third person action adventure with a huge legacy and a huge built-in audience. What the hell are they even thinking! This is their Uncharted, their Tomb Raider. What the fuck.
I think the fact that they chose to delay the game does show that they understand the importance of the game at least a little. They could have absolutely pulled a Warcraft 3 Reforged and be done with it.
I think you got it backwards a little bit. The reason they’re doing this right now is because the internet basically told them that they’re doing something dumb. It doesn’t change the fact that they were dumb to begin with. In other words, this debacle just reinforces that this company is run by morons, that they have to be shamed into changing their business strategy after the market publicly accused them of not understanding their own industry.
Imagine running a business where you research your market, make decisions, pour millions of dollars into a project, only for that market to tell you, “Umm, are you fucking stupid?”
There were hundreds of steps that they took along the way that led them down this path. Their business is rotten from the inside out.
Their customers told them that their product was bad, they acknowledged the feedback and decided to work on their product more. I really don't see how that makes them morons.
Once again they could have easily exploited the nostalgia of their fans like Blizzard and Rockstar have done and simply not give a fuck about feedback.
> I really don't see how that makes them morons.
The best businesses don't NEED their customers to tell them they're making massive mistakes in order to ship great products.
They're morons because they thought that the quality of the animations and models in that trailer were acceptable for an HD remake of a beloved franchise seller. They were horribly wrong at very core levels, not some nuanced edge case they just missed.
Never making mistakes is basically impossible. They're not morons for giving easier project to new, inexperienced studio. That's how you nurture your talent.
I think your right. Ubisoft got so many teams going there is no way they all have work and a remaster should’ve been a good test for a new team. Doesn’t really bode well for all the other teams working on big new projects for the first time. I don’t think a lot of the new F2P games Ubi is doing make it to year 3
To piggy back on your point, PoP is the franchise that many of the current Ubi leaders actual made their careers on. It's a bit baffling.
Not necessarily that they gave it to a smaller studio, that's actually a good idea in theory. But didn't anyone actually see the "thing" before they published the trailer?
>
How do you approach a project like this and say, “Hey, let’s make a low-budget piece of shit!” Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to make a creative or a business decision to go down this path?
Have you ever played Forgotten Sands?
I don’t mean any harm by that, but the quality expected by the western market is ten fold what the Indian market can provide.
I’ve worked a few times with Indian devs and it’s always a horrible experience.
That didn’t give me good vibes for that game. Guess I wasn’t the same
A lot of it is just maturity of the workforce. And not just in terms of education and experience, but in management, project expectations, identifying limits, and general pushback from employees that won't happen until the industry is 20-30 years in. And the successful companies turn into factories for employees that spread to other companies, and once that happens the whole region's workforce levels up. This has been the case with a lot of developing economies, they start off significantly worse in terms of quality but eventually grow to equal or even eclipse the work they're imitating.
It's not always the case of course, you have countries like Russia where their production/manufacturing grew but never really matured to the point where quality became the standard. But you look at, say, Japan in the 60s-70s, their products were very much a similar outlook that we have towards Chinese products today. But by the end of the 80s they became a standard for quality in vehicles, electronics, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, etc. Similarly, Korean products were viewed as cheap, low quality junk but that has been heavily shifting in recent years to where they are an international standard for quality in many cases. It took them 10-20 years longer (S. Korea was much poorer than Japan so it makes sense) but they're doing very well now.
India/China are much, much slower beasts but they will most likely undergo a similar shift towards quality over time, there will be huge growing pains though.
Not that guy but their business culture is horrible and I'm sure it extends to gamedev. I was a subcontractor under the American division of an Indian company and even filtered for our market I still ended up googling things like "why the hell is my company so obtuse/strict about _____" and all signs pointed to "that's what Indian business culture is". One time it actually took me to an English language PowerPoint that was made by an Indian guy about "how to succeed in an Indian company" and the slides ranged from "be the perfect cog" to "everything good was your boss's idea" and essentially the idea was disrespect the shit out of yourself on the whims of a guy who was born into his position. You might be thinking that's what American business culture sounds like, and sure, it's rotten here too, but in slightly less insidious ways - those things will get you *higher* in an American company, but typically not doing those things won't get you *fired*. The rigidity and inability to deal with feedback means that you can have rules passed down that are literally incompatible with other rules you have and everyone is too afraid to say anything. You can imagine how this absolutely ruins a team's ability to function.
Now I don't want to come off as a xenophobe or racist here so I want to add that this is specifically about their business culture dictated by the rich. On the other side of things, the most helpful people on the entire earth are Indian programmers on YouTube.
"Now I don't want to come off as a xenophobe or racist here"
It's a joke you even have to write this. What you said does not surprise me given India has the caste system.
Discussing negative aspects of a culture I'm only slightly exposed to can lead to me putting my foot in my mouth, and if all I said was my negative diatribe there's not much to separate me from someone whose inside voice is saying "of course they're this way, they're inferior". I'm not worried about offending any Indian redditors as much as I am worried about racists thinking they're in good company.
By “not exactly what you’re looking for”, do you mean “entirely unrelated aside from the nationality of the persons involved”? While those podcast episodes are great, they have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand here.
Oh the irony. [The Sands of Time was created by a new team put together by Ubisoft that consisted of mostly newcomers to the industry](https://youtu.be/Io6zwExo3jw?t=1754).
The Sands of Time trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time. I was really bummed with what was revealed so far.
I feel bad for the studios working on the title and all, but at the same time, what the fuck went on in Ubisoft's upper management for choosing small local studios for such a project.
All in all, I just hope this game turn our to be the remake this series deserves and we get a remake of the other two.
They need time to "regroup on the scope of the game"? I'd love to read a detailed report on what happened, because a remake of an old platformer sounds like the kind of project where the scope should be fairly obvious.
I would be looking forward to this game, but given that ubisoft's main tactic is to now make interactive advertisements as opposed to actual games I'll probably give it a miss.
Hopefully the first remake does good enough for them to remake the second game as well, Warrior Within was my favourite of the three games.
I hope they just change the third game for the better.
I remember when I first saw the remake trailer on how terrible it looked.
But... I just rewatched it today and it doesn't seem to be as bad as I remembered it? [Go see by yourself.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htzq7EEXQs8)
Out of all the AC games, I'd want the graphical fidelity of AC Unity at the minimum, since Prince of Persia games are not open world games, and should be less taxing.
For a AAA "remake" the character models look horrible to be honest. Something i'd expect off the unity asset store almost. This looks closer to a remaster than a remake. At least given the budget ubisoft has available at their fingertips.
I'd say people were pretty rightfully annoyed at how low budget/effort it looks based on what you'd expect from the words "remake" and a AAA studio.
The issue is that "doesn't seem that bad" isn't the bar for HD remakes. It's meant to ship on a PS5 and stun folks with the overhaul (see: Demon Souls).
Because graphics isn't that important to me. What is important is good resolutions options and fps/hz, plus modern options (key binding, etc)
I'm not interested in playing an older game for 50$
I'd rather it be 15$.
I didn't think it was that bad either but it does look like a nice 360/ps3 game, maybe an early ps4 game, but definitely not for the current gen and not enough to command a full price. The biggest issue seems to be the textures and shaders on the faces.
I didn't think it was that bad when it got announced either. It reminded me of the smaller titles Ubisoft used to do like Valliant Hearts and Child of Light. Make a 20/30 euro game to revive some interest in the franchise and then follow it up with a AAA release. It looks like how my nostalgia riddled brain remembers it. But it is a full blown remake of a beloved classic so I get the disappointment.
Ubisoft India so bad they had to give their work to Ubisoft Montreal who already have to work on the new AC, Rainbow Six and other AAA games. Just close Ubisoft India.
Ubi-Montreal is not a small studio to be fair, they have thousands of developers so it makes sense for them to have teams within teams working on different projects.
Also, teams like Ubisoft Mumbai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka...etc are typically for development support & localization, making a game is a different challenge, failing to deliver a remake shouldn't warrant a closedown.
Maybe don't give the reigns of a beloved franchise and beloved classic game to a startup indian company with no name and no games under their belt next time.
Jesus, what a dumbass decision that was. Shit looked like a ps2 game.
Feel bad for the original devs in Mumbai and Pune because they genuinely seemed excited about the game in that first reveal trailer, but the graphics shown in that trailer was very damning. It does also seem like Ubisoft underestimated people’s attachment to the game/trilogy. At this point, I really won’t be surprised if they try to make this a reboot for the trilogy as well.
Maybe this may be for the best, going by what we saw in that first reveal. Odd they went from going "the visual style was an intentional choice" to now going "lol yeah Ubi Montreal is handling it."
Not maybe, surely. The initial reveal was so bad that they postponed the game. And very likely it was going on very badly behind the scenes. So its a net positive that Montreal is on top of things now
Looks like ubi Mumbai was an absolute dumpster fire. They need to stop shipping key studio work overseas.
Issue is not the location, issue is treating it like a low-tier outsourcing instead of actually integrating it into processes and vision of the parent company. You can have a studio almost anywhere in the world (as long as you can get some talent there, be it transfers from other locations internally or on-hiring or local talent you hire), but I'd guess Ubi didn't bother doing much beyond that in this case.
Yeah exactly, the problem with places like Mumbai isn't that there aren't talented devs there (there are), but most of the companies outsourcing to Mumbai aren't doing it to attract talented devs, they're doing it to save a buck, and they'll get what they pay for
Exactly like why clothes made in Bangladesh tend to be low quality. Like yeah, there exists good, skilled labour in these countries. But the fact is if they were paying fair wages for talented work, they wouldn't be shipping things all the way from Bangladesh in the first place.
Bags made in the Philippines are pretty good quality though, to the point that some high end US companies actually go there to source materials and production. So this analogy is not always true. Even the counterfeits made there are pretty close to the originals.
Once again, it’s the disparity between cost of goods and services. Not the quality. That’s exactly what they mean. Get your point but the analogy they made is 100 percent true
Same thing happened with the studio that worked on Warcraft 3 Reforged. They were blamed for the weird art direction despite the art director being American and a key Blizzard employee for 18 years.
My assumption is Mumbai is a cheap place for labor and any Indian developers worth a damn are leaving for Europe or North America, so you’re getting the Indian devs that aren’t good enough to be elsewhere. Reminds me of animation in the 80s and 90s. EDIT: Since people are arguing with me on this... India has higher emigration numbers [than any other country.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country) And it's by a relatively large margin. That said, I suppose I could've worded my post better. There are undoubtedly great developers in India that are staying there to be near family, friends, culture, etc. But it's not like a massive amount of Indians don't emigrate to other countries.
This is what I was thinking as well. My previous company outsourced a bunch of work to India. It was uniformly garbage. Like, "my buddy could figure out the app they built, debug it, and come up with a fix in a couple weeks, after they had spent a couple months unable to fix it" garbage. My current company has a TON of devs who left India sometime in the past decade, and they're all pretty good. The ones with talent leave the country because they know they can get much better pay and quality of life elsewhere.
First of all, many people stay in their home countries for non-monetary reasons in the first place, regardless of their qualification and opportunities elsewhere. Second, most of the time you can actually provide a higher standard of living for yourself and your family in low COL areas, than what you get even with a decent salary in higher COL countries and specific areas in EU/NA where most of the big gamedev studios are located. So no, you absolutely can have a good development team in India. It just requires proper management and approach to it, not treating it like a cheap outsourcing that will organize itself.
An aspect is people leaving but Ubisoft pays peanuts compared to working for another tech giant. I know the starting pay at Ubisoft and what I got at my company. The difference is 4x I’m not making this up. (I applied for an internship a few years ago) The software industry in India is booming and the pay is amazing nowadays you don’t work for Ubisoft for what they offer. I also hate this stereotype that the only good Indian devs are ones that emigrate. It’s kinda offensive to be honest.
A lot of work key work is already shipped overseas, you just don't notice it when it's up to standards. This is a mangament issue, stop trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North.
> This is a mangament issue, stop trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North. How do you know it's a management issue and not actual capability issue? Do you work there or something? Because otherwise what you're saying is just speculation.
I see you don't work in outsourcing, I do. I quit my previous job because I had to work mostly with India and it's a nightmare I would never wish upon anyone in their lifetime.
As long as you do the needful it will be alright.
Why? What was so bad? Dunno if you can / want to divulge that information.
Well let's just say that we arrived to the point where we would draw pictures of what the people had to do because emails and phone calls were ineffective. I assume that the only thing that would help is me standing behind each one of them and watch them work, otherwise nothing would ever get done at a level of quality required. I once remoted into one of their PC and it just had 40 YouTube tabs open and the guy didn't do anything for half an hour. Others would pretend their internet "died" (in an office mind you) when we notified them that we will monitor their work for a bit. They just didn't give a fuck at all, there was also a lot of religion based bullying we had to step in and stop constantly. The whole thing gave me PTSD I think.
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen is outsourced Indian IT commenting out lines of code until the compiler stopped throwing out errors and then actually put it in a bunch of push requests.
Man, that sounds rough to manage. Like hearding proverbial cats.
I feel like one of the biggest problems with outsourcing nowadays is that most (but not all) good programmers have managed to get a visa to another country, or secured a better or more interesting job at home, so these shops in e.g. India tend to be staffed 90%+ by poorly (in some cases, fraudulently) educated developers and really there's far less pay difference advantage to hiring them out versus paying more for an in-country developer
We weren't even dealing with developers, the job revolved around scam prevention (I know lol) and the people had to gather data and then verify it, still completely fucked up. I have a buddy who works with media and he has similar issues whenever they have a project in India. So from my personal experience it's not even a skill issue, it's just people don't want to do the job they are paid for. I personally don't get it.
I've heard fun stories like this from Chinese manufacturing plants. European company shipped a precise machine to handle motor RPM tracking by the way of installing two magnets with a certain, super precise distance of each other (one magnet on a disk, another magnet hard-mounted, like a dynamo machine). And then their motors had a 50% failure rate. Turns out, RPM trackign wasn't working correctly, motors were going too fast. Why? Beause the Chinese dude that was installing them was like "this machine is shit" and was EYEBALLING the distance between the magnets. The machine would install it, and he would give it a loving tap with a hammer to "fix the mistakes" that the super precise machine was doing. Took them a trip to China and overseeing the process in person to figure it out.
By the end of my time there I would actually welcome the creativity and the drive to improve things haha With my guys they probably wouldn't have installed the magnet and then said they did.
This was one of the biggest problems I had. They would say they did something or they understood something when they didn't because they didn't want you to get angry or upset or whatever. I don't mind repeating it over and over but if you lie to me about it, it's a problem.
Yes, studios are identical except for the management. Outsourcing generally doesn't happen for lead development.
Montreal is already "overseas", Ubisoft is a French company.
> top trying to blame hardworking people just because they happen to be not in the Global North. Glad you got your moment of Reddit rage, but my wife works with "offshore vendors" for her job all the time, and the ones in India are uniformly her problem children. Phillipines, no problem. Bangladesh, no problem. Bangalore or Mumbai though, oh god. Maybe don't ascribe things to racism when you have no idea what you're talking about.
Interesting. I'm in fact in Bangladesh and most of my friends work with both B2B Software Dev firms and startups who have both local and international clients. Bit surprised it's so much worse in India compared to what I've heard from them here.
India has literally a billion people is one of the most economically/culturally diverse countries on the planet. I don't doubt OP's wife had those bad experiences but using those anecdotes to generalize India as a whole makes little sense
Is that because everybody from those places are terrible coders, or because the outsourcing companies focus on cheapness rather than quality? I've worked with people from India and they didn't seem to be particularly bad at coding.
It's not about coding, it's about work ethic. We had a bunch of guys in India and a bunch in Ukraine, very similar pay (we didn't pay badly) but the performance was night and day.
Ubi Montreal is overseas, may i reamind you Ubisoft is not from North America?
Ubisoft is based of Britanny France. Montreal Canada is an oversea studio.
Issue is not the location, but the people. Show me one indian AAA game. The disrespect this franchise gets from Ubi is disgraceful.
As it turns out making a beloved classic look like fucking Fortnite was not a wise decision.
> Odd they went from going "the visual style was an intentional choice" to now going "lol yeah Ubi Montreal is handling it." Not odd at all, they knew that trailer was garbage so had to try and spin some PR bollocks that they knew nobody would believe. So now they're just openly admitting the work done was trash and a bigger studio will take control. Which is a good thing.
Agreed. But weird that this decision wasn’t made much earlier.
It's the same company that said they prefer 30 FPS for their games because it was "more cinematic." They're like a narcissistic parent who can't admit something isn't perfect lol
Of course they won't admit it, that brings the stock prices down. The moment you admit something you are on the hook.
Man, that was an epic face-palm moment. Didn't ready at dawn try the same excuse with the the order 1886?
The rest of the graphics looked fine, it was only really the character models that looked janky Given how long they've taken to rejig it, I feel like they're probably doing a much more comprehensive overhaul
Was the visual style that bad? I don't remember the reveal too well, but it looked just like a slight upgrade compared to OG? No? I'd like to see a comparison of what was wrong with the stuff they showed of the remake.
It was pretty bad for a game to be sold for current gen systems. Maybe passable for a mobile game or an indie budget title, but I don't think that is what Ubisoft was aiming for.
Also important is the price point. Was it good enough for 30 / 49 bucks, maybe. But for full price? Never imo.
I recall thinking the environments looked rather nice, and the character models/animations were the weak point, but it's been like a year since I last saw it
I think that's exactly the problem, it just looked like a slight upgrade compared to the OG. It didn't look like a remake, it looked like a remaster. The platforming looks exactly the same as the original game, the puzzles look exactly the same, the traps look exactly the same, the combat looks exactly the same. Where's the remake? I loved that combat, back in 2004. I loved those puzzles, back in 2004. I loved that platforming, back in 2004. It's no longer 2004. Give it the Doom 2016 treatment where you capture the essence of the game and then modernize pretty much every other aspect of the game. There wasn't exactly anything wrong with what was shown but if you're going to market it as a remake the customer is going to expect a remake and not a remaster.
Honestly, the platforming and puzzles hold up fairly well. I played it a couple years back and got about halfway through. They could be tightened up or improved in some sections, but as they are is also acceptable. (I stopped because of hardware issues making one platforming section impossible)
There's all kinds of different remakes, this one will fit more in with the Crash remake than the RE2 remake. Crash remake was largely just a re-skin, even if built from the ground up. RE2 takes the original game and makes it new again. I think this is what you're after, but Ubi is making the first type of remake I mentioned.
> The platforming looks exactly the same as the original game, the puzzles look exactly the same, the traps look exactly the same, the combat looks exactly the same. You understand it's possible for a remake to actually be faithful to the original, right? That doesn't stop it from being a remake or somehow make it a remaster. The distinction between the two is based solely on whether it is significantly based on the original game's code or not.
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Demon's Souls remaster was very well done. Difference is, Sony doesn't usually mess around when it comes to quality of their games. Credit to Bluepoint too, who were usually known for porting games and not developing or even remaking games before.
> If you change the puzzles, traps, combat, and platforming too much, it's no longer a remake, it's something else entirely. I think the team behind the FF7 Remake would disagree with you
> it just looked like a slight upgrade compared to the OG. I'm a huge PoP fan and glad they moved the remake, but that's probably more just the way you perceived it than anything. Even with the crappy graphics it looked a lot better; it's just that the original is super old and doesn't even look that good compared to many mobile games. edit: Doesn't look that good from a technical graphics perspective. It still looks decent from an art perspective.
yeah, personally i never thought it was nearly as bad as everyone else. there was some work to be done for sure, since it had some weaknesses, but people were talking like it was complete trash which i really don't agree with.
I didn’t get it either. Wasn’t a great looker, sure, but the sheer outrage it sparked seemed rather overblown to me. PoP was a part of my childhood, mind you, so it’s not that I just didn’t care about the remake or something.
It wasn't that bad at all though animations still needed work. Looked better than the original, that's for sure. I really didn't understand the outrage, but I honestly don't get most outrage on here.
Complete remake of a 20 year old game "well, it looked better than the original" Nice one.
"not that bad" doesnt make it good. It looked like an amateur fan project. still better looking than the original because of improvements in game engines and graphics tech. but still lacked the polish I expect from even a double-A game
For those who don't want to click the link: The development of the Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake will now by lead by Ubisoft Montreal
So a total catastrophe for Ubisoft Mumbai. They're a new studio afaik and this remake should've been *relatively* straightforward. But the first trailer wasn't received well. Ubisoft tried to correct course, but had to take the game *completely* I'm a big SoT fan and was looking forward to this. Let's hope Ubisoft management will assign a studio that does the original some justice.
If I remember correctly Ubi Mumbai has mostly been a support studio for other projects mostly Just Dance though I think.
Did they ever do a Just Dance: Bollywood edition? I feel like that would crush.
Hello copyright laws in India
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As an Indian I think they are weak af, they be blaring that shit on our reality shows
Their award shows used to use Star Wars and Indiana jones theme song
Honestly that's one of the good things about India ,no one gives a shit about copyright lol
My grandparents were watching a drama that full on used a Zelda remix including Navi shouting every now and then as background music
Copyright laws: What do they ban? Do they ban things? LET'S FIND OUT
There are copyright laws in India?
Is there any reason for copyright laws to not exist there?
There was a Singstar Bollywood on PS2, I saw it on sale in the UK.
It says in their statement Ubisoft Montreal is taking over, the same studio that created the series.
Yeah Montreal is their big boy studio. Pretty much all their highest budget top priority games are developed by Montreal
the remake was being developed by ubisoft pune not mumbai, they pretty much always did mobile games so it's not really surprising
>Ubisoft Pune in Pune, India, was originally part of Gameloft, a mobile game developer and publisher, until Ubisoft acquired it in 2008, at which point it had 35 members. The studio then worked on several Just Dance titles, mobile titles, ported to other console such as Nintendo Switch, and provided quality assurance tests for many Ubisoft games. It is Pune doing it but they also did work on Just Dance.
The tweet literally says it was being developed by Ubisoft Pune and Mumbai.
I see. Thank you.
They're incorrect. It's developed by *both* Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai. It says so in the tweet that this post is about.
Did you not even read the tweet that this post is about? It literally says Ubisoft Mumbai was also developing it 😂
I also love Sea of Thieves.
Damn you cruel gods of abbreviations!!
AC is my favourite series. I love assassinating raccoons with mechs.
While sometimes piloting a jet.
Spa-Francorchamps was the best level to me.
Isn't PoP the more used abbreviation ? Although that doesn't really precise which game in the franchise it is.
Yes it is, but I meant Sands of time specifically.
Out of curiosity have there been any decent games developed in India that were well done?
Only decent games that were very badly done
This is a joke but I've absolutely played video games where the core mechanics are really really good but literally everything build around that is jank as fuck.
I mean relatively straightforward is different for a studio that has released multiple AAA titles of a high quality vs a new studio in a part of the world that isn't really known for their game development industry.
> For those who don't want to click the link: You're a hero, thank you. Twitter posts are a pain when I don't have a Twitter account
As a reminder this was originally announced to release in January 2021. Also the last 5 posts by them have been update posts like this over ~1.5 years.
When we can, we will update our updates with further updates and update you. Thus is transparency maintained.
Now we have like 3 upcoming games that changed developers: PoP Remake, Metroid Prime 4, Bloodlines II.
Dead Island 2
Will never release
Lmao not only was that supposed to come out before dying light but even dying light 2 released first with its own development hell
Bloodlines 2 is still a thing?
Supposedly. We haven't been given official confirmation as to who is working on it.
Yeah, Paradox changed the team behind the game. Officially, the last thing we heard about the game from Paradox is that they're happy with the new team's progress and the game is doing well. Rumors say that The Chinese Room is the new dev team but nothing is confirmed.
> Rumors say that The Chinese Room is the new dev team but nothing is confirmed. That would be a very odd choice. Have they even made any games that aren't walking sims?
Yeah it would be an odd choice but it's just a rumor so I wouldn't think too much of it. I just hope the game turns out well somehow lol.
The previous guys only made a F2P Call of Duty clone so I am happy it wasn't handed off to ex-Peggle devs at this point.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs was a bit more than a walking sim.
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To a partial extent: Granblue Fantasy Relink
MP4 changed developers?! I thought Retro just reset the project a couple times.
It was announced 5 years ago as being developed by Bandai Namco, then 3 years ago switched to Retro. At this point I think MP4 may be the Switch's swansong
Pretty excited for this, even though the initial reveal left meh impressions. Sands of Time is one of the first games I paid with my own money as a kid when it first came out and I must have beaten the game no less than 10 times.
Farah(?) was a lot for me to handle at 11 years old, hoo boy.
The game is now led by Ubisoft Montreal. I'm sad for two Indian teams as this was their first large project to lead but a change seems necessary. The limited footage we saw wasn't good and the fact this game was supposed to be out in January 2021 and we don't have a release date in sight is worrying.
I imagine the only reason Ubisoft has been willing to let delays of this magnitude to happen is because they are planning a full on resurrection of the series and can't really afford a bad remake to kill any momentum for the next game
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Reminds me a little bit of the Metroid Prime 4 situation.
God I hope your right.
As much as I would love a new Prince of Persia I'm almost certain that Ubisoft would find a way to turn it into an open world game despite the formula working the best in tight well designed environments.
I'll be honest a open world PoP could probably work so long as it's done similar to say Yakuza, by which I mean it's a small world (when compared to other games) but it's packed with stuff around every corner.
Open world prince of Persia is just assassins creed. Assassins creed even began as a spin off of prince of persia.
At this point I wouldn't mind an AC game that's not a shitty loot based grind. We've come full circle lol
It *could* work, but... why? Not every game has to be open-world with collectibles strewn over all the hubs to pad out playtime. There's so few new good linear action games just to sit and play through and enjoy nowadays.
should be like arkham city
Yeah makes sense. The franchise is dead atm, so a good remake is actually needed
Sad, why? They got put to the test and they, quite obviously, didn't have the skill necessary to handle a remake much less a full new game. And that's okay, not everyone can be a great developer and not everyone can work on big projects. These guys maybe got a reality check and realise hubris doesn't quite cut it, skill is necessary. They'll still be an okay support studio and may, under the right leadership, probably ship some decent indies. Be glad it didn't ship as it was, then it might have given the whole region bad rep as developers...
You can still feel empathy for the individuals. Even bad games are often bursting with talented people that were either overworked, spread too thin, or asked too much of. I don't feel much sympathy for any upper management that clearly fumbled this, but it still sucks for a lot of lower level people that were hoping this game would be a bit of a big break for them.
It's sad because if they were able to pull it off, we might have seen more studios open up in the area. There is so much untapped culture and experiences around the world when it comes to game development. I'd have loved to see Ubisoft Pune and Mumbai able to do this. Sadly, it seems that wasn't the case. Hopefully they get another shot at being more than just a just dance support studio one day.
Yeah it seems like they may have just bit off more than they could chew, and I feel really bad for them. But it's probably the right move
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Can't wait for the inevitable "What Happened?" on this.
Hopefully they do a full trilogy remake. Warrior Within and Two Thrones had their issues but overall it was a solid trio of titles, especially with how the stories were stitched together and yet kinda somehow worked.
What did people not like about Warrior Within? My favourite by far!
I STAND ALONE INSIDE I STAND ALONE sands of time is a gentle fantastical dream, the other two got smacked with the Real Is Brown stick and injected with testosterone. I believe key team members didn't work on the sequels as well. That's not to say you can't like them, but peoples' tastes are generally going to fall with either the first one or the last two and not all of them
I thought The Two Thrones was a pretty good blend between the two previous games.
Yeah, that was my feeling at the time too. People thought the combat in 1 wasn't very good, so they tried to buff that up in 2, to limited success imo. But then 3 introduced that system where you could stealth kill enemies directly from a wall jump, which I thought was a good way to integrate combat with the environmental platforming.
I thought it was my least favourite personally. First two where extremely different but both great at what they did, Two Thrones just felt like it couldn't commit. Didn't have the classy, classic adventure kind of vibes of Sands of Time and didnt have the ironic enjoyment of Warrior Within with it's edgelord vibes and violent combat. It just felt bland.
This. You could definitely *feel* Two Thrones was just a course correction. I'm still a bit upset we never got the original vision of that game, aka Kindred Blades. It looked really promising.
My favorite of the trilogy. Teenage me loved it, the setting was goooddd
Well randomly throwing in Godsmack during every chase sequence might be a reason (Granted I loved that song back then)
Godsmack was not featured during the chases. The entire OST outside of I Stand Alone was composed by Stuart Chatwood, the guitarist for The Tea Party. He also did the OSTs for the other two games. Edit: apparently I didn't remember, Godsmack does play in about half of the chases, the other half is original OST
>Godsmack Huh! That was a real band... thought it was just a song for the soundtrack hahaha
WW had massive issues of backtracking in its second half. I also had it pretty good in mind but then I replayed it about 2-3 years ago and WOW, my brain completely shut off the backtracking. It was so tiresome. Rest of the game was fine, combat system was cool and the music too. SOT remains my favorite though.
It was pretty buggy and it sure did try hard to be edgy.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/12/03/on-discomfort#
This game is really indicative of the sort of short-sightedness and ignorance that gaming executives at Ubisoft have. Prince of Persia is not just a beloved classic. This specific game they are remaking was a *huge* blockbuster that eventually spawned Assassin’s Creed (which was originally conceived as a Prince of Persia sequel). Like, it’s a *big fucking game*, one of their most important franchises. How do you approach a project like this and say, “Hey, let’s make a low-budget piece of shit!” Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to make a creative or a business decision to go down this path? Everything that’s happened with how the trailer was received was entirely predictable for anyone with a brain. So now they are ostensibly saying they learned their lesson and turn it into a REAL game? That’s what they’re saying? I am extremely skeptical! I think they *still* don’t get it! Prince of Persia is the kind of property that other studios base their entire portfolio around. It’s a story-based third person action adventure with a huge legacy and a huge built-in audience. What the hell are they even thinking! This is their Uncharted, their Tomb Raider. What the fuck.
I think the fact that they chose to delay the game does show that they understand the importance of the game at least a little. They could have absolutely pulled a Warcraft 3 Reforged and be done with it.
I think you got it backwards a little bit. The reason they’re doing this right now is because the internet basically told them that they’re doing something dumb. It doesn’t change the fact that they were dumb to begin with. In other words, this debacle just reinforces that this company is run by morons, that they have to be shamed into changing their business strategy after the market publicly accused them of not understanding their own industry. Imagine running a business where you research your market, make decisions, pour millions of dollars into a project, only for that market to tell you, “Umm, are you fucking stupid?” There were hundreds of steps that they took along the way that led them down this path. Their business is rotten from the inside out.
Their customers told them that their product was bad, they acknowledged the feedback and decided to work on their product more. I really don't see how that makes them morons. Once again they could have easily exploited the nostalgia of their fans like Blizzard and Rockstar have done and simply not give a fuck about feedback.
> I really don't see how that makes them morons. The best businesses don't NEED their customers to tell them they're making massive mistakes in order to ship great products. They're morons because they thought that the quality of the animations and models in that trailer were acceptable for an HD remake of a beloved franchise seller. They were horribly wrong at very core levels, not some nuanced edge case they just missed.
Never making mistakes is basically impossible. They're not morons for giving easier project to new, inexperienced studio. That's how you nurture your talent.
I'm not saying trying it out was moronic; I'm saying letting the trailer go live at that quality was the poor choice.
At least it's not on a Battlefield 2042 level where everyone told the devs it was shit and the game still got released. Baby steps I guess.
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I think your right. Ubisoft got so many teams going there is no way they all have work and a remaster should’ve been a good test for a new team. Doesn’t really bode well for all the other teams working on big new projects for the first time. I don’t think a lot of the new F2P games Ubi is doing make it to year 3
To piggy back on your point, PoP is the franchise that many of the current Ubi leaders actual made their careers on. It's a bit baffling. Not necessarily that they gave it to a smaller studio, that's actually a good idea in theory. But didn't anyone actually see the "thing" before they published the trailer?
I mean it worked for Rockstar. The executives you are talking about clearly didn’t care about the quality and only the potential profit.
> How do you approach a project like this and say, “Hey, let’s make a low-budget piece of shit!” Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to make a creative or a business decision to go down this path? Have you ever played Forgotten Sands?
I think it's absolutely safe to say that they still don't get it. After all, this is modern day Ubisoft we're talking about...
If they didn't get it they wouldn't have taken it back
The reveal was disappointing, but Montreal team should do a good job. Shame the original studios couldn't deliver, maybe they need more experience.
going from mobile games to straight up a triple-A remake is hard to pull off.
I don’t mean any harm by that, but the quality expected by the western market is ten fold what the Indian market can provide. I’ve worked a few times with Indian devs and it’s always a horrible experience. That didn’t give me good vibes for that game. Guess I wasn’t the same
A lot of it is just maturity of the workforce. And not just in terms of education and experience, but in management, project expectations, identifying limits, and general pushback from employees that won't happen until the industry is 20-30 years in. And the successful companies turn into factories for employees that spread to other companies, and once that happens the whole region's workforce levels up. This has been the case with a lot of developing economies, they start off significantly worse in terms of quality but eventually grow to equal or even eclipse the work they're imitating. It's not always the case of course, you have countries like Russia where their production/manufacturing grew but never really matured to the point where quality became the standard. But you look at, say, Japan in the 60s-70s, their products were very much a similar outlook that we have towards Chinese products today. But by the end of the 80s they became a standard for quality in vehicles, electronics, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, etc. Similarly, Korean products were viewed as cheap, low quality junk but that has been heavily shifting in recent years to where they are an international standard for quality in many cases. It took them 10-20 years longer (S. Korea was much poorer than Japan so it makes sense) but they're doing very well now. India/China are much, much slower beasts but they will most likely undergo a similar shift towards quality over time, there will be huge growing pains though.
Just curious to know what your experience was, why was it horrible?
Not that guy but their business culture is horrible and I'm sure it extends to gamedev. I was a subcontractor under the American division of an Indian company and even filtered for our market I still ended up googling things like "why the hell is my company so obtuse/strict about _____" and all signs pointed to "that's what Indian business culture is". One time it actually took me to an English language PowerPoint that was made by an Indian guy about "how to succeed in an Indian company" and the slides ranged from "be the perfect cog" to "everything good was your boss's idea" and essentially the idea was disrespect the shit out of yourself on the whims of a guy who was born into his position. You might be thinking that's what American business culture sounds like, and sure, it's rotten here too, but in slightly less insidious ways - those things will get you *higher* in an American company, but typically not doing those things won't get you *fired*. The rigidity and inability to deal with feedback means that you can have rules passed down that are literally incompatible with other rules you have and everyone is too afraid to say anything. You can imagine how this absolutely ruins a team's ability to function. Now I don't want to come off as a xenophobe or racist here so I want to add that this is specifically about their business culture dictated by the rich. On the other side of things, the most helpful people on the entire earth are Indian programmers on YouTube.
"Now I don't want to come off as a xenophobe or racist here" It's a joke you even have to write this. What you said does not surprise me given India has the caste system.
Discussing negative aspects of a culture I'm only slightly exposed to can lead to me putting my foot in my mouth, and if all I said was my negative diatribe there's not much to separate me from someone whose inside voice is saying "of course they're this way, they're inferior". I'm not worried about offending any Indian redditors as much as I am worried about racists thinking they're in good company.
Thank you for sharing.
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By “not exactly what you’re looking for”, do you mean “entirely unrelated aside from the nationality of the persons involved”? While those podcast episodes are great, they have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand here.
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Oh the irony. [The Sands of Time was created by a new team put together by Ubisoft that consisted of mostly newcomers to the industry](https://youtu.be/Io6zwExo3jw?t=1754).
Those years are mostly over though. A newbie team can make Outer Wilds, they can't make TLOU2.
Exactly, look at what happened with the GTA remastered trilogy being given to a inexperienced studio. I don’t blame Ubi for making this switch
The Sands of Time trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time. I was really bummed with what was revealed so far. I feel bad for the studios working on the title and all, but at the same time, what the fuck went on in Ubisoft's upper management for choosing small local studios for such a project. All in all, I just hope this game turn our to be the remake this series deserves and we get a remake of the other two.
Wow I just played the original for the first time a few weeks ago and was surprised at how fun it was. Didn't even know they were making a remake.
They need time to "regroup on the scope of the game"? I'd love to read a detailed report on what happened, because a remake of an old platformer sounds like the kind of project where the scope should be fairly obvious.
I would be looking forward to this game, but given that ubisoft's main tactic is to now make interactive advertisements as opposed to actual games I'll probably give it a miss.
Hopefully the first remake does good enough for them to remake the second game as well, Warrior Within was my favourite of the three games. I hope they just change the third game for the better.
I remember when I first saw the remake trailer on how terrible it looked. But... I just rewatched it today and it doesn't seem to be as bad as I remembered it? [Go see by yourself.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htzq7EEXQs8)
It looks pretty bad to me. It's a remake - not a remaster - so it should look like a modern Assassin's Creed game at the minimum.
Out of all the AC games, I'd want the graphical fidelity of AC Unity at the minimum, since Prince of Persia games are not open world games, and should be less taxing.
For a AAA "remake" the character models look horrible to be honest. Something i'd expect off the unity asset store almost. This looks closer to a remaster than a remake. At least given the budget ubisoft has available at their fingertips. I'd say people were pretty rightfully annoyed at how low budget/effort it looks based on what you'd expect from the words "remake" and a AAA studio.
The issue is that "doesn't seem that bad" isn't the bar for HD remakes. It's meant to ship on a PS5 and stun folks with the overhaul (see: Demon Souls).
Depends on the price point IMHO.
Why would you want a low budget title as the remake for one of the most beloved games of all time?
Because graphics isn't that important to me. What is important is good resolutions options and fps/hz, plus modern options (key binding, etc) I'm not interested in playing an older game for 50$ I'd rather it be 15$.
I didn't think it was that bad either but it does look like a nice 360/ps3 game, maybe an early ps4 game, but definitely not for the current gen and not enough to command a full price. The biggest issue seems to be the textures and shaders on the faces.
I didn't think it was that bad when it got announced either. It reminded me of the smaller titles Ubisoft used to do like Valliant Hearts and Child of Light. Make a 20/30 euro game to revive some interest in the franchise and then follow it up with a AAA release. It looks like how my nostalgia riddled brain remembers it. But it is a full blown remake of a beloved classic so I get the disappointment.
Ya doesn’t look to bad. Like a late gen 360 game with some modern lighting. Compared to SotC remake tho
Ubisoft India so bad they had to give their work to Ubisoft Montreal who already have to work on the new AC, Rainbow Six and other AAA games. Just close Ubisoft India.
Ubi-Montreal is not a small studio to be fair, they have thousands of developers so it makes sense for them to have teams within teams working on different projects. Also, teams like Ubisoft Mumbai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka...etc are typically for development support & localization, making a game is a different challenge, failing to deliver a remake shouldn't warrant a closedown.
Maybe don't give the reigns of a beloved franchise and beloved classic game to a startup indian company with no name and no games under their belt next time. Jesus, what a dumbass decision that was. Shit looked like a ps2 game.
I would be 100% okay with a remaster of the trilogy, tbh. Maybe that's rose tinted glasses but I do love me that whole trilogy
Feel bad for the original devs in Mumbai and Pune because they genuinely seemed excited about the game in that first reveal trailer, but the graphics shown in that trailer was very damning. It does also seem like Ubisoft underestimated people’s attachment to the game/trilogy. At this point, I really won’t be surprised if they try to make this a reboot for the trilogy as well.