Ubisoft continues to prove that they have no fucking clue what their fans want. They continue to take the Clancy brand and wipe their corporate asses with it, laughing at us while developing it, then scratching their collective heads incredulously when one of their stupid ideas fails to gain any traction with their audience.
XDefiant, their new Clancy-verse shooter, offers up something no one asked for, in a package that not a single Clancy fan would go for. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that nobody likes the aesthetic here. In a bid to appeal to the Edgelords of the world, Ubi took Clancy brands like The Division and Splinter Cell and funk-fied them, giving them punk vibes that, while fitting for a game like their upcoming Riders Republic, has absolutely no fucking place in a military shooter.
Not only is it annoyingly… well.. annoying (don’t do emotes in a shooter, just don’t), it is exponentially more insulting when you consider that Ubi is taking the Splinter Cell franchise and shoe-horning it yet again into a place where it doesn’t belong.
Look, I’ll admit that I thought the Sam Fisher cross-over in Ghost Recon Wildlands was cool. At first. But then they kept doing it. Over and over. It’s like Ubisoft was personally giving the finger to the multitude of fans that keep asking for a new Splinter Cell game. Those of us that hold out the slightest bit of hope every fucking summer for even the slightest hint that they might be making a new game.
To say this newest revelation hasn’t gone over very well would be an understatement. I just watched an entire episode of Podcast Unlocked where they essentially tore Ubi a new one over XDefiant. When the IGN guys are mad at you, you know you done fucked up.
I mean, imagine if you were hungry, and you wanted a pizza. You absolutely loved pizza, and you hadn’t had a pizza in a long, long time. You go into a restaurant and you ask for a pizza. Now, the restaurant has all the ingredients to make you a pizza, but instead they bring you a hot dog, yet it has pizza sauce and pepperoni on top. Well, you like hot dogs alright, and you love pizza, but a hot dog-pizza combo just doesn’t sound all that appetizing, and you asked for a fucking pizza.
So you tell them no, you don’t want that, you want a pizza. And they are like “ok, we’ll cancel the hot dog pizza” And you’re like “great, cuz nobody around here asked for a fuckin’ hot dog pizza.”
You wait for a while, patiently, and they come back out with your food. Only this time, it’s pizza dough, with tomato sauce, but instead of cheese and pepperoni, it’s topped off with gummi bears and ice cream. Now hey, I like ice cream just as much as the next guy, and gummi bears are always a bonus, but nobody wants it on a pizza. So again, you tell the waiter, “Hey, this isn’t a pizza. I mean, it’s almost a pizza, but then you went and threw all this other shit on top that doesn’t belong. Why can’t I just have a pizza?”
The waiter is now annoyed with you, because you keep rejecting the stupid shit they keep shoveling out to you instead of just giving you what you fucking want. He’s mad, and he goes in the back and tells the cook that you don’t know what you want. You asked for a pizza but yet I keep sending back everything they make.
The cook, frustrated and angry, says “You know what? Fuck this guy, he doesn’t know what he wants. So this is what I’m gonna do…” He then proceeds to grab every fucking ingredient in the kitchen and throw it into a giant bowl. Ice cream, hot dogs, gummi bears, cheese, tomato sauce, and even some other shit he had laying around that had nothing to do with anything. He throws some ketchup packets in there. Maybe some brown sugar. A napkin or two. He then pours it out onto a giant pan, spray paints it hot pink, and bakes it, but only halfway.
And that’s what XDefiant is. A half-baked pan of shit from the Ubisoft kitchen in a desperate attempt to figure out just what their fans want instead of actually fucking listening to them.
At this point, if you were a customer in this restaurant, what would you do? Continue to frequent the place, or just walk out and wait for new ownership?
I’m still looking forward to Riders Republic. I like the idea, but that’s mainly because it’s not trying to be anything else. It’s a mish-mash of other popular games out there like Fall Guys mixed with extreme sports and that token Ubi “punk” that they’re so fuckin infatuated with right now, but I’m okay with that. I’m not against them trying this shit. What I am against is them is them shitting on a plate and calling it chocolate, when I asked for cake.
I’m not stupid, Ubi. I can tell the difference between shit and cake.
Oh, and just as a special bonus, between the day I started this writeup and today, when I’m finishing it up, Ubisoft announced that they’re shutting down Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, another Clancy-verse mashup that nobody asked for, that featured another Sam Fisher cameo, only a year after it launched. Why do you think this happens, Ubi? How many times does the rake handle have to keep smacking you in the balls before you learn to stop stepping on the rake?
How many times will we keep coming into your restaurant when you can’t get our fucking order right?
