Posts Tagged ‘Ubisoft’

The commercial shortcomings of Beyond Good and Evil

From NextGen,

Ubisoft plans to make the sequel to Beyond Good & Evil more “accessible” than its predecessor, in order to avoid the commercial shortcomings endured by the original.

Apparently, Ubisoft evaluated the original and somehow came to the conclusion that difficulty was the reason the title flopped at retail. Maybe, but from the comments garnered by the article this doesn’t seem to be the case. Also, I dug up the old gamespy review and “low difficulty level” is actually listed as one of the cons.

Well, here’s another explanation, the reason I didn’t buy the game was that I played the demo: great characters, interesting environments, etc., but I had the game crash or freeze on me multiple times to the point where I just gave up and didn’t bother even finishing the demo. Now, this may have just been an issue with the demo, or maybe the PC version, or a graphics driver issue but, simply put, the demo left me with a very negative impression of the game’s technical quality and even now, when I pick it up for far less than the initial $45+, I’m apprehensive to do so. Maybe this was just my experience, but it certainly seems to be a more plausible factor (among many others) than difficulty.