My Email Stating My Disappointment In Ubisoft

Posted on by

Following on from Simon’s article on how the PC community are royally ticked off by the poor effort shown by Ubisoft Montpellier in From Dust, I thought I would share with you all my opinions on the title, and give our readership a look at the email that I sent to the Ubisoft support team, stating my utter disappointment in them. I hope that you will join us on Game Craic in knowing that this is a sign of developers becoming lazy and carefree, whilst they forget the powers of the PC platform and what it can offer.

My email went a little something like this:

I’m very unhappy with the quality of the product that Ubisoft felt was acceptable to release for the PC, as you predicted I was going to say, because I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way. From Dust is evidently a result of a very poor console port, and it is terrible that Ubisoft would even think about disregarding the PC platform when the development team could have made the game look absolutely stunning compared to the console versions. What gives?

I purchased the game from Steam, fully expecting a great quality title, but I was mistaken. This game didn’t even tickle my PC in regards to the visual memory and processing power needed, and I’m really annoyed and let down, because I feel like I have been robbed of my money. I don’t want to have to play a video game in windowed mode just so that I can use the settings from the ATi CCC to make the visuals look a bit better. It’s inexcusable, and the dev team should actually be really ashamed of their laziness and shoddy effort of a PC title.

I don’t want to have to compromise and buy a game for my Xbox 360 just so that I can get the best out of the title, because PC games should in fact be far superior to those on the console in respect to visuals, but more and more developers are letting the PC community down because they can’t be arsed to take advantage of the PCs power. What did Ubisoft Montpellier do exactly in those weeks when the game was delayed? Because I was hoping for visual touch-ups and bug fixes but it just seems to me like they all put their feet up and did nothing all day whilst getting paid for it.

I hope you realise how awful it is that Ubisoft have had me pay money that I chose to spend on their game that I had complete faith in. As aforementioned, I feel robbed, and now I’m financially worse off. You may think that £12 isn’t much, but it is when I have just spent money on a game that looks about as polished as early versions of Rollercoaster Tycoon.

Conclusion: I would like a refund, please. I don’t think it’s fair that I have essentially wasted my money on this title for the PC. From Dust is a fantastic idea, but the PC version is an absolute joke and a laughing stock in terms of controls and graphics. It looks and feels like a very low-budget game, and I expected so much better from the company and the development team.

I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed, so please do not interpret this as a rage email as such.

I look forward to your reply, which will hopefully confirm my refund, and I hope that you take my opinions on board and pass them on.

Thank you for taking the time to read,

Jay.

That was it! I could have said more, and raged more, but I thought that it was best to keep the email as formal as I possibly could, especially when hundreds upon hundreds of people have already did my raging for me on the official forums, and elsewhere.

Did you get around to purchasing From Dust for the PC? What was your reaction? Leave your responses in the comment section below. In the meantime, try and avoid this game for the PC if possible, and look to purchase it on your consoles.

JB.

 

  • Pingback: Free Game Friday: Reprisal Universe | Game Craic

  • Pingback: Piracy To Blame For Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Not Coming To PC | Game Craic

  • http://www.game-craic.com Jay

    Probably the best comment we will have in a long time. Too true. I was highly amused by the Star Wars reference, ha ha.

  • Spook

    I completely agree with you on this one Jay. Even though I’m not to bothered about the game not being “Graphically tickling” to my PC, as I’m not too fond of tech demos, I am rather annoyed by the fact that the game got shipped whilst missing current day fundamentals for adjusting the video settings to optimal performance, indeed, it is missing video settings altogether. What Ubisoft Montpelier is pulling off here is equivalent to visual communism. It’s works on consoles because everyone has the same platform to run a game on. In the capitalistic world of the PC master race however it is only proper that those with better machines get better visual performance, while in the meantime those of us with less powerful computers can take the scenery down a notch so they still get a smoothly running game. The computer the game is running on should be the bottleneck for performance, not what the devteam can be arsed to deliver, which in this case is a heap of ported shit.

    What also bothers me about this game is the ridiculous use of the mouse as if it were a analog stick on the Xbox. The camera always stays focused on the cursor (or Breath). This concept works well on consoles where you… wait for it… DONT HAVE A MOUSE AND KEYBOARD. When I play RTS or basically any point-and-click-top-down-view game I want to be able to grab something on the left of my screen whilst on the right already being able to see where I’m going to put/drop it. When I played From Dust I saw this massive flow of lava slowly progressing down hill. I couldn’t quite determine its path yet, so while I was grabbing dirt and lava from other parts of the map I wanted to see if my village hadn’t been instantly fossilized in the mean time. But not if its up to Ubisoft Montpelier. According to them it’s only natural the I wander of to find some dirt on the other side of the map only to come back to the smoldering remains of uncle Owen and aunt Beru.

    Third and last point I want to make is that I was only ever so slightly disappointed with the actual game play. While the controlling of elements are great I must say that the the complexity of tasks never goes much further than “water comes, pile dirt”. You’ve most likely been distracted from this fact by the stunning way in which “water comes” and how sand sinks down when you “pile dirt”, but after 10 missions this concept starts to wear down rather quickly in my opinion. Then again, I don’t know how the devs could have done much more with it. Perhaps they could’ve invested more in the idea they had going in I think it was level 6, where you are in the desert and you have to keep water flowing for vegetation to grow. If my villagers would harvest crops from around their villages and a lava flow woud cut of irrigation, that would be a slightly more intriguing problem to solve.

    All in all, once more we’ve been presented with a game that has towering potential, but because companies would rather have money than a steady consumer base they clipped this birdies wings once more. Shame on you Ubisoft.