Assassin's Creed: Unity - 8 Unforgivable Issues That Insult The Fans

8. Micro-Transactions In A Fully Priced Triple-A Product

Yes, in an Assassin's Creed game, a title made by Ubisoft - a team with enough money to stitch it all together and sail around the world - they've still insisted on including micro-transactions. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it's the idea of gutting the core experience and selling back to the gamer specific parts of a full retail product - a practice that's spawned from the money-sucking ways of mobile gaming, infecting the bigger titles in a way that's entirely anti-consumer. Not only that, but it goes directly against the idea of games ever being perceived as an artform - as when has something like a film or book been segmented and sold back to the audience? They go all the way up to $99.99, getting you 20,000 points to then out-spec your character for use within the main game, rather than actually playing through it to experience anything close to what we'd hope the scriptwriting team originally envisioned. You can sink additional funds into things like giving your character more melee damage for three minutes (what?) or worse-yet, circumvent every semblance of game progression by simply buying every upgrade outright, from clothing options to boots and weapons. It's a terrible state of affairs when you've put down so much money, and Ubisoft have the gall to ask for more of your hard-earned to unlock additional on-disc features. In mobile 'freemium' titles Google eventually forced all apps to be advertised as such, but as we're seeing with this, Dead Space, Forza 5 etc. when this business practice invades fully-priced games it's just insulting.