Ubisofts games has become the epitome of generic games. But to me there isn’t that much difference between ubisofts games and the rest of the AAA lot of releases. The thing that sets some big games apart from being just as generic as Ubisofts games are strong direction, narrative or game design. Ubisofts games always feel completely lacking of any strong vision and feel designed by a committee of marketing managers rather than any visionary game designer.
Games like Red Dead redemption and God of war stand of because of their coherence and unitary vision.
Games like Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima or Spider-Man on the other hand to me are just the same games as Ubisoft makes but executed with higher quality and feel more coherent.
It’s obviously the case that AAA development has become so enormously costly that there is every incentive to make a very safe product and also that development resources will be spread out geographically to a large extent. Both of these factors make imposing a strong unitary vision on a project challenging. Apart from Fromsoft, I can’t think of a single big non-first party developer who actually do that. Arguably Square with FFXVI but that’s close to being first party and presumably Sony has made a deal that mitigated risk for Square.
Edit: totally forgot about Capcom! The Japanese publishers does seem to have found their footing quite well in recent years after struggling to adjust and scale up their operations in the early PS4 gen.
I do think that Ubisoft are aware of their reputation and standing and are making some moves to mitigate. The 2D Prince of Persia to me looks really good and the new Star Wars game look intriguing as well. The summer show case from Ubisoft was to me at least the most promising from them in a long long time.
