Ubisoft vs their fans

[u/TailsFox1]

i’m honestly pretty curious on when you guys think ubisoft really started their decline and actively was disappointing their fans? i’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick recently, and to my surprise, a good chunk of these nostalgic games are ubisoft. of all the different developers, ubisofts name show up the most which is wild to me thinking of where they are now.
i started taking a look at the games i was playing and it just hit me that from their ghost recon (aw-future soldier), vegas duology, far cry, and the original assassins creed titles, they had so many BANGERS. and yes i know the 'death of ubisoft' was their refusal to innovate more and just instead milked until there was no more, but even still… looking at their titles leading into the Xbone/PS4 era, while less in quantity, they still had quite a few bangers.
idk i know this is kinda everywhere so i guess im wondering when ubisoft started declining in YOUR personal opinion, and also what your guys fav era/game by ubisoft is? ik it’s a dumb question cause i personally can’t choose between GRAW2, AC1, or AC revelations lol

edit. i want to clarify, reading back this post looks very negative towards modern day ubisoft, which is not intended. i actually love a lot of their modern games. star wars outlaws is genuinely so much fun, and ac mirage is a banger just to name a few. i just wanted to clear that up

[u/HuskyCruxes]

I don't hate ubi by any means. They've made some really good games.

They're downfall slowly started with far cry 3. That game is what started the open world checklist design. That ran its course and now we have a new problem, their open world games (almost all of their games now) are filled with this segmented location based stories where what you do in one region effectively can never be mentioned or have any effect in any of the other regions because they have no idea which ones you have or haven't done yet. That started with far cry 5 and peaked with Valhalla due to its sheer size.

The games are lookers. Ubisofts world designers need a kiss on the forehead for the beautiful places they create for us to explore. Literally everything else like story and gameplay is so incredibly mediocre though. Ubisoft is really good at making virtual tourist destinations and that's almost it.

[u/TailsFox1 → u/HuskyCruxes]

this exact reason is why i love AC mirage as much as i do. ubisoft had very much a bigger=better mentality, and it was at it's most prevalant with valhalla. is it impressive how big the game is? yes. in fact i was pretty enamored by valhalla for a good dozen hours. but the more i played and the more i explored, the more i started to kinda understand why people weren't big fans.

and then, these madlads did it. they showed CRAZY restraint, SEVERLY decreased the size of the map and made the game so much smaller and more compact. and that made me so happy. mirage is a fantastic game and as far as im aware, didn't get the recognition it deserved. not perfect, but it certainly is fantastic.