Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is here and violently colon-less, despite my deep-rooted ancestral urge to fill every gap between those words with dots and dashes, as our forefathers did in the days of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
But it’s not Ubisoft’s crimes against grammar that prompted the game to hit Mixed Steam reviews at launch (it’s picked up since, and at time of writing is at Mostly Positive). It was the fact that, in typical Ubisoft fashion, the game’s store page ripples with microtransactions for outfits, weapons, and the obligatory ‘Pay $5 to play less of the $60 game you just bought’ map-reveal pack.
The reviews were home to a lot of people who felt nickel-and-dimed. “What’s the point of getting the deluxe version when, immediately in game, there’s $84.91-worth [of] ‘DLC’ that you don’t own” asked one. “I want a single player experience I can enjoy WITHOUT microtransactions,” wrote another.
Ubi, perhaps inadvisably, is actually responding to some of these reviews, though. The studio’s boilerplate response to a bunch of complaints about the game’s microtransactions reads as follows: