Ubisoft is killing the best game it’s made in years

Rainbow Six: Siege entered with a flashbang, but may leave with a whimper.Evolve is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where a team of hunters chase down a monster. It was made by the hugely talented Left 4 Dead developers over six years before being released early in 2015, and I thought it was great. But publisher 2K, so convinced of the game's quality, put in place various DLC packages and pre-order bonuses to milk what it expected to be an enormous community. The perception took hold that Evolve was ripping off players—who had to buy the "core" game first—and it failed to sell in anything like the numbers expected. Now it's dead.
An unfortunate series of unwanted slaps
Self-incriminating release notes
As things stand, Siege is a potentially brilliant game that's smothered by the very people who would benefit if it succeeds. You don't have to look far in the FPS graveyard before seeing games that deserved better, and Evolve's corpse is so fresh it's almost twitching. No game has a divine right to succeed, though. Zealots like me can only pray Ubisoft sees the light, even if it may already be too late.Perhaps Siege is seen internally as potential sequel material, Ubisoft's own Call of Dutycookie-cutter, rather than a platform to be grown over time—but that would be so short-sighted, and such a waste of potential, that it has to be called mismanagement. Siege's quality is so high in parts that the game could become a serious e-sports platform and, given time, might even surpass the mighty Counter-Strike.

Rainbow Six: Siege walks a dangerously similar path.

Launched just before Christmas in the kind of primetime slot that with hindsight so often looks like a graveyard, Ubisoft anticipated that Siege would achieve lifetime sales of over seven million copies. For many reasons, however, Siege has thus far failed to make a commercial impact. The tragedy is that Siege offers something new and unique in the stalest of genres, the mainstream FPS. At one point it even looked like it might usurp the greats of the competitive shooter world. What's stopped it? Ubisoft.

Siege is riddled with evidence of top-down game design edicts. Prime among them is that the game is sold at a premium price (a rapidly-falling £50/$60), but at the same time includes a layer of microtransactions based around XP boosters—which will help players unlock stuff faster—as well as cosmetic weapon skins and a season pass for future DLC content. That might sound heinous, but it's to the credit of the development team at Ubisoft Montreal that it doesn't encroach too much on the core experience. These microtransactions, however, haven't had a good impact on the game's image, and much like Evolve, Ubisoft is in danger of losing players before they've even given the game a try.

Ubisoft's hasty "free weekend," launched shortly after release, as well as falling retail prices haven't helped. Some looked at this, and the layer of microtransactions that already existed in-game, and reached the understandable conclusion that Siege would soon enough be a fully free-to-play game, making people evenless likely to try it out. It's hard to think of how Ubisoft could have botched it more completely.

Luckily we don't need to, because the game itself represents one of the most chaotic and heroic product launches of recent times. Chaotic because it was released in an unfit state after a beta that clearly showed it wasn't ready (I'll come to the specifics). And heroic because, amidst the debris, Ubisoft Montreal threw out the schedule of one-patch-per-month in order to deliver three substantial patches in the game's first six weeks.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that Siege is so very close to being one of the greatest competitive shooters ever made. The destructible environments result in wonderfully dynamic matches, where positioning and an intimate knowledge of the map is everything. Plus, it's sprinkled throughout with beautiful touches, like the asymmetric preparation phase, where attackers search for the objective with drones while defenders fortify it. This is a special game that, after years of being a Counter-Strike junkie, pulled me away and felt like a true evolution of the genre—a notable feat given the genre's inclination towards big budgets and homogeneity, where whatever is successful is copied ad infinitum.

The issues are legion, with the most serious centring around Ubisoft's servers. At launch these had a tick rate of 30, which is how many times per second it updates the position of each player. This is not nearly high enough for a competitive shooter (CS:GO pro matches are on 128-tick servers), and sure enough one of the first switches was to 60-tick servers. Latency was a major issue at launch too, but despite patches that claimed to fix it, you can still be shot by someone that you just didn't see. Even worse, the killcams often show how unfair everything was, with your killer shooting a full second after you got into cover, yet the boomerang headshot still landing.Siege is a unique experience and in many respects an enormous step forward. But it's almost like, for loving it so, every so often it has to give you a slap, just to bring you back to reality.

Server problems like this are accentuated by the fact that Siege doesn't have a server browser—which you'd expect from any competitive FPS on PC—but is sidelined here in favour of Ubisoft's own servers. This puts Ubisoft's credibility at stake with regards to online, because if the publisher's matchmaking and servers aren't good—and at the moment they're terrible—players have nowhere else to go.

It's a make-or-break issue for Siege, but we should also bear in mind that, among the major publishers, Ubisoft specialises in singleplayer blockbusters with multiplayer modes. It's not really an online specialist—and, wow, does it show. Forget latency: sometimes it's a triumph to even connect to the game. "Error 41" disconnections were all the rage in the first month, though those now seem to have been fixed. But people still disconnect all the time for other reasons—and when it's party members who remain on voice comms in other programs, the problem isn't with their router.

Even when matchmaking is successful, there's a small chance it'll just leave you stuck on a blank screen until you close the game. Sometimes matchmaking takes so long you just give up and play something else. And then sometimes you get a game, have a good time, and then at the end it can't "synchronise data" with Ubisoft's servers and you don't get any of your hard-earned XP.

The three patches released so far claim to address such issues but, despite a general improvement, bad things keep happening. In some cases it's gotten worse. In ranked matchmaking, when you do eventually get into a game, one team often hopelessly outclasses the other. Bizarrely, the casual playlist produces much more balanced matches. A lot of my ranked games are 4-0 defeats or victories, and when you look at the ranks afterwards it's obvious why: one team has some bronze and silver players, and the other platinum. It is mind-boggling for a game of this quality to have such problems.

We could let Siege damn itself, in fact, by noting some of the things that have been fixed. Patch 1.1 changed the nearly-unforgivable launch netcode that meant you were regularly killed by people that hadn't yet appeared on-screen, as well as the charmless issue of random players' microphones permanently transmitting during matches. Patch 1.2 introduced the ability to let you manually change the data centre you're connecting to by editing the gamesettings.ini file. Very PC gamer. The developers justified this as the quickest way to get a fix out there for a common problem, before adding it in-game, which is fine, but does bring to mind a mechanic hanging off the front of an F1 car.

Finally Patch 1.3, released January 14, claimed to introduce more anti-cheating protections, but was (understandably) light on details. As Ars readers know, there's nothing better than spotting a cheater, but I'm also cautious of being too hasty, because people online shout "cheat" all the time. It's not endemic but there are definite cheaters in Siege, and a wall hacker is an enormous problem in a game where you can be shot through most walls. Don't get me started on the lack of a structure to deal with griefers and teamkillers, because we could go on like this forever.

I adore Siege but this stuff drives me nuts, so for those on the fence I can only imagine what it looks like. Stockholm syndrome? I just had a game playing as the Fuze class where—after placing a cluster charge on the outside of a boarded window—a clever defender blew out the window from inside using a nitro charge. My cluster charge, however, remained in position, suspended in space, and I triggered it to send in three grenades for an undeserved but delicious kill.

Glitches like this can be fixed easily enough, one would hope, but body parts clipping through walls is a more intractable problem. On the defending side Siegeis very much about camping, but if you're next to certain walls bits of your anatomy or gun can clip through them. This happens especially when prone, because the player's perspective is disconnected from the character model in the sense the latter can occupy impossible positions so the former can take realistic sightlines. This is not an easily solvable problem because, basically, it's a trade-off the developers have made. But one has to question the wisdom of that deal in a game where positioning is king.

If I ever meet Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, the first thing I will say is "give up on uPlay." One has to respect that any publisher Ubisoft's size wants to have its own distribution platform and "social network," but not at the point where it is actively making that same company's games worse for the player. Siege uses uPlay to handle team invites, and it only just manages. Sometimes the invites don't go through, or it drops players between screens, and is a pain when you just want efficiency.

More than anyone else I feel sorry for the developers of Siege, who have made the game of their careers. It is an absolute peach, but while they're firefighting so many issues there's no time to look at long-term refinements for balance and maps. It's like Ubisoft's management doesn't comprehend just how good Siege is, or how much its potential is harmed by Ubisoft's servers and uPlay.