One of the missions in the new Assassin’s Creed is having fun at EA’s expense, with its quote about ‘pride and accomplishment’.
Back during the launch of the PlayStation 3 you couldn’t move for games managing to work the phrase ‘giant enemy crabs’ into their games, in gentle mockery of Sony’s infamously unsuccessful reveal event.
What publishers and developers get up to at press events, or when talking to the public, can often end up being referenced in games, although Ubisoft really are being cheeky with this latest example.
It’s a mission in the recently released Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – part of the minotaur quest – which involves acquiring three special tokens.
You can either take part in a trail to get them or just buy them with in-game currency. But if you try to do that with the accuracy trial you get the following response:
‘You want to pay to win? Aren’t you a warrior? Where’s your honour? Where’s your sense of pride and accomplishment?’
That may not seem like anything important at first, but it’s a direct quote of an infamous Reddit post from EA, in which the company tried to defend the use of microtransactions in Star Wars: Battlefront II.
The comment became the most downvoted post in Reddit history and was instrumental in leading EA to remove microtransactions from the game and starting an industry wide pushback against loot boxes in full price games.
The problem is Ubisoft are hardly blameless when it comes to microtransactions, especially not in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – which many accuse of padding out its playtime in order to encourage people to pay money to level up their character.
Whether that’s actually what Ubisoft is doing or not is open to interpretation, but it probably wasn’t wise to draw attention to the issue in this way…
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