Ubisoft – Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (Fail) Mouse/Control Problems

I have to plop in my thoughts on a game I’ve been all excited in playing, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier on PC even on a menstrual blog because of how outraged I am. Having tweeted in the past about Ubisoft’s failure with a game called ANNO 2070 where it would require you to have a persistent internet connection to play, their commitment to failure has not ceased. In ANNO 2070, being offline would kill a variety of critical game mechanics and features. Though this is supposed to act a deterrent for those who illegally download the game, it also serves as a huge inconvenience to those who purchase it legally. With that said, those who pirated the game were much better off because it allowed people who didn’t always have a permanent internet connection to play. Point noted is that their aggressive attempts failed miserably… in fact, it solidified many opinions of my friends and I on why we should bother paying a company to release a game in which we didn’t have the “right” to play anytime, anywhere. Doesn’t it make more sense to pay $0 and have MORE rights to the game than those who paid $50?

In the past few days since the release of GR:FS Ubisoft has been “so-called” listening to the feedback of fans about the game and bugs which have cropped up. These “grand production” of games somehow pass QA when basic functionality such as keyboard/mouse fail to operate correctly when playing the game. Some people have mentioned that having any additional controllers plugged in may supersede the keyboard/mouse controls, but having unplugged all my “accessories”, the game continues to act as if I have a XBOX controller plugged in an refuse to allow my mouse to move the directional facing of my character. How did QA/Testers not see this bug? 2 patches which I’m aware of has been released, 1.1 and 1.2… none of which truly addresses the controller issue. I understand that fixing other components of the game is important, however, when your fans can’t even play the game – what does it matter if you’re “improving performance” and “enhancing gameplay”? WHAT GAMEPLAY?

Many sites such as this one recommend people hold off on buying the game, particularly for the European launch happening tomorrow (Friday). Why would you even want to support a company which screws you for your money? They’re making futile attempts to “smooth things out” with many of their customers by offering this game a one-time DRM activation requirement. I have not had any fun with this game at all, why? Because I can’t even play the game unless I’d like to only be staring straight in front of me at all times while getting shot from the side and not being able to retaliate.

Ubisoft is exactly the reason why consumers should be looking to their local pirating sources for the game, rather than paying for a product which you are crippled from using. Shit, the pirates might provider a better fix than the game maker would! Porting a game is bad enough when there are so many remnants of the console configurations lying about, but it’s worse when a game detects things that aren’t there or refuse to accept input from other devices.

I like how a Ubisoft publisher representative has ‘pledged to fix a critical bug which prevents PC users from playing the game’. Did you really need to pledge or promise something like that? This isn’t just a nuisance/bug that can be overlooked, this makes the game UNPLAYABLE. If they didn’t bother addressing it and addressing it damn soon what makes them think that consumers are stupid enough to pay for a non-working product (ok well there will always be a few fan-tards)? Even just by DELAYING a fix like this they’ve probably lost tons of customers who were going to pay for the product instead of downloading it.

Congratulations to all the people who “acquired” the game through alternate sources than paying Ubisoft.

As we all know UBI loves to blame PC game delays on piracy. Clearly it’s not a piracy issue, it’s an incompetence issue. This game is NOT finished

– Forum User

I must point out their lovely “workarounds” as well… oh right, because they’re too incompetent to release a product which works for gamers computers (probably their target market) who usually will have multiple input devices attached. In order to play the game, I will need to:

• The game is running with keyboard/mouse OR gamepad. In order to lay with the Keyboard/mouse you should remove all other peripherals (game pads, joysticks, wheels etc).
• If you had a controller installed on the PC please try to uninstall the controller drivers.

So…. it’s bad enough I have to go to the back of my computer cabinet to unhook/hook up any other input devices than my keyboard/mouse before and after gameplay, but I even need to uninstall my drivers? Good lord!

Fix your god damn product and because of your incompetence, I really hope most people will avoid buying your shoddy software and just pirate it… just like you deserve. They’ll probably use this as an excuse to go back to DRM… lol!