Ubisoft and Nvidia form gaming alliance, give journos many laughs

I could make a joke about how one of these characters represents Ubisoft and the other represents their PC reputation, but…

Ubisoft and Nvidia have announced that they’ve formed a GAMING ALLIANCE in order to “offer PC gamers the best gaming experiences possible for Ubisoft’s biggest upcoming titles.”

Specifically, Nvidia’s Developer Technology Team are apparently working together with Ubisoft’s dev teams in order to add the latest and greatest in graphics technology to Ubi’s games, including Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. This technology includes TXAA antialiasing, soft shadows, HBAO+, DX11 tessellation, and all sorts of other phrases that make me go cross-eyed.

“The PC remains one of the world’s most popular gaming platforms, and we’re committed to offering PC players the best possible experience with our games,” said Ubisoft’s chief EMEA marketing and sales officer Geoffroy Sardin, who still hasn’t told us when Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is coming to PC. I guess “the best possible experience” doesn’t involve “playing it at the same time as everyone else.”

Splinter Cell: Blacklist will also be making use of all of this shiny tech, and will actually be bundled with a lot of Nvidia GPUs – the GTX 660, 660 Ti, 670, 680, 770, and 780, specifically. In fact, they’re so focused on the PC for that release that there isn’t actually any PC review code floating around, which is why we haven’t reviewed it yet.

I’m being incredibly hard on Ubisoft here, and most of it’s in good fun, but there’s still a big difference between saying you’re focusing on PC and actually focusing on PC. The lack of PC review code for Splinter Cell: Blacklist is weird and worrying, particularly if this is indeed something that they’re heavily focusing on, and we’re still seeing PC versions of games coming later than the rest. Blacklist being on time is a good start, and I quite understand that Assassin’s Creed 4‘s PC release is presumably delayed so that it’s got parity with the next-gen console versions, but Ubisoft’s reputation with the PC crowd isn’t out of the woods yet as far as I’m concerned.

We’ll see how much all of this really means when Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed 4 launch, I suppose, plus how their gaming schedules go with 2014 when the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are actually out. For now, the jury’s still out.