At last year’s E3 event during Ubisoft’s conference which included the whole show being hosted by Community’s Joel McHale and offered a glimpsed into the billion dollar hit Avatar also included a look into Ubisoft’s future.
One of the overlooked features that was talked about was a service called Uplay. I almost completely forgot about it up until I popped in my Assassin’s Creed 2 copy. When on the main menu the Y button told me I can enter Uplay. Now I have joined hundreds of gaming/developer sites in the past and it was nice to see that somehow my gamertag was connected to one of these accounts.
What the feature held though was great. For unlocking certain achievements in-game you were able to use those achievement points in a Dave & Buster’s/Chuck E. Cheese way. Where you can earn those credits and then unlock rewards for them. I personally spent 40 of the points I earned on an exclusive map in AC that lets me go through the family crypt and 10 points on a Uplay Assassin’s Creed II theme for my dashboard.
Now I think I have 70 points left over and I have the ability to buy Altair’s outfit from the first Assassin’s Creed or additional throwing knives but with the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction a month away I think I will save them and put them towards possible rewards in that game or any other game that will be using that system.
You are also given the ability to sign in on the Uplay website with your account information and see rewards you can get and even a sneak peek into what Splinter Cell:Conviction awards you can get.
Ubisoft seems to be taking an approach like Bungie though although the community isn’t there on the site as much as Bungie you can sign in and open a Web Battle client which compares your stats with other Assassin’s Creed players and do a simulated battle to see who the better player would be. With this though you can take a deeper look into your stats i.e. meters ran/swam/climbed/paddled with gondola, kills, assassinations, air assassinations, and other things. Which is quite a nice feature to be offered by such a huge developer that doesn’t really need to offer such a thing and not be successful.
The last feature I enjoyed though was the fact that your account tracks all these statistics for that game but it also has a hidden achievement system inside of it like perform 200 hidden blade kills,blend for five minutes, and cover 500 meters on gondolas are just a few of the achievements but each one either unlocks a wallpaper, video clip, or music.
This is a lot cooler than I thought it would be, although it is simple now, the fact that the gamerpoints I have earned over my tenure on the 360 (along with other people earning points on their PS3 or PC) may not just be a glorified statement of how big of a geek I am thanks to at least one developer.
