like Assassin’s Creed The Black Flag remake earns the dubious title of the most leaked game ever that a reader is frustrated by the publishers’ inability to keep a secret.
So this week we finally got the reveal Assassin’s Creed Black Flag resynceda game that everyone has known for three years and that absolutely everything was previously revealed. It was so bad that new leaks were still happening just hours before the announcement.
I’m reasonably interested in the remake, but I have to admit that, along with many others, I was sorry to hear about it this week. People complain that a lot of gaming news is just rumours, but when it’s all true, I’m not sure what anyone should do about it.
If the information is there, and it is obviously true, what are the websites intended to do? Pretend they don’t know? Let the rivals face them? Of course, not every rumor is true, but I think GC and other more reliable websites do a pretty good job of only talking about the reliable ones. But the problem is that this means there are no more secrets.
You could say that once the information is out, it doesn’t really matter how you learn about it, but when something is revealed through a rumor, it’s not a trailer and a big reveal like we used to do on E3. It usually starts with a developer working on a new game, then you find out that the game is part of a certain franchise, and then you start getting more specific leaks and so on and so forth.
Everything is drip-fed for so long that it has no impact. Leon being inside Resident Evil Requiem it was revealed years ago but debated whether it was true or not and then how much he really was and when it was finally officially announced… it was no longer news.
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This was relatively unusual because it was a Japanese game, and they tend to be better at keeping secrets, but they’re getting worse and worse. Now we have rumors that a new Star Fox game will be announced soon and while Nintendo are conflicted enough to delay it, just to make the rumors untrue, I expect the fact that there is a new game is right.
But when you go to American companies… forget that. Everything flows like a sieve and nothing is ever a surprise. What gets me is why don’t these companies try to stop it? If I knew that my salary would be docked if a secret was revealed, I would be very careful not to reveal it. Especially if the only benefit to me that came from it was making a few cases Reddit famous for five minutes.
It’s not just that kind of rumour, though. Why is data a thing? Why do developers keep putting references, including images, of upcoming features in their game code? They know people will find it and yet there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to hide them or rename them or anything. And job ads! How many games have leaked information through job ads and yet it continues to happen.
A lot of people complain that companies don’t make the effort to showcase their games like they used to, and I agree. E3 is dead, there are far fewer interviews these days (when was the last time we ever heard from anyone at Sony?), and even when there is a reveal, it’s just a pre-recorded video, not really a live stream.
There is a total lack of effort in trying to get people excited about the games and on top of that a total lack of effort in trying to keep things secret. I don’t know how anyone could argue that the way games were discovered wasn’t much better, and that constantly discovering new games via a sentence or two of gossip or a vague image is infinitely less interesting.
This is my only hope Activity finally got sick of Call Of Duty leaks earlier this year and now they have stopped them completely. So apparently it’s pretty easy to deal with if a company wants to. And it’s also ironic, because there were so many Call Of Duty leaks, and they were so accurate, that many people thought they were plants anyway.
I think not though. We’ll see if the lack of prior knowledge builds excitement for this year’s Call Of Duty, but if it does, I really hope it convinces the publisher that they don’t have to endure any more secrecy.
From reader Grackle
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