Hello everyone, today I want to talk about the Mission Rating System in 2013's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, 2014's Unity and 2015's Syndicate.
The way it works is that once you complete a mission in any of these games (a mission being a structured activity you need to manually activate like a story mission or an Assassination Contract and doesn't include Random Events or challenges), the game gives you an option to rate the mission you just played from a range of 5 stars.
Assuming everyone who uses this system rates as honestly and fairly instead of trolling or whatever (an unrealistic ask, I know), I can see the benefits of this system. Since the AC games are relatively formulaic and consistent in design rather than making major sweeping revisions per entry, seeing how different missions get different responses can help gauge what needs to be changed and iterated in future games. For example, if every tailing mission gets a low score from players, it lets Ubisoft know there's something really wrong with Tailing Missions and they should either be removed or changed (and they were removed after Black Flag). If every Sandbox Assassination gets a great score except Sandbox Assassination number 4/8 for some reason, it lets Ubi know they were on the right path for the other 7 Sandbox Assassinations and something went wrong with number 4.
However, I wonder if this does provide accurate data to work with anything other than something universally negative or positive. 2 Players could rate the same mission in different ways depending on lots of different factors. Let's imagine a straightforward Assassination Contract. 1 player could rate it low because it's just a straightforward side mission with no additional story or relevance. Another could rate it highly because they had a neat time using a novel strategy. Another could rate it low because it has higher level requirements than their gear and they had a rough time in combat and so on. And there's no way to send additional feedback. A player can't say they rated it low because there's no story or because it's rough in combat for lower leveled characters. They can only give a star rating. And of course, while there is a mission replay system, how many players will go back and play missions which may change their perspective? And again, all this is assuming everyone who uses the system actually uses it properly. I imagine most players probably ignore it or give troll information and very few players actually rate missions to what they feel it deserves.
I imagine Ubisoft probably already gets additional data from players' ratings. Like how much they rated it but also their overall completion, gear, levels and stats etc and that probably helps find correlations. But I wonder how that accounts for more story and lore based players?
I also wonder how long it takes to actually implement any changes the feedback offers and if that affects the validity and value of the feedback. Like, in the case of AC, Black Flag, Unity and Syndicate were made by different teams at AC and in very close succession. Suppose after Unity's release, the Unity team find that players really don't like missions focussed on Social Stealth for whatever reason thanks to the rating system, even if they tell the Syndicate Team to change their Social Stealth Missions, it would be too late into Syndicate's Development to be able to rework Syndicate's Social Stealth missions. But it wouldn't be late for the Black Flag Team. As an aside, this is likely why Origins and Ody don't have Social Stealth but Valhalla does after fans complained these games didn't have social stealth.....only for Valhalla to resume making lacklustre social stealth.
Also, one possible negative of this system is that it does show the game is a game. Something like say, Uncharted, which works hard to keep the transitions between levels as seamless as possible might not benefit from such a menu popping up when you complete a chapter.
Personally, I feel that such a system would probably still work best in AC games given their formulaic structure and design, but also for live service games like Genshin Impact since the game is constantly being adjusted and having content added so getting a sense of how players are feeling towards individual quests would be useful knowledge to have. Maybe even stuff like online shooters where after you play a match, you can say how you felt about that match and how much fun you had. Though Ubisoft did drop this approach after Syndicate. Perhaps because most players weren't using it enough? Or because Origins Onwards are much more fluid about their quests so there aren't traditional missions to trigger exactly like 4/Unity/Syndicate which made it more odd to add such a popup? I guess we may never know.
So yeah, what are your guys' thoughts on this?
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