Ubisoft Announces XP-Farming Player-Created Quests In Assassin’s Creed Will Now Cost $4.99
Struggling to handle the flood of player-created quests in the new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Story Creator Mode that are designed as simple XP farms, Ubisoft has hit upon a bold new strategy to level the playing field and make the single-player only game fair again: charging players $4.99 to access them.
After introducing the tool Ubisoft quickly discovered that players, rather than creating immersive story content for each other to enjoy, were instead generating easy XP farm events that they could repeat over and over to power-level themselves in a way that irritatingly bypassed the Ubisoft store and its XP-boosting microtransaction, introduced to balance the game so that players who struggled to find the time to complete Ubisoft’s unending goliath could simply pay them more money to cut down on tedium.
The new decision “puts power back into the hands of the players, once they have purchased it from us,” Ubisoft says. “Like the riddle of the sphinx, solved by ancient Oedipus, we want players to crawl on four legs in the morning, walk on two legs in the afternoon, and then pay $4.99 for an additional leg at night.”
“We had a lot of robust internal debate about this,” explained Ubisoft spokesperson Wapp Billingsley in a statement. “Some of our staff insisted that any players abusing the Story Creator mode should be chained to a rock in the Caucasus for eternity and each day have their liver torn out by an eagle, while others thought maybe we should just ban them.”
“Ultimately, however, this is a win-win for everyone. Our creative players get full access to the powerful creation tools which we have lovingly crafted for them, and Ubisoft gets to accelerate the downsizing of our quest design department from Q1 2020 to Q3 2019.”
One of the leading figures in the Story Creator community is Edmund ‘Porps’ Porp, whose quests such as A Witch Curses You To Gain Six Levels and Stand In One Place While You Soak Up The XP Like The Thirsty Boi You Are have been played more than 30,000 times. He told Point & Clickbait that the change “made him feel like part of the team”.
“Nothing says ‘Ubisoft’ quite like being charged an arbitrary amount of money for something that really should have been there from day one,” said Porps. “When Ubisoft told me that they would be charging people $4.99 for my quests, I knew that I had finally made it.”
When asked whether Ubisoft was worried about “inevoking the vengeful wrath of Zeus” over their decision to deny the players who guest within their worlds with the gift of easy XP, Billingsley chuckled and assured us that the company would be “sacrificing a fattened intern” in the morning.
