Ubisoft : le Top 2013 des meilleurs jeux de la concurrence

Une fois n'est pas coutume, Ubisoft a décidé de se plier à l'exercice du Top de fin d'année. Plusieurs personnes influentes de la firme ont donc dévoilé leurs meilleurs jeux de 2013 sur le blog de l'éditeur, hors jeux Ubisoft, histoire de mettre de côté l'esprit corporate. Parmi les personnes courageuses qui se sont portées volontaires pour expliquer leurs choix, il y a le Game Director d'Assassin's Creed IV : Black Flag qui a élu The Last of Us comme le meilleur jeu de 2013. Le Creative Director de Splinter Cell Blacklist s'est laissé emporter par GTA V qu'il considère comme étant LE jeu de l'année, tandis que le Game Director de The Division vote massivement pour DOTA 2. Quand au responsable de l'animation pour Watch Dogs, il est partagé entre The Last of Us et GTA 5, qu'il classe respectivement premier et deuxième de son classement. Quant au Lead Game Designer du multi d'Assassin's Creed 4, il choisit aussi le jeu de Rockstar Games comme étant celui le plus influent de 2013. Toutefois, dans ce Top 2013, on note quelques bémols puisqu'on retrouve des jeux de 2012 dans le listing, tels que Skyrim, Borderlands 2 ou Dishonored. On a dit 2013 messieurs...

Ashraf Ismail
Game Director

Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag

1/ The Last of Us
Incredibly well-executed game on every front. From storytelling and cinematics to the level design, pacing and more, all of it is topnotch. This is incredibly difficult to achieve and something that I have the utmost respect for. Besides that, I had a blast playing through the experience!

2/ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
I love when games try something new and out of the box. But even more wonderful is when the narrative and the mechanics push you to feel and live the story more powerfully through the game systems. This was the allure of Brothers. The relationship between the characters is represented in the controls and puzzles of the game, which helped make this a big hit for me!

3/ Path of Exile
I love action-RPGs, and this one surprised me – specifically, how intense and complex the skill system is. You can create virtually any type of character you want. There is a lot of exploration and investment to do in this system and it gives an insane amount of replay value. At the end of the day this game created its own strong identity even if it may superficially look like a Diablo clone. It is definitely not !

Maxime Béland
Creative Director

Splinter Cell Blacklist

1/ Grand Theft Auto V
This is game craftsmanship to a level that I’ve never seen before. The attention to detail is mind-blowing. From your GPS that doesn’t work when you’re in a tunnel to the sandals that flip and flop when you walk, everything in the game is just crazy. Usually, a game has to cut a few corners without the player noticing. Grand Theft Auto V flipped that and said, No, we’re going to care about everything. The details don’t just matter because they’re beautiful. You want to love things, but why would I care about something that the creator didn’t care about? In GTAV, it felt like the people who made it cared about the details and put in the effort for all those little details. That’s on top of the systems in the game working really well and the story being great and the characters being entertaining. But the attention to detail and the level of craftsmanship in GTAV definitely made it my game of the year.

2/ Rogue Legacy
These days I’m really interested in games that change the way games are structured. Rogue Legacy is a roguelike game. That means you’ll play it, you’ll die, and then you spend the money you earned to improve your character… then play again and hopefully make it a bit further before dying again and repeating the process. You’re always replaying a different map because all the maps are randomly generated. But Rogue Legacy is, in some ways, more about the meta game surrounding the game than the actual gameplay. I really like games that do that. Rogue Legacy is definitely a game that did that well. I’m still playing it now.

3/ Borderlands 2
A lot of the games I play are co-op games. I have a great friend and we play multiple times a week together (that is, when we’re not working too much on the game we’re making). We try to play every big co-op game together and Borderlands 2 is one that we both put over 100 hours into. The gameplay is simple enough that you can jump in and be talking about other things in the real world and still be enjoying the game – and then there are these moments where the game spikes up the difficulty and you hit a boss and you have to focus on co-op strategy and tactics. The gameplay has the perfect level of depth. It’s deep enough that you’re leveling up a lot and becoming better and getting better guns, but at the same time the subject is light and really funny. It’s the type of game that when you’ve spent 12 hours at work, you can just go home and play a couple of hours, then maybe go to bed without a headache that night. It’s one of my favorite co-op games.

Ryan Barnard
Game Director

The Division

1/ DOTA 2
Quite simply DOTA 2 is the best MOBA developed to date. An updated version of the original Warcraft III mod DOTA, D2 is beautiful, challenging, very rewarding, deadly, frustrating (at times), deep and an extremely well-balanced team PvP game.

2/ Hearthstone : Heroes of Warcraft
What League of Legends is to its inspiration (DOTA), Blizzard’s Hearthstone is to Magic the Gathering. Meshing the collectable card gameplay of Magic the Gathering with World of Warcraft–themed classes and spells, Hearthstone is very easy to get into but has some surprising depth with class and card synergies. But most importantly it’s just a flat-out blast to play !

3/ The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim
Really set the bar for me personally for open-world RPG immersion, exploration and character choice. They do a great job at delivering with a triple-A main storyline while not forcing their players along any one path of the game. It is up to you as a player how and where you want to adventure. (I know that the game has not been released in 2013, but I’ve spent lot of time on it this year !)

Colin Graham
Animation Director

Watch Dogs

1/ The Last of Us
As an animator you can’t help but admire Naughty Dog for creating such a gorgeous game with amazing character animation. The interaction between Joel and Ellie in the world they crafted was riveting, and the scenes were so believable I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

2/ GTA 5
There’s just nothing quite like GTAV. Every single mission was so well done with tons of custom gameplay driven along by a nice relationship between Trevor, Michael and Franklin. The mission design in particular was stellar because we often started out with one objective but the characters progressively complicate their lives leading to something surprising. I lost a lot of hours just exploring the world, and I had a big smile on my face while cruising around a virtual Venice Beach.

3/ Dishonored
I was extremely interested in Dishonored as soon as I first saw the previews, and I fell in love with the world they were creating. There is a very nice exaggeration and attention to detail that makes the world feel so rich and atmospheric. The real beauty of this game, however, is the ability to face each situation in so many unique and creative ways.

Tim Browne
Lead Multiplayer Game Designer

Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag

1/ GTA V
This was a highly anticipated game and in my mind Rockstar didn’t disappoint. I’ve been a fan of the GTA series from the very first 2D top-down version on the PlayStation. I was a little worried about the game following three different characters for the first time, but it really delivered. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and some of the choices you had to make. After the initial teething problems of GTA Online, I had hours more fun just driving around with friends robbing liquor stores, racing one another and avoiding being taken out by other players.

2/ Payday 2
Hands down one of the best shooters of the year. What’s not to love about discussing tactics and tricks before the heist begins, followed by the tension that builds as you get into position, and then remaining inconspicuous before putting the mask on and shouting at people to get on the ground. Some of the best games I’ve had were when I try not to raise any alarms and do the job quietly. Of the four different classes I mainly specialized in the Technician. What can I say, I like explosives !

3/ Don’t Starve
I was late to discover how much fun Don’t Starve is, but so glad a community member recommended it to me. It’s a very freeform game in which (as the title suggests) the main goal is to not starve to death. You have to survive an increasingly harsh environment that has seasonal weather, nasty monsters… and “Charlie,” the thing that lives within the darkness that comes for you. It’s quite unforgiving, but this game is really about learning from your mistakes for the next playthrough, which makes you want to try again to survive just one more day from your previous record.

Jeffrey Yohalem
Lead Writer

Child of Light

1/ Save the Date
Short and sweet, Save the Date reinvents the adventure game as a lexical open-world experience. Add to that one of the most engaging, real female characters I’ve seen in a game in ages and a very touching meta final act and you have my game of the year.

2/ The Stanley Parable
Explodes the stale tropes of modern videogames, while questioning the meaning of freedom and storytelling itself with rapier-sharp wit.

3/ Year Walk / Device 6
These rich journeys dripping with mood and style were both released by Simogo, which published my two favorite iOS games this year. Not only a brilliant implementation of touch mechanics, these games explore all the different mechanisms that can possibly create narrative and puzzles on iOS, even using a second app to tell part of the story.

Richard Dansky
Central Clancy Writer

1/ Saints Row IV
No other game so fully embraced the fun of being a game this year. Mix great gameplay with the winking, cheerful self-awareness of things like “Nolan North Mode” and a gonzo storyline that mashes up everything from They Live to Paula Abdul videos into a glorious narrative gumbo, and you get a level of pure, unapologetic entertainment. Also, run-on sentences, but that’s the sort of dizzying abandon the game inspired in me.

2/ Papers, Please
And on the other end of the spectrum, we have a Kafka-esque nightmare of moral murk and impossible choices. Taking player expectation of clear rules and defined rewards for following those rules – then smashing them head-on into human corruption, greed and desperation – created the same investment in player decision-making that Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead (two more games I loved) asked for, without the distancing factor of a supernatural setting. Quieter in some ways than Gone Home, but just as emotionally devastating.

3/ “AAA Games That Took Narrative Elements Seriously As Part Of The Player Experience As If It Were Always Supposed To Be That Way And Didn’t Spend Tons Of Time Shouting LOOK SHINY NARRATIVE!”
As for a third game, let me instead propose the above category. After all, we got a whole bunch of non-RPG games this year – from the Tomb Raider reboot to The Last of Us to Bioshock Infinite – that started from the premise that good narrative was an intrinsic part of the player experience and not something to be bolted on, called out, or separated from what the player did minute to minute. By taking for granted the fact that gameplay and narrative work together for the player’s benefit, they pushed the paradigm toward a better, more interesting place. Maybe it’s a cop-out not to name one in particular, but I think the trend as a whole is worth recognizing, and having each of those titles out there made the others stronger.

Julian Gerighty
Creative Director

The Crew

1/ GTA 5
Difficult to deny that Rockstar raised the bar this year. From taking down high-end jewelry stores to rappelling down elevator shafts of burning skyscrapers, the game had enough action sequences for four Hollywood blockbusters. But the moments that really got me were the quieter ones: the flights over lakes, the yoga on mountain tops, the discovery of a pot farm while driving off road aimlessly. The narrative is a blast but once you’ve exhausted its charms, there’s a whole new world of mayhem to discover. Not only is the sandbox one of the most fleshed out and coherent ever created, but GTA Online could be the gateway drug to MMOs that console players were waiting for. The ambition, scope and execution blow me away every time I revisit it.

2/ The Last of Us
Ellie. Infected. Shivs. Shotguns. Dave. The Giraffe. Ellie !

3/ Combo Crew
“Combo Crew could very well be the definitive beat-em up of the mobile age of gaming,” said Kotaku, and who am I to disagree? Swipes, taps and finger gymnastics make for a rhythmic brawler that draws inspiration from our old-school classics. Cherry on the cake? Ryu, Chun-Li and Blanca can all be played (Ken, too, but who cares). OK, full disclosure: my wife and a good ex-Ubi friend are behind the title… Both of them are tougher than me so I had to feature it. So if I had to choose another game it would be Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon (bending the rules again). Only rarely does a game embrace pop culture so well (even down to the gun designs!) that it creates a trend (see a recent kickstarter) and that should be celebrated.

Chris McEntee
Level Designer

Rayman Legends

“Compelling Choice and Storytelling”
Ever since reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child, I’ve been dying to make meaningful choices in games. The Walking Dead did it for me last year, but there were two big surprises for me in 2013.

The Stanley Parable turned out to be a game completely about making choices, and though them, you unfold the ridiculously clever and tremendously entertaining narrative in increasingly surprising ways. Never before have I played a game simply about walking through doors that kept me as engaged as The Stanley Parable has. And I still haven’t seen every ending it has to offer.

Papers, Please manages to take the most unappealing job in the world – immigration officer for the fictional Eastern European country of Arstotzka – and turn it into a compelling and surprisingly challenging puzzle game. But even more impressive, the game has one of the most engaging narratives of any I’ve ever played. It forced me to make tough but meaningful choices every five minutes. Ones that could mean the life or death of my family, or even land me in Arstotzkan jail for treason. Having choices in games has been done before, but notably neither of these two games makes use of dialogue trees or other intrusive user-interface to achieve it. They simply let you play the game the way you want, and adapt as the world reacts to your actions. For me, they’re modern works of art, and a testament to the power of videogames.

“The Game That Compelled Me to 100% the Thing”
Guacamelee is the perfect combination of Castlevania meets Metroid meets side-scrolling brawler… meets Mexico. The humor is as subtle and lovely as the art style, and the fluidity in the combination of platforming and combat is incredibly satisfying. The completist in me just couldn’t keep myself from finding every last hidden secret in the game, and I swear I didn’t even use a walkthrough to do it (this time).

“The Game That’s So Fast I Don’t Even Know What Just Happened”
Hotline Miami was a huge surprise for me, because it’s been a long time since a game has been so brutally punishing and unpredictably fast… and it’s way too fun for its own good. With its trippy colors, ambiguous story and amazing soundtrack, Hotline Miami is, as a complete package, an experience incomparable with any other I’ve had in the past.