Tag Archives: assassin’s creed

Steam Gives Ubisoft a Weekend of Discounts

Posted on by Gareth Andrews
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It’s hard to argue when you look at Steam that it’s not the leading distributor of PC games, with its digital platform offering sales and protection for both creators and players of games. This weekend it’s Ubisoft’s turn with a weekend of discounts on all of their games.

Want to grab one of their new games? Why not try about Rainbow Six Seige at 33% off, costing you only £26.79, or how about going a bit Savage in Far Cry Primal for 20% off at £31.99.

Feel like you need something in between? Why not try out Assasin Creed Syndicate for 50% off for only £19.99! Enjoyed the game? Why not purchase the Season pass, which is also 50% off at £9.99.

With Far Cry 3 at 75%, Far Cry 4 at 50% off, the modern Far Cry games all call to be purchased. But what about the older ones? Don’t worry these are also on sale, with the original Far Cry coming in at only £1.74 (75% off) and Far Cry 2: Fortune’s Edition costing only £4.99 (50% off).

Want to play some classics, grab Rayman Legends for £3.99 at 75% off or race around in TrackMania United Forever Star Edition at only £9.99 (50% off).

Classic games like Rainbow Six 3 Gold, the Brothers in Arms Series and the Ghost Recon series are also included in the sale at 50% off.

With so many games to buy, check out the full list here and brace your wallets for a steep decline in funds.

*All prices were listed from the UK version of the site and were valid at the time of writing.

UPDATE: While the games themselves may be discounted at good prices, be wary of buying in bulk as the bundles seem to cost more than if you were to add and buy the games individually. For example, the Assassins Creed Pack will set you back £27.99 but the sale puts the contents of the bundle at only £21.98, something that Steam itself even picks up and tells you. It always helps to shop around, even during sales.

Naughty Dog Used Assassins Creed Concept Art

Posted on by Gareth Andrews
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People are protective over their work, they care about the fact that if they spend time making something then they should at least have their name on it, being rewarded by recognition at least for their efforts. So imagine the surprise when Ubisoft noticed their work in Naughty Dog’s trailer for Uncharted 4?

The mistake was first noticed by none other than the head of content for Assassins creed Azaïzia Aymar.

The trailer has now been taken down but not before the creative Director of Ubisoft Montreal managed to get a quick tweet in regarding the matter.

In a comparison of the two images, you can see the only difference being a slight difference in colour and the lack of a pirate (why would you remove a pirate from a picture?)

The image in the Uncharted 4 trailer

The Assassins Creed Black Flag concept art

Naughty Dog has since responded saying that they messed up, with Neil Druckmann treating a link to a statement from the company.

In the statement NaughtyDog state that they “didn’t thoroughly vet the artwork used” for their story trailer. They go on to apologise to everyone at Ubisoft, who worked on Assassins Creed, the original artist and even their fans.

Ubisoft Project 60% Growth – Takes Assassin’s Creed Off Yearly Cycle

Posted on by Ashley Allen
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Ubisoft has revealed its roadmap for the next three years, over which period it plans to grow its revenues by 60%. The French company’s plan includes scaling back the yearly release of games in its Assassin’s Creed franchise and expanding its intellectual properties into transmedia franchises, following the production of the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed movie, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed during an Investor Day call [PDF].

Guillemot says that the AAA games industry has become less hit-driven to become a more dependable business space, at least for the major players. Ubisoft will also focus on multiplayer games with a long life cycle, high engagement, and year-round and multi-year services as part of “a clear strategic road map that has already started to deliver,” the Financial Times reports.

“We want shareholders to have the right information about where we are going and how we will get there, and to understand how dangerous creeping control could be,” Guillemot said.

Ubisoft has also announced that it will break its yearly release cycle of Assassin’s Creed games, starting this year. Instead, it will “re-examine” its approach to the series, with no new game due in 2016.

A Ubisoft blog post reads:

“This year, we also are stepping back and re-examining the Assassin’s Creed franchise. As a result, we’ve decided that there will not be a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016. Since the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity, we’ve learned a lot based on your feedback. We’ve also updated our development processes and recommitted to making Assassin’s Creed a premier open-world franchise. We’re taking this year to evolve the game mechanics and to make sure we’re delivering on the promise of Assassin’s Creed offering unique and memorable gameplay experiences that make history everyone’s playground.”

Ubisoft shares closed up 11 per cent to €22.31 on Thursday (18th February).

Assassin’s Creed Franchise Taking a Breather

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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The Assassin’s Creed franchise has seen its share of bad publicity with the last couple of games released. Assassin’s Creed Unity was a fiasco of magnitudes and while Syndicate did better, it failed to reach the same sales records as previous games. Both Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed have gotten a bad name and it looks like they’re pulling the breaks in order to take a breather and get the series back on track.

According to multiple anonymous sources which have provided credible leaks in this franchise before, we won’t see any new game in this series in 2016 at all. The next Assassin’s Creed game will instead come in 2017, giving the developing studio a little more time to come up with a fix for a broken game.

Now when I say broken game, I don’t refer to the trouble with Unity, but rather the whole concept. Assassin’s Creed is caught between the casual and hardcore gamers and with a product that doesn’t satisfy either one in the end. The original stealth approach has been replaced with a more straight on slaughter mode and the introduction of more and more firearms also disgruntled a lot of users. Not to mention the ship battles in Blag Flag, that while cool seemed totally out of place in the game.

One of the anonymous sources also leaked some information on the new games location and setup, but that wasn’t confirmed by any of the other sources. But according to this source, the new Assassin’s Creed game coming out in 2017 will be set in Ancient Egypt with the protagonist being a (former) slave. The project is codenamed Empire, but that will most likely not be the official name. The new game is said to

The new game is said to get a Witcher 3 feel with player progression and a freeform combat system. The environment is described as extremely colourful and with very little parkour. Both of these things might be something that will leave the hardcore fans disappointed. There will be horses and ships to travel, but no naval combat, oh and you’ll get a pet eagle like the one known from the Far Cry franchise.

While I think that it is great that Ubisoft is taking a breather to rebuild a damaged and what used to be one of my favourite game series, I’m not convinced that what has been leaked so far will change much. It’s just not the same game anymore.

As bonus information, I can add that it looks like Ubisoft will use the opening created by this to release Watch Dogs 2 instead, but that’s just another rumour so far.

Ubisoft Looking Into Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate SLI Issues

Posted on by John Williamson
5

Assassin’s Creed: Unity is one of the worst PC releases in recent memory and plagued by terrible optimization, bugs and instability. As a result, Ubisoft promised to learn from their mistakes and ensure Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate ran smoothly. Currently, the general consensus is quite good on modest hardware providing you disable NVIDIA’s advanced effects. On my own personal rig, I play at 3440×1440 with a single GTX 980 Ti and experienced stutter while opting for maximum settings. However, when selecting the High preset, everything runs beautifully at a stable 60 frames-per-second. SLI players aren’t as lucky and encountered a huge array of problems including hitching. One user proclaimed:

“This game EXPLICITLY advertised that it would scale well with SLI in the spec… and on NVIDIA cards at that! You even recommended the 970 as the card of choice in the recommended specifications and yet still, two 970;s in SLI perform worse than Unity. I am disappointed..”

Ubisoft’s Community Manager “Mr_Shade” addressed people’s concerns and said:

“The team are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it – it’s possible that NVIDIA will release driver updates to correct this, but in the mean time – please try using just one GPU for the game so you can play if that solution works for you”.

While Ubisoft’s intentions seem good, it’s just another example of a game with rubbish SLI support on launch. This shouldn’t be happening especially when you consider Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is a bundled title with NVIDIA graphics cards. Perhaps, the development team feels SLI is such a niche audience, that they don’t need spend the time on properly coding for two GPUs.

Would you recommend SLI or is it not worth the hassle?

Early Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate GTX 970 Performance Revealed

Posted on by John Williamson
14

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’s PC release is imminent and scheduled for the 19th November worldwide. Compared to previous titles, this is a fairly brief delay and raises questions about the studio’s ability to create an optimized port. Back in August, Sam Kovalev, Studio Production Manager at Ubisoft Kiev proclaimed:

“We have introduced several new improvements to our production pipeline and validation process, which allowed us to focus on polishing, stabilizing and optimizing the PC version very early on in the project,”

“This has been one of the top priorities for the production team this year.” 

“The additional four weeks are for us to really bear down and finalize all of the polish and optimization, to make sure the game and all of its systems are stable when it launches, so it runs smoothly for all players starting on day one,”

Without trying to sound too cynical, PC gamers have heard similar promises before and experienced poor scaling across a wide range of hardware. Thankfully, just before release, a video has emerged which provides an insight into the game’s performance. The video was originally found by Twitter user @RobotBrush who was kind enough to share the technical analysis:

The test system in question revolves around a GTX 970 played at a resolution of 1920×1080. This is a fairly popular configuration among hardware enthusiasts and shouldn’t encounter any major problems when aiming for 60 frames-per-second. To test system performance, every setting was turned up to maximum and recorded with two pieces of monitoring software. MSI Afterburner and FRAPS were both used to determine GPU utilization and frame-rate. Although, having both of these running simultaneously might have impacted on performance.

Nevertheless, during indoor sections, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate hovers around the 40-45 frames-per-second mark which is pretty disappointing albeit playable. However, once the player moves to outdoor environments containing large crowds, the frame-rate suddenly drops to around 30 and can get as low as 23. Initially, I thought the dramatic change could be a result of low GPU usage, but the MSI Afterburner clearly shows 99% utilization.

Theoretically, the disappointing performance could be improved after a release-date patch but this is still not an ideal situation. Additionally, if a GTX 970 cannot attain over 30 frames-per-second in densely populated areas, how will 2560×1440, 3440×1440 or 4K users be able to reach a playable frame rate?

Assassin’s Creed Unity And Syndicate PlayStation 4 Graphics Compared

Posted on by John Williamson
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Assassin’s Creed Unity’s technical shortcomings caused a great deal of embarrassment for Ubisoft and memes mocking the bugs were scattered across various forums. The game’s vast population density proved to be overly taxing on the current crop of consoles and ran poorly on PC due to shoddy optimization. Given this difficult lesson, Ubisoft has decided to scale back the number of NPCs to improve Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s performance. Now the game is finally out, YouTube channel Candyland decided to compare the graphics from the PlayStation 4 versions:

“We compare the graphics of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Unity on PS4. Syndicate runs much smoother than Assassin’s Creed Unity and seems to achieve a stable framerate by reducing some graphics options such as lower texture resolution, lower draw and detail distance as well as texture filtering, lower details overall, lower population density and variety. That sounds like a total downgrade, but it is not. The game still looks awesome and transports a lot of atmosphere.”

Overall, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is lacking in detail, and the entire world looks quite empty. However, the frame-rate has been improved by this and texture pop-in isn’t as noticeable. Additionally, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate introduces a dynamic day/night cycle while Unity only offered dynamic weather. While there are improvements, initial impressions show Assassin’s Creed Syndicate struggling to maintain a solid 30 frames-per-second. On this note, I’m interested to see the PC performance which will give a better indication of Ubisoft’s optimization compared to Unity.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Early PlayStation 4 Performance Revealed

Posted on by John Williamson
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Assassin’s Creed Unity suffered from a plethora of technical issues across all platforms and often dipped around the 20 frames-per-second mark on consoles. Given the huge amount of bugs, and negative publicity, Ubisoft promised to improve the optimization of future titles. However, according to footage analyzing the latest Assassin’s Creed game, it appears the frame-rate is still well below par.

The video showcases version 1.00 running on the PlayStation 4 and struggles to maintain a solid 30 frames-per-second. The frame-rate dips below 30 on a regular basis and even manages to reach lows of 25. The game also utilizes a resolution of 900p which makes the performance even more disappointing. While patches could improve things, the launch performance looks quite buggy. On the other hand, the current crop of consoles have struggled to maintain 1080p 30fps in a variety of graphically diverse titles. If this is the case, Ubisoft should have reduced the game’s resolution to make for a smoother experience.

It will be interesting to see how the PC version performs and that will give an indication about Ubisoft’s skill level in optimizing the game. Some critics argued, the release schedule of Assassin’s Creed should be prolonged to 2 years which could help improve the game’s technical performance. However, this doesn’t seem likely as Ubisoft opts for a yearly cycle to make the series more profitable.

MSI Bundles AC Chronicles: China & India With Selected AMD GPUs

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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We all like free stuff and MSI seem to agree to that, at least they have bundled a free copy of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India with the MSI Radeon R9 380 GAMING or MSI Radeon R7 370 GAMING graphics cards.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China brings you to China in 1526 where you play Shao Jun. Shao Jun is the last remaining Assassin of the Chinese Brotherhood and was he trained by the legendary Ezio Auditore, my personal favourite Assassin in the series. Your job is it to restore the fallen Brotherhood, but not without taking your revenge.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India takes you to the middle of a conflict between the Sikh Empire and the East India Company in 1841. You are taking on the role of Arbaaz Mir and the mission is to return a mysterious item, but that’s likely not going to be as easy as it sounds.

The MSI Radeon R7 370 GAMING and MSI Radeon R9 380 GAMING graphics cards are equipped with MSI’s highly awarded TWIN FROZR V cooling solution that allow them to stay cool and quite throughout your battles.

The promotion and thereby free games started on September 21st and will run until October 31st, 2015, or while supplies last. Game codes that haven’t been redeemed by July 31st, 2016 will expire, so better activate it before the code gets lost in your mail folder somewhere.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Will Shed Some Light on the Series’ Storyline

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
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Those of you who played the entire Assassin’s Creed series so far might be baffled and confused on where the story is headed. I am a huge Assassin’s Creed fan myself and since Black Flag, everything seems to have turned into fragments and totally different stories around the world, whereas everything up to Assassin’s Creed 3 seemed to follow Desmond Miles’ present story and his ancestor’s life stories.

However, Ubisoft wanted to assure its fans that everything is connected and hinted that all of it will have a meaning and be explained in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Sure, things got a bit weird since Black Flag, when players found out that the present day character is now a Templar ‘guinea pig’, but you must have seen Shaun and Rebecca briefly during the exploration side missions around the Templar HQ.

During a GameSpot interview, creative director Marc-Alexis Cote wanted to reassure fans that the story is actually heading somewhere, though the above mentioned signs were somewhat obvious. He said that the story is divided into cycles and everything up to Assassin’s Creed 3 was the ‘Desmond cycle’, as he calls it. Black Flag was actually the transition point between cycles and beginning with Syndicate, a new cycle will start and explained in the upcoming title.

Cote did not go into too much detail, of course, but judging by the actual signs who some might not have been aware of so far and what was briefly explained during the interview, we might actually see Syndicate be released with an amazing comeback in terms storyline. So how excited are you about this?

Thank you GamingBolt for providing us with this information

The E3 Hype Begins as First Banners Go Up

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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There is still a little over a week until E3 kicks off and the preparations are running at full speed. The first banners have gone up over the LA Convention Center and the hyping can begin.

This year it is Nathan Drake and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End that takes the spot across the main entrance, but that wasn’t the only banner that has gone up.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End isn’t scheduled for a release until at least spring 2016, but with a banner like that we can be sure that Sony will have some great trailers for us, if not more. It’s going to be big.

Uncharted 4 wasn’t the only banner that got up, more can be found around the Convention Center. Twitter is full of pictures and some of the ones already up are BattleBorn and Batman Arkham Knight.

It wouldn’t be an E3 event without the yearly Assassin’s Creed banner. Ubisoft made quite the large banner for the latest Assassin’s Creed game and they shouldn’t be any doubt that they too have early trailers with them to showcase the press and fans.

If you should have some downtime today and not know what to do, look through them on Twitter and have a laugh at the comments. There are quite a few good ones, especially about the Assassin’s Creed banner such as “Assassin’s Creed 2015 Rushed Game Edition” or “‘I’m pretty sure there’s been an AC banner in that spot since before I started in the industry”.

Thank you VG247 for providing us with this information

Ubisoft Will Announce a New Assassin’s Creed Game on May 12

Posted on by Cernescu Andrei
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It’s pretty safe to say at this point that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity game was not exactly a remarkable success, especially given the title’s numerous performance issues and glitches. We’ve already covered the fact that Ubisoft knew that Unity was not ready before its release, and even though the game’s tessellation patch for PC is still nowhere in sight, the company is ready to announce a completely new Assassin’s Creed on May 12.

Given Ubisoft’s resources, it’s not hard at all to imagine that the next title has been in the works for quite some time now, but it sure would be nice to see another major patch for Unity in the near future as well. The announcement is accompanied by a teaser trailer, which highlights the statement “Oppression has to end.” Personally, I’m quite curious to find out more about the upcoming game, and I do hope that it will be much more stable and glitch-free when compared to its predecessor. You can have a look at the teaser trailer by clicking below.

What do you think about Assassin’s Creed games in general? Are you looking forward to the next installment in the franchise?

Thank you Dsogaming for providing us with this information.

Assassin’s Creed Unity PC Patch Breaking SLI and More… Obviously

Posted on by Peter Donnell
2

Assassin’s Creed: Unity is somehow still broken! Yet another patch has been released on PC in the last couple of days and while it fixes some performance issues, it welcomes in a wave of new problems that are ruining the game for some players.

The fourth update for the PC release of the game breaks the Nvidia SLI compatibility, so that money you spent on a second graphics card for extra performance isn’t going to do you much good right now; at least not on this game.

When you do enable SLI you end up with diabolical flickering of the lighting and textures that are more likely to give you a seizure than anything else.

The endless saga of failures continues…

Assassin’s Creed Unity Left With 39GB Patch?!?

Posted on by Peter Donnell
6

Console users woke up to a frightening update for Assassin’s Creed: Unity, clocking in a staggering 39GB, which is what I can only summarize as the digital equivalent of a product recall. This isn’t a patch, this is a complete replacement of the game install, it’s a HUGE download, especially when you think that the Blu-Ray discs these games ship on have a maximum capacity of 50GB.

On a good quality 10mbps connection, you’re still looking at almost 9 hours of download time at full speed; which is outrageous. Not so bad if you’re on fiber broadband, but I myself only manage a steady 6.5mbps download rate, leaving me with half a day of patching a game! PC users are still to get the update, but it doesn’t look promising.

How long will it take you to download this patch? You can use this calculator to get your answer.

Latest Assassin’s Creed: Unity Patch Should Fix “Most” of the Problems

Posted on by Henry Reeve
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Can you believe it? Assassin’s Creed: Unity is still broken, but Ubisoft has promised that the upcoming “Patch 4” will fix the game’s problems. The game’s Q&A and Known Issues section on its website has been updated, adding in some new details.

The website reads that a bug that caused many gamers to have the game crash after loading a save has been given “a lot of attention”, and most instances of it should be squashed in Patch 4. A similar problem exclusive to the PlayStation 4 should also be resolved according to Ubisoft. The update reads “Work continues on Patch 4, which should bring improvements to the framerate as well as additional fixes. We’re still testing some fixes in Patch 4, so we’ll have a more detailed preview next week.”

Source: Polygon.

Assassin’s Creed Victory Leaked, Takes Place In London

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
2

It hasn’t been a great last month for Ubisoft, and to make things worse they’ve now had their upcoming part of Assassin’s Creed leaked. The next installment in the action-packed series through the animus is set to play in London during the Victorian era.

The new game has the name, or codename, Assassin’s Creed Victory and will be out next year for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC according to the sources familiar with the game. So it looks like the old console generation will be abandoned and focus shifted to the current. And there will only be one Assassin’s Creed game next year, not two like this time around.

The leak consists of a 7 minute “target gameplay footage” video that was leaked to Kotaku and that demonstrates the upcoming game. The video is said to be surprisingly slick and that it could pass for an E3 presentation. Sadly they don’t share the video, but instead just describe it and gave us a couple of screenshots. Most likely due to legal reasons. The video ends with the text that it was produced entirely in the Anvil engine, so it isn’t pre-rendered footage.

The video begins with an assassin climbing a tower and looking at London. Next it shows some potential side activities in a side alley with gambling and carriage street racing. After a leap down to the street the assassin accepts an assignment from a mysterious masked woman. The task: kill a man named Roderick Bulmer, who has been trafficking little girls for the assassins’ ancestral enemies. “The templars must receive our message,” says the woman. “You must send it in blood.”

It goes on to show some fight scenes and side activities like changing outfit as he chases the target through the train station. Inside the assassin uses what looks to be a new item, a grappling hook, to swing over the trains and kill his target. Next he jumps onto a moving train and fights off a couple more templars while crossing the River Thames. As the video ends we get a leap from the train into a conveniently placed haystack, the camera changes to the horizon and the Assassin’s Creed Victory logo appears.

The Ubisoft team in Quebec will be spearheading this game instead of the Montreal studio like in the previous parts. Maybe in a hope to eliminate some of the bad luck the last couple of releases had. Of course, like all Ubisoft games, this game will be developed across many of their studios all around the world, so it’s unknown how much difference it will make who is in the charge.

After the initial leak of this story on some outlets, Ubisoft issued the following statement: 

It is always unfortunate when internal assets, not intended for public consumption, are leaked. And, while we certainly welcome anticipation for all of our upcoming titles, we’re disappointed for our fans, and our development team, that this conceptual asset is now public.

The team in our Quebec studio has been hard at work on the particular game in question for the past few years, and we’re excited to officially unveil what the studio has been working on at a later date. In the meantime, our number one priority is enhancing the experience of Assassin’s Creed Unity for players.

Thanks to Kotaku for providing us with this information

Images courtesy of Kotaku

Ubisoft Says Sorry With Free Assassin’s Creed Unity DLC

Posted on by Peter Donnell
1

Breaking news: Assassin’s Creed: Unity launched full of bugs! OK, that’s not exactly breaking news. Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last few weeks, it’s been hard to miss the constant wave of news surrounding this game and Ubisoft.

As a way of saying sorry for the games shortfalls, which the developer promises they’re still working hard on fixing, they’ll also be offering a free DLC release.

The upcoming Dead Kings DLC will be free for everyone, while season pass holders will be treated to an additional game from a selection of Ubisoft titles for free. This is a good will gesture and obviously not intended to fix the whole issue. However, Ubisoft have said that Patch 3.0 will land very soon.

Check out the full letter of apology from Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto CEO, Yannis Mallat, here.

Workaround Provided For Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity Main Menu Problems

Posted on by Michael Hatamoto
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Gamers are reporting problems with Ubisoft’s Assassin Creed Unity, saying the game is crashing on the main menu screen.

Game crashes have hit PC gamers, Sony PlayStation 4, and Microsoft Xbox One console owners, keeping players from using the game title’s social features. It’s an absolutely atrocious problem gamers have endured, with Ubisoft trying to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Here is what Ubisoft said in a statement:

“We have discovered one of the issues that may cause the game to crash at the main menu after pressing the CONTINUE button. The issue affects all platforms. The team is working hard on a fix for those players that have been affected by this. However, for players who haven’t experienced this issue, we highly recommend you take the following steps to prevent a crash.”

Ubisoft recommends not adding in-game recent players as a game contact, and if you already have, then remove them (My Brotherhood > My Contacts > Game Contacts (using RB/R1) > Focus on a Contact (LS) > More Actions (Y/Triangle) > Remove from contacts. Gamers still having problems can submit a support ticket on the Ubisoft website.

Ubisoft has endured a rough couple of weeks, with France upset at the game studio – as Ubisoft blames AMD for poor performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity.

(Thank you to IGN for providing us with this information. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.)

Ubisoft Says “Disconnect Your Internet” To Fix Performance in Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Posted on by Henry Reeve
5

Alright Ubisoft, we get it – you don’t want PC gamers to purchase your titles, but saying this type of thing? You might as well refund gamers’ money for future titles and pre-orders right now.

The company has posted on their forums with ways of fixing the performance-related issues associated with Assassin’s Creed: Unity, with one of the recommendations from Ubisoft being “that you disconnect from your internet connection (wifi or network cable).It could potentially improve frame rate.”

Now, between you and me – this type of thing should’ve been picked up in the QA stages of the game – I’m sure Ubisoft doesn’t run their offices without Internet access, but hey – maybe I’m wrong.

Source: TweakTown & Ubisoft Forums.

Ubisoft PR Blames AMD CPUs and GPUs for Crap Performance in Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Posted on by Henry Reeve
3


In what is turning into an even bigger mess, Ubisoft PR has come out blaming AMD for the bad performance in the just-released Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

The news is coming from WCCFTech, who is reporting the news, finding Ubisoft’s statement on their forums. The rep said: “We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available.”

Gamers around the world have been having serious performance issues with AC:U, but it hasn’t been limited to the PC. The console versions have also had poor performance, but for Ubisoft to come out blaming AMD like this… wow. I don’t think this is the end of it, I think this is only the beginning.

Source: WCCFTech.

AMD Catalyst 14.11.1 Beta Drivers Now Available

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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The latest AMD Catalyst beta drivers are finally here. The updated software suite brings a small wave of features that update your system for two of the biggest game releases of the season; Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Assassin’s Creed Unity.

Neither the new Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed come with support for less than 4GB of system memory, or Windows XP. In fact, this update itself on supports those with 64-bit Windows 8.1 (update 1), Windows 7 and Windows Vista based systems. This is generally the majority of users these days, but there has certainly been a bigger shift recently at pushing out support for older systems.

Performance Improvements

  • Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare performance optimizations
  • Assassin’s Creed Unity performance optimizations

Known Issues

  • Occasional stuttering in Assassin’s Creed Unity in CrossFire mode under specific game settings
  • Small chance of intermittent screen tearing or corruption in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare on high settings 4K resolution in AMD CrossFire mode
  • Quad CrossFire AMD Radeon R9 295X2 may sometimes black screen when loading a game in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
  • AMD Radeon R9 280X/280 may experience a crash when playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and a video at the same time. If you experience this issue a work around is turning off the video while playing the game.
  • CrossFire users may experience intermittent flickering in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare menus. As a work around if this issue is seen restarting the game may cause the issue to disappear.

Important Notes

AMD is currently working with Activision to resolve the following issues in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare:

  • Users in AMD CrossFire mode sometimes experience texture corruption
  • Negative scaling sometimes being observed at specific resolutions with AMD CrossFire

If you want the best performance currently available from either of these games and you’re running AMD hardware. Then you’ll certainly want to update your drivers.

Thank you TechPowerUp for providing us with this information.

NVIDIA 344.65 Driver Update Released

Posted on by Ashley Allen
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Less than a week after their previous update, NVIDIA have released their version 344.65 drivers – Game Ready for Assassin’s Creed: Unity, in advance of the game’s launch on 11th November – to the public, available for download now through GeForce Experience.

The new driver contains performance enhancements and an SLI profile for Assassin’s Creed: Unity. NVIDIA’s website says, “The new GeForce Game Ready driver, release 344.65 WHQL, includes improvements which allows GeForce owners to continue to have the ultimate gaming platform. In addition, this Game Ready WHQL driver ensures you’ll have the best possible gaming experience for Assassin’s Creed: Unity.”

Entering the Holiday season, it anticipated that a high number of Game Ready driver updates will be released in the coming weeks.

Source: AnandTech

Ubisoft Pushing Uplay & Pulling Games From Steam

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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Ubisoft need to stop what they’re doing, get up from their desks, take a walk outside and just stay there for a few weeks. It seems not a day goes by where I don’t get an email with “You’ll never guess what Ubisoft has done” in the title. Today we have heard news that Assassin’s Creed Unity will not be available on Steam in the UK, but it now looks like it runs a lot deeper than that.

“We’ve been in discussions with Valve about Assassin’s Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK,” a Ubisoft representative told PCGamesN.

However, it now also looks like Far Cry 4 and The Crew will be joining Unity as the listings for all three games have been pulled from the Steam service entirely.

This means that if you want to purchase these games digitally, you’re going to have to download the UPlay service to play them.  The general consensus on Twitter is that no one likes Ubisoft (but that’s hardly breaking news). It also means these games won’t be cropping up in any of the popular Steam Sales we all love so much.

https://twitter.com/shadowzack/status/530569514057216000

Thank you PC Gamer for providing us with this information.

Ubisoft Must Think We’re Idiots With Their Latest 30FPS Claims

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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I’m absolutely raging this week and it’s all because of Ubisoft, who are once again talking utter nonsense to try pull the wool over the eyes of the average consumer, but they’re not fooling me! The developer confirmed this week that their new title Assassin’s Creed Unity will be running at 900P on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, which is fine, I’m sure the game will look very nice and play well enough to keep us all happy; to a certain degree, because graphics aren’t everything.

Now for the bit that has wound me up, Nicolas Guérin, World Level Design Director on Unity said that AC: Unity was locked at 30FPS to give the game “a more cinematic feel”, what a load of nonsense, this is a thin excuse for their game engine not being able to push above 30FPS, not a technical decision to aim for 30FPS.

“At Ubisoft for a long time we wanted to push 60 fps. I don’t think it was a good idea because you don’t gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn’t look like the real thing. It’s a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird”. He continued: “And in other games it’s the same – like the Rachet and Clank series [where it was dropped]. So I think collectively in the video game industry we’re dropping that standard because it’s hard to achieve, it’s twice as hard as 30fps, and its not really that great in terms of rendering quality of the picture and the image”. said Nicolas

So which is it Nic, you aimed for 30FPS because you think it’s more cinimatic, or you had to settle for 30FPS because 60FPS was “hard to achieve.” Saying it’s not really that great in terms of rendering quality is completely contradictory, higher FPS is EXACTLY great in terms of rendering quality, it’s as simple as that.

AC: unity Creative Director Alex Amancio made matters even worse by saying that 30FPS feels better, a matter that I’m sure is subjective, but looks and feels are two different things and he’s really just wiggling around the issue at hand. If anyone here has played The Last of Us on PlayStation 4, you’ll find that it’s set at 60FPS and it looks gorgeous! But you can also set it to a more “cinematic” 30FPS in the pause menu and I love the developers for doing this, as it’s a perfect example of how quickly people switch back to 60FPS once they realise that 60FPS is king for this game, which I would now like to point out is an action adventure title…

“30 was our goal, it feels more cinematic. 60 is really good for a shooter, action adventure not so much. It actually feels better for people when it’s at that 30fps. It also lets us push the limits of everything to the maximum. It’s like when people start asking about resolution. Is it the number of the quality of the pixels that you want? If the game looks gorgeous, who cares about the number?” said Alex.

What really annoys me, other than literally everything these idiots are saying is that people will believe them! Your average consumer will think “oooh cinematic, that sounds great”, but the reality is they’re just sugar coating a half-baked game engine. So Ubisoft, you show me a 30FPS locked demo and a 60FPS locked demo and we’ll hold a vote on which is better.

Stop lying to consumers, you settled for 30FPS because it was an easy target, you didn’t want to drop the graphical quality on the console editions any further in favour of higher FPS. The reality is that 30FPS is not the visually better of the two and it will have to do. Let’s hope the PC version isn’t locked at the same level.

Enjoy these technical demos that show you the difference in FPS. Gotta love that cinematic judder.

 

Assassin’s Creed Unity Launch Delayed

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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The newest addition to the Assassin’s Creed series, Unity, should have been released in October, but has now been postponed. It is however not as bad as we’ve seen it in the past from Ubisoft titles *cough Watch_Dogs cough*.

Assassin’s Creed Unity has been delayed 2 weeks to allow the developers to fix the last small bugs and put the last finishes on the game. So about the same thing we hear every time a game is delayed. The new date is now November 11. in the United States and November 13 in Europe. The news came from a blog post made by Ubisoft.

Now that the team has a near-finished game, those extra two weeks will allow them to focus on those minor adjustments that can make a big difference – and ultimately help Ubisoft deliver on the promise of the game. “We’re very confident in the game we’re making,” Pontbriand says.

The second new game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Rogue will be released on the same day. That however is sadly a console exclusive from the looks of it, at least for now, coming to Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

Thank you Ubisoft for providing us with these information.

Image courtesy of Ubisoft.

Huge Assassin’s Creed: Unit Map Leaked

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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The new map for Assassin’s Creed: Unity has leaked! Not only is this map freaking huge, but it also looks remarkably similar to maps of what Paris should have looked like in the 18th century.

The map really is quite large, Reddit user Skelaa who uploaded the image said “To give you an idea of size : just look at the “Île de la Cité” in the middle, all the streets, almost a little village”

When compared side by side to that of 18th century Paris you can really see that there are some similarities between the two and the developers have no doubt called upon a lot of historic details to help them create the location. Albeit they’ve likely shuffled a few things around to create lot of unique and rather convenient run, climb and jump friendly areas, oh and lets not forget the hay bails dotted around for your convenience.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity is already shaping up to be quite exciting, but will it just be another AC game, or can we expect some real innovation this time around? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Thank you BehindGames for providing us with this information.

Images courtesy of Reddit.

Ubisoft Demos Impressive Anvil Engine: To Be Used In Assassin’s Creed Unity

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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There are enough big game engines out there: EA’s Frostbite 3, Crytek’s CryEngine and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Ubisoft are throwing themselves into the mix with their latest and greatest game engine the Anvil Engine. The Anvil Engine will power the next Assassin’s Creed game, Unity, and a recently released video demonstrates it is a very impressive looking game. The Anvil Engine has been used to recreate Old Paris with an “almost 1:1” scale. The demonstration video, see below, reveals impressive lighting features and graphical detail.

The biggest advance of the Anvil Engine is not just the graphics, but the AI control. Ubisoft have worked hard to provide more realistic, advanced and response AI. The new engine is supposed to make NPCs incredibly unique and impossible to predict: making the Assassin’s Creed experience more unique and challenging than ever before. Of course, we’ll have to take Ubisoft’s word for it for now, but if you’re interested in finding out more then check out the video below.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIIFvysvQo[/youtube]

Source: Assassin’s Creed (YouTube)

Image #1 courtesy of SweClockers, Image #2 courtesy of Ubisoft