The troubles that hit Assassin’s Creed: Unity at launch seemingly caught Ubisoft unawares, however inexcusable it is that they could happen in such a widespread and noticeable fashion. However, since then they’ve been keeping people updated with their attempts to fix the various bugs in the game and track down what it was that is causing such disappointing framerate issues.
The most obvious thing that people likely latched onto as a potential cause for the frame drops were the game’s impressive and expansive crowds, but apparently this is not the case. Instead it’s something much more mundane, as Ubi wrote that “it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance.” This was something that wasn’t discovered prior to launch, in a relatively controlled environment, and only manifest itself in the “post-launch environment.”
In the immediate future, they’re working to try and bring a few potential fixes to the table in their third patch, including:
- Streamlining some technical aspects of navigation: We’ve fixed a number of edge cases with our detection system to smooth certain behaviors during parkour. We’ve fixed a few objects which were improperly tagged to smooth navigation.
- Improving task scheduling: We’ve tuned the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores to improve framerate in certain edge cases.
- Tweaking performance for Reach High Points: We’ve optimized the reach high points, during the camera swooping sequence to improve framerate a little bit.
There’s sadly no timeline set in stone for the third patch, but there shold be news by the end of the week on when it will arrive.
Source: Ubi Blog
bunimomike
More reason as to why I’ll sit tight with new launches unless I know it’s void of truly awful (and potentially game-breaking) bugs.
Kennykazey
There’s no way they didn’t notice the poor framerate. Just trying desperately to save some face, by the looks of things.
Youles
I agree!
jayjay119
I agree as well. Especially as they made such a big deal of ‘capping all versions to 30 fps to avoid the comparisons’. Seems as though the excuse for that is far more simple; they just couldn’t get it to run at a solid 30 fps let alone 60fps which is what PS4 users expected.
TSBonyman
I believe them, we all know that crowds don’t form queues at the best of times. ;)
cnutard
Not unless they’re British ;)
beeje13
Let me know when it’s out of beta then I’ll get it out of Cex.
double-o-dave
My thoughts exactly.
I do want to play the game, but there’s no way I’m gonna be paying full price for something they’ve evidently rushed out.
jayjay119
I haven’t bought an assassin’s Creed game, or any ubisoft game, that wasn’t in the Steam sale for under £5 for about three years now. I just don’t have the faith in their products anymore. Unity was the first game I did have faith would change the game, but how wrong I was. I don’t mind waiting a year for it to fall into bargain bin prices… that is if it ever gets to Steam in the Uk as we miraculously don’t have it here. If not I’ll shop around for a physical edition or key sites which are already selling the game for a whopping 50% less than what Uplay is asking for it.
Pitcher-T
They quite clearly had deadlines to meet before Christmas and therefore released it and thought ‘meh, worse case we’ll patch it after if we hear of any problems’.
At least the gaming community is openly voicing their opinions on these matters and not just lapping it up. I wonder what the day one sales will be like.
Benyboyuk
This was a game that I was interested in right up until I saw the number of technical problems that have plagued its release.
It is sad to note that this isn’t an isolated case and a number of new releases are plagued with technical difficulties and issues upon release.
So are Ubisoft saying that the poor frame rate is something that they will be able to potentially fix? If so then I may have to give this game another look.
double-o-dave
If they can fix the frame rate with more time, (I don’t wanna start a resolution debate) does this mean they’ll be able to patch the PS4 version to native 1080 with more time spent on it?
tactical20
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this game. All a fuss over nothing imo.
Amphlett
I was in that smokey place called London yesterday following a review on our account. Reviews of accounts are a real positive as they highlight what’s going well, what’s not so good and can help those on the account see the wood for the trees. My point here is that if Ubi were really surprised by the post launch issues then they should be going through a post-launch review of their processes, team set up, etc. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the auditors to see where the issues have been created and how to resolve them in future projects. My concern for Ubi would be that the delays in Watch Dogs (and the subsequent graphical downgrades), delays to The Crew and now the issues in AC:Unity all point to Ubi not performing reviews, not acting upon the findings and actions of the reviews, or a mix of all of the above. This tells me that there is likely an unhealthy business culture in Ubi.