Assassin's Creed Unity: Return of the Horse

[Lantyssa]

Since all the game journalists collude anyways, they could really screw Ubi over on the next game if they had decided to break the embargo.

"Farcry 4 Review"

"We'd love to review this game, but after we decided to tell customers exactly what we thought of Ubisoft's last release, they no longer send us review copies.  We cannot play them until the street date.  As such, and given the quality of the last game, we suggest you hold off any purchase until there is a chance to see how other suckers early adopters find it."

[Yegolev]

I figured they are already half there with the "where all the assassin women at?" thing.

[Lantyssa]

Too busy in the kitchen.  Assassin biscuits take a lot of work!

[Sir T]

Like hell. You know all the kickass assassin minigames they could set in the kitchen?

Hop on cabinets to find the ingredients.

Face your kids in glorious one on one combat!

Do you have the speed, strength and focus to carry out... the BOBBIT MANEUVER!!

And of course carefully design your costume for maximum cleavage without the danger of spillage.

[tazelbain]

Out of interest, what do you actually play these days? Half of your posts seem to be in politics and the other half are mostly in the non-gaming areas. The few about games seem mostly to be bitching about things that you don't appear to play.

Mainly Hex and random indie shit. The last "big game" I bought was Skyim. The Hex forum is hidden for whatever reason.

[Lantyssa]

Do you have the speed, strength and focus to carry out... the BOBBIT MANEUVER!!

Oh, the Bobbit is easy.  The secret is to exhaust your target, which takes about 30 seconds, then strike when they're passed out.

[jakonovski]

Ah oh ah oh aaah!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DzsFMsIZPM

[HaemishM]

Oh God, I'm rolling! 

Shit, even the texture popping/lighting issue on the main character's hood is SO BAD. I'm so glad I checked out of this series after the first one ended like it was half-finished.

[Lantyssa]

It's not a bug but a new kind of emergent gameplay!

[Triax]

Assassin's Creed: The Bloopering? 

[Goreschach]

This is my favorite glitchshot so far:

That 'glitch' looks better than hair in most games.

[Fordel]

Ridiculous glitches aside, we are getting real close to getting out of the uncanny valley.

[Malakili]

Ridiculous glitches aside, we are getting real close to getting out of the uncanny valley.

I don't think so.  The closer it gets to looking real, the even more real it has to look to keep you from noticing if that makes sense.  Most of this stuff isn't even IN the uncanny valley because your brain recognizes it as obviously fake.

[Maven]

Also, stylized.

[Hawkbit]

AC Rogue doesn't have reviews from the major outlets yet, but the comments tend to be significantly more positive.  The general theme seems that it's an amalgam of previous AC games and keeps throwing new ideas in a way that feels fresh.

I'll wait for next year's PC version of it, maybe.

[Samwise]

Ah oh ah oh aaah!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DzsFMsIZPM

That could only be improved by having it be the Scout doing the same thing.

[lamaros]

Ridiculous glitches aside, we are getting real close to getting out of the uncanny valley.

I don't think so.  The closer it gets to looking real, the even more real it has to look to keep you from noticing if that makes sense.  Most of this stuff isn't even IN the uncanny valley because your brain recognizes it as obviously fake.

Not sure I agree, there have been a few titles recently with realistic faces that just look good.

I'm not sure that "it's not in the uncanny valley if you see it as fake" is correct either, TBH. Uncanny valley is what it is because there's the tension between realism and blindingly obvious fake elements. When we look at them we think "that's disturbingly almost-real-but-messed-up", when we look at other things we just go "that's pretty realistic, neat".

[Yegolev]

Multiplayer is pretty fun when it works.  Naturally, this is my version of MP wherein we heckle each other for mistakes, riff on failures, sabotage each other, and remind ourselves that it is better than the later Dorf videos.  It would be even better if the game we were playing wasn't so shitty.

[Venkman]

Also, stylized.

This. This is how you avoid the uncanny valley. I'd actually see "real" has long been the wrong goal anyway. Not until we break into real sustainable and widespread 3D interfaces.

The MTX stuff is rightly critiqued, as any premium priced game deserves. I don't get what models these companies run where they think the amount they might make on MTX will outweight the PR hit for having that stuff in there in the first place. Maybe it would be slightly less bad if the content here had the breadth of IV, the likeable Ezio of II and also the quality of both. But I doubt it. Fans will forgive a lot of things until they feel they're being gouged.

MTX or premium up front purchase. I don't get how this isn't axiom in the biz. It's almost 2015! for chrissakes.

I'll pick this up on a Steam Sale eventually because I do enjoy the series. And maybe by then they'll mea culpa the bugs and gouging.

[calapine]

That 'glitch' looks better than hair in most games.

Yes, it's a shame. Ubisoft is ruing their brandname (hö hö) by rushing this.



The image is half clownshoes, half impressive. The hair and specular highlight on it is great.

[tmp]

He's totally about to fire his lazer there.

but yeah, the lighting on the hair looks really really nice. For that matter the skin ain't half bad either (what's loaded of it, anyway)

[Jeff Kelly]

ten development teams have worked on that game over the course of its development and it probably cost upwards of $300 million to make if you include the marketing budget.300 million dollars and ten dev teams and they couldn't even make the game run at a constant 30 fps and without huge glitches and issues.

And still the gaming press isn't calling them out on that bullshit.

[Maven]

Source for those figures? That's insane, but I guess that's conglomerate development. It was a common practice at Blizzard to yank developers from other teams to help on a project, but based on what I've read on Ubi and my brief time at EA, it's more compartmentalized.

[Khaldun]

That's the "mythical man-month" right there, for sure.

[koro]

So, I guess the game either sold poorly enough or is too-broken-to-patch enough that Ubisoft has canceled the season pass and is compensating anyone who bought it with a free game.

http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-US/community/liveupdates/live_updates_details.aspx?c=tcm:152-186650-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32

If you purchased the Season Pass or Assassin’s Creed Unity Gold Edition (which includes the Season Pass), you are eligible to choose one free game from among a select list of Ubisoft titles.* These are:

    The Crew
    Far Cry 4
    Watch Dogs
    Assassin’s Creed Black Flag
    Rayman Legends
    Just Dance 2015

Looks like they'll be squirting out the one DLC they had almost ready to go, give it to all owners for free, and forget the game exists.

[Maven]

That reminds me, a new game is coming that's a sequel to a major franchise that has been carefully crafted and only released when it is ready.

Arkham Knight. Origins mis-step aside, that's how you do a franchise.

[jakonovski]

I don't think it counts as free when you pay money for x and get offered y instead.

[Tebonas]

But then you bought a Season Pass for a game, so the company knows you are a sucker anyway.

[Jeff Kelly]

The damage control attempts were hilarious as well.

At first they tried to ignore it, then it were the classics: "rare instances" and "it runs fine on ur systems.

After that they claimed that it was because the console hardware was too shitty to run their awesome game because "thousands of NPCs" and "something something CPU bound" until people politely pointed out that the PC version was even more of a shit show (they'd also have to explain how you can be CPU bound on a 6 core system when you're only using one core on most PCs)

Then they released a "known issues" list they claimed to work on which was several pages long and had to acknowledge that their own tests concluded that their bottlenecks didn't come from being CPU bound but from a shitty rendering pipeline and engine transaction handling instead.

Then GTA V came out and was exhibit A for just how full of shit Ubisoft's PR is  because it runs (with some minor hiccups) great on console HW and looks great.

[Jeff Kelly]

Heads up to all owners of the XBox One version! Patch 1.4 for AC: Unity will be a whopping 44 GB because Ubisofts updater is broken and can't perfom a delta update.

If you own AC: Unity on disc, delete the game install files, reinstall the game and then apply patch 1.4. Then Uplay will only download and apply the 6.8 GB patch file. If you only have the digital download the patch file wil be 44 GB. PC version also seems to be affected by this bug.

[Paelos]

:-->

[Rendakor]

Heads up to all owners of the XBox One version! Patch 1.4 for AC: Unity will be a whopping 44 GB because Ubisofts updater is broken and can't perfom a delta update.

If you own AC: Unity on disc, delete the game install files, and go play something else.

FIFY.

[Jeff Kelly]

just when you thought Ubisoft couldn't get any more evil/stupid.

People who bought the season pass and want to download the free Ubisoft game promised to them have to agree to never ever pursue any sort of lawsuit or sue for damages in regards to AC:Unity.
 

[CmdrSlack]

It's a serious problem. Why, I filed ten lawsuits seeking the return of $60 for the game just last night. Just wait for my super-lucrative class action...