It’s not on Steam.
It was last night when I checked?
It’s on Steam. Just not in the UK.
Ah, I thought they’d removed it everywhere.
I’m in the same boat, had the PC preorder up but after reading the reviews I’ve decided to wait and cancelled my preorder. It kinda sucks because I was really looking forward to it.
Yep, I’m gutted. I really wanted it to be an awesome fresh start for the series. I’m still looking forward to playing Rogue on PC, if they port it. I wonder, if Unity doesn’t meet sales expectations, whether they’ll port Rogue to XBO/PS4 to try and reclaim some ground for the franchise on the current gen.
It seems to be a very special place where geometry is very complex and detailed.
Said that… lol at “cinematic framerate ubisoft”. They made the bed, now they have to sleep in it.
It was briefly removed everywhere, but got added back except in the UK.
So I’m sure this opinion will go over like a lead balloon, but after a frightening 8 hour binge session last night, I think the game is pretty great. It is half baked in several ways, primarily technically, but it’s still a shockingly beautiful and playable game. I actually think gamers who soured on the series with 3 would like this a lot, as it goes back to a lot of what made 2 (and its sequels) great: charismatic main character, lots of activities, and a huge, dense, impossibly gorgeous city to play in. Then weds it to the difficulty and upgrade structure from Black Flag, and mixes in next gen parkour. The stealth and combat are modest upgrades, but I really enjoy both.
The best surprise is the co-op, which I only attempted out of a sense of curiosity. But it’s a total blast. Approaching a fortress packed with guards with some allies triggered this awareness of all the options we had, from bursting in through the front door, to slipping in through the windows, using smoke bombs, or sniping at range, etc. And when I was in one building stalking a target, and I tilted the camera and saw my allies flags in other buildings down the block, it reinforced the huge scale of the game. Plus, you get a piece of equipment, cash, and skill points when you complete the mission. I played several missions multiple times and had a lot of fun each time.
Coop is the part I’m most interested in. Is it primarily just stand alone coop missions, or can you do interesting/useful things free roaming around Paris?
First of all both this game, and watch dogs, have and do run fine on my PC (i5 3.4GHz, Radeon R9 290.) I played Watchdogs on max, finished the game. Playing this on Very High and I’m running at least 30 FPS - if not higher. On Ultra it plays fine but the cutscenes chugh (~20FPS.)
It’s also a fun game, and the story/history is great. It looks outright fucking gorgeous. It is however the same game we’ve all played 1/2 a dozen times, so if you’re looking for something new it’s best to look elsewhere. If you’re looking for the best looking Ass Creed to date, and probably in the best setting to date, this game is a homerun.
They’re not as directly similar as you might think. The One has 32 MB of ESRAM that’s really fast, and then the rest of RAM is slower than the PS4. The 360 was similar with its EDRAM. So if you can stay pretty local to the fast RAM (ie minimize render target changes, keep most of your texturing to a small pool, etc), you can see a lot of benefit on the XBox.
Most engine rendering pipelines are basically similar across platforms where possible, with some optimizations for specific hardware. They probably started this game and tech 3-4 years ago, while the hardware was still in flux and may not have been disclosed to them anyway. At that point you make a guess about what’s coming and design for that. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they bet on more fast local memory and built the pipeline and content around that, and ended up with higher performance on the One.
I’ve only played a few hours and agree with Giaddon’s assessment. This game is a visual feast and quite enjoyable. I think some of the negative comments are because the graphics are so detailed that when something is slightly “off” it really stands out (ie, walking animations have a noticeable “slide”, lady’s dresses clipping into the ground, etc). The draw distance in this game is absolutely insane. And the NPC crowds… wow… a game that finally matches and surpasses the Hitman games in terms of sheer number of NPC’s gathered in one place.
I’m playing this on the PS4 and so far only noticed one area where the framerate stuttered. Overall though, it’s an impressive achievement and will get better with patches.
I think the comparatively weak cpu of the consoles is going to bite developers that focuses on open world games, which are the type of console games that need more cpu.
I suspect it is more likely that more effort needs to go into the One to make proper use of the ESRAM, so it just gets more of the optimisation development time towards the end of production.
Though given how it is running on PC, it is just as easy to speculate that the engine is just a horrible performer in general.
They should just learn to utilize the Power of The Cloud!
Man, the Steam user reviews on this are brutal.
Just a few thoughts:
I am loving the ambiance of the setting. Walking through beautiful mansions to navigating a river under the bridge - I feel that this is one of the most fully realized settings in an AC game yet. It’s interesting to merely walk around and observe the crowds. I was near an outside cafe when a couple locking arms walked by. I felt like going and grabbing a cup of coffee in real life and then in game sitting down at that cafe and people watching.
Fighting is more difficult - not automatic like previous AC games. You need to pay more attention in battles. In AC II, I would just hold the parry button and press the attack button when needed; I was safe as long as the parry button was held. In Unity, you need to get the timing down better or you will be parrying thin air.
I’m loving the game so far, but the worst part if all of the out-of-game maintanance needed to open the chests, as others have mentioned. I think this also happens with artifacts too - if you press “L” (on the PC obviously) for the map legend, there are multi-colored emblems besides chests. For a “AAA” game, I feel like everything should be easy to access. I don’t want to download additional apps and connect accounts to other accounts or games or whatever! This isn’t a freemium iPhone game, Just let me open the damn chests! Hopefully Ubi will change this, but I doubt it. Maybe mods can fix this eventually?
Finally, I don’t know how much I am going to like the RPG-ness of Unity. In the other games I could do everything as an assassin when I got far enough in the story. Here, I’m afraid that customizing the assassin will mean not being able to do other skills that I automatically was able to do in previous games. For example, you need to “purchase” the throw money distraction in Unity. So I’m afraid if I spend points in sword fighting, does that mean I might not have enough points to cover other (in previous games - free) skills? I guess I’ll see when I get far enough.
I don’t own this game yet (my PC is ancient and I don’t own a current gen console) but I’m a little bummed to read that the ability to recruit and develop your own group of assassins is not in this game. Most reviews I’m reading seem to consider that function dead weight and good riddance anyway, but I really enjoyed it. Does anyone who might be playing the game and feels similarly think that the game works well without it?