I’ve played solo on the PS4 using the private match option from the map screen.
Tom M
I’d like to try this with M&K, just to make it easier to admire Paris, but I can’t get the space bar to work as Parkour Up at all.
And here I was happy how well my GTX 660 has been keeping up (in everything else). Apparently, it is dying in a hurry if this is where things are headed. I’d attempt a French phrase here, but would muck up the spelling something fierce.
A comparison using that site as reference, about recent ports, using exact same hardware, same quality settings.
Min/max framerate:
Unity: 33 / 39
Advanced Warfare: 85 / 96
Mordor: 54 / 66
So basically Unity runs at half, if not less, the framerate of its contemporary games.
And that surprises you? It’s also trying to render twice as much, at least.
I had no idea Advanced Warfare and Mordor were also trying to do crowds filled with hundreds of individuals. Definitely adding those two to my wishlist now.
They still run on the same hardware, since XBOX and PS4.
The difference is that Mordor is fixed 30 fps and 1080p. Unity is 22-30 fps and 900p.
The gap between the two isn’t as big as on PC.
And what’s even more hard to justify is that the issues on consoles are due to the CPU. On PC the benchmarks show that a non overclocked 2500k can push 60fps at max detail in Unity. So CPU shouldn’t be an issue (the part that needs mostly to deal with these crowds) yet it’s the GPUs that are doing very poorly.
Even an i3-2100 can do 44fps MINIMUM at max detail in Unity. It’s dual core.
There something that isn’t technically quite right, on PC. We have CPU headroom to spare, yet performance is still bad.
I think the more relevant question is: should Unity have bothered trying to do crowds of hundreds if it was tanking the frame rate? Watching people play Unity, the streets are crowded with milling pedestrians, far more than are needed to make the city feel alive. I haven’t heard anyone say these extra NPCs added anything awesome to the gameplay. So … why put them there in the first place? As the fella said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.
Pity the game is so glitchy, as Paris itself looks like a wonderful place to explore. But Inquisition is coming out next week so Unity is gonna get a pass until it gets patched up. (Which surprises me; after DA2 I wasn’t sure I was going to play Inquisition at all.)
I haven’t played it, but from what I understand, the heavy crowds are needed to show the people out on the streets during the Revolution, right? I think that’s a pretty good reason to do it. Anyone who plays Assassin’s Creed games purely for gameplay reasons without taking pleasure in being a virtual tourist to historical places probably is not a fan of the series in the first place. So I think trying to squeeze in big crowds to virtually experience the French Revolution sounds like a good reason to me. But, hey, I don’t know. I don’t have the game. Maybe Giaddon or the others playing through it can chime in once they experience the big crowds to let us know.
Have you not played Mordor? It’s one of the best games this year and is a perfect blend of AC with Batman combat. The Nemesis system is also one of the few actual innovations we’ve seen in a game in a while.
Well, I was looking at an install on a friend PC and it’s worth noticing that, counting the location data only, the whole of Black Flag is 10Gb, versus the 22Gb of ONLY the Paris location in Unity.
If we count everything else it’s Black Flag 10Gb versus 30Gb of Unity.
More things:
No graphic setting has any effect on the characters level of detail, or pop-in. So it’s hardcoded across platforms (same on PC as on consoles).
The only option you have is how far environment objects pop-in, on lowest setting you have huge chairs that suddenly appear from nothing just a few feet away.
Even on highest setting the proper lighting mode only applies to the room you’re in. So for example you can notice huge light changes when you enter a room, that’s because the game renders its proper detail just at very close range. The stuff they say gives proper light to materials works only when you’re really close.
People walking around in the ACs have always been more annoying than anything else. The role of ‘people’ in these games is to make you stumble. Gee.
With the buildings I get slick canned parkour animation. With people I get canned tripping-up animation. They’re another ‘we have all this technology… what can we do with it’ feature. Like most of the other AC sub-systems really.
To me its part of what makes the world come alive - its not a stumble machine. Its something that makes me appreciate that this IS paris, teeming with life. Then, I tend to submerge myself in the world, and not so much its systems.
I like the crowds, but if there was a “25% less crowds, 10 more frames” option, I’d push it.
Ubisoft has launched a Live Blog for the fixes they’re working on.
http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-gb/news/news_detail.aspx?c=tcm:152-184353-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32
I can’t remember any Ubisoft game they patched at good pace and in depth, so I’m don’t trust they will get it properly fixed eventually. Ubisoft patches are usually small and late (though it could be said their games didn’t need anymore).
This looks like a game released because there was a hard date and not because the game was ready for use by the public.
Anyway, I like these glitches, and make for these uncomfortable moments when you want to laugh, but you don’t want to anyone suspect what is on your screen is not work-stuff.
I am already looking forward for enormous laughts at home, when some youtuber collect a whole bunch of these.
TotalBiscuit refuses to do a “WTF is” for this game. Instead did a “Let’s not play” video.
Basically, he says playing the game was an awful technical experience and that he “wouldn’t wish it on anyone”.
I’m not saying he’s a liar, but Giantbomb’s Quick Look video seems okay to me and the first half is on a PC.
You know experiences in pc are very variable. He is having lots of crashes, other people aren’t. Hardware and software combinations and all that.