When Assassin's Creed Unity launched last week, it was mocked endlessly, thanks to a slew of weird glitches. In the days since, Ubisoft has started work on patches for every platform, and it's doing a surprisingly good job informing players about its process on a recently launched "live updates" blog.
Take, for example, Ubisoft's examination of the game's frame rate. The publisher outlines some of the technical solutions that should resulting a smoother experience:
- "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."
It also explains why crowds aren't going to shrink, as it doesn't seem to have a meaningful impact:
"Though crowd size was something we looked at extensively pre-launch, it is something we continue to keep a close eye on. We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are.
We’re working very hard to see these changes rolled out in Patch 3, but as we’re still testing our fixes we need to be conservative with any estimates as far as ETA is concerned. We hope to have further updates on this topic before the end of the week."
None of this absolves Ubisoft from having launched a full-priced video game that clearly wasn't done, obviously, but in an industry full of PR spin and misdirection, a little honesty is appreciated.
Perhaps the bigger question: when are we going to hold Microsoft and Sony accountable for saying this is OK? Ubisoft shipped these games, but the platform holders signed off on them, too.