The press should just start buying games themselves and avoid NDA's.

Too many cooks? Too big to succeed? Size doesn't matter? Pick an idiom.

Holy cow, have a feeling some of these reviews are going to be rough.

I actually liked more of what I saw of Rouge than Unity from an artistic perspective and I'm a sucker for that ship traversal. I hope Rouge does get a PC release at some point.
But Unity, ouch is what I predict.

@onarum: It looks like their presets are for a stable 45ish instead of 60, so you can probably get AO going and keep it above 30 at least.

Thanks, now I'm singing the Too Many Cooks theme song in my head.

Now I'm singing the Too Many Cooks theme song... damn you. :D

So they buy it with everyone else, putting us in the same situation, and the review is either rushed and late or not rushed and irrelevant?

I bet you're a Gamergater. And that you have one of those fine tinfoil hats.

Don't worry guys, TIME put Unity on their short list of the best looking games of 2014!

I now know what not to buy new in Nov'14.

Ben Kuchera is on twitter urging people who are "buying games today" to "hold off a bit" until the review hits. Not a good sign indeed.

Unity has always looked like the most boring direction Ubisoft could've taken with the series. So with all these glitches and the terrible performance I'm glad I'm not getting it. They kinda soured me with the shitty PC port for AC4 last time out so fuck this.

@kingspeedy: let's hope so... though I found a dude on steam forums reporting on the 680 performance and apparently he has everything set to max other than AA (using FXAA) and textures, and is being able to get constant 30+ FPS, so I bet if I turn PCSS off I might get some nice frame rates.

Granted this dude has a considerably better CPU, but I'm betting on the strong OC on this I5 3570k of mine heh :P

Some of the weird glitches don't bother me like the lady weirdly floating over a box. Cmon guys, it's still an open world gsme. However, the performance stuff is certainly troubling and hopefully can be fixed. I recall Jeff saying they received a game in the mail for the Xbox because the publisher said the ps4 version was busted after the firmware. We can most likely assume it is this and like I said, hopefully a patch can sort things out.

So how is the game beside performance issues? Does it play better or at least look nice besides the issues?

The noon review embargo is one of the more insulting and disgusting things I've seen a game company try to pull off in a long time. Don't give a shit what the reviews say, I'm not playing this game.

@sackmanjones said:

Actually, that was most-likely Dragon Age. From the sounds of some reviews, PS4 2.0 broke that game hard, but it's apparently been sorted out in the last couple days.

@milkman: Patrick seems to agree.

@sackmanjones: that was about dragon age, there's an article about it on polygon

@milkman: They didn't "try to pull it off" - they did. And from what we're seeing based on the reports of players who have it: for good reason, too. I agree it's really rotten and underhanded. I saw Ubisoft's life Twitch/Amazon thing over the weekend and the game looked great. If it turns out to be as bad as people are saying there must be some weird tricks going on. Coupled with the fact that they aren't sending out review copies of AC: Rogue at all, I think Ubisoft deserves a real black mark for all of this.

I'm still pretty early in, but like I said, I'm really enjoying it.

The assassinations themselves are a little more open ended but with scripted choices, which I like. They have definitely attempted to go back to the roots of AC2 in tone and style.

Black Flag might as well as not have existed.

I prefer the city structure to the 'open seas' structure personally and they've made Paris very beautiful. I really like the lighting and the art is stunning, especially the interiors.

The "time anomaly" rift stuff appears to take the place of the "current day" sections in previous games. The first one I did was very enjoyable, back to the platforming style.

I'm pretty into the story already and I've been getting lost with the tonne of side missions.

I've only played one co-op mission to completion, a 2 player 'heist', which was fun but short. Annoyingly people seem to quit out halfway through so this will be much better with friends.

This is definitely unmistakably an Assassin's Creed game but like with the new COD there are different flourishes and tweaks that make it feel more fresh than it has for ages, for me.

But they'd be allowed to talk about it outside of their reviews. Right now the press are embargoed for another hour from speaking about the game. I bet companies that were comfortable with the product they were selling would still give the press early copies without them signing an NDA.

Ouch.

In this one case sure but 80% of games have the embargo lifted before release and 19% at release (midnight EST usually).

I'm actually still excited for the game somewhat but this whole affair has definitely dampened said anticipation. The technical issues probably wouldn't bother me if they're not game-breaking, these kinds of things rarely do get in my craw.

So how would the press have gotten the game early enough to have a review ready for today if they had to buy the game themselves? Unless every outlet is able to find a store that is willing to violate the street date there isn't really a viable alternative to review embargos if you want day 1 reviews. I agree that this situation is shitty and that something needs to be done, but I don't see how buying games on day of release helps anyone.

Of course this wouldn't be an issue at all if people changed their buying habits and actually waited for reviews. I think the way this dumb embargo stuff ends is if people get burned enough to stop preordering and buying on day 1. Then there is no incentive to delay the reviews since people would be scheduling their buying around review availability rather than release dates. Dare to dream.

I would rather know if a game works well (seems to be the main question with launch games these days) and then a delayed review where more time and thought can be put into it. Real critique.

After reading Patrick's tweets about this, it just makes me shake my head. I'm almost reconsidering my Far Cry 4 preorder.

In the words of the great Woolie: Ubi please

Whats the fuzz about? When has an AC game ever been bugfree with stable fps, do you guys really need reviews to find out this is the fifth AC game in a row with the same problems?

But I wanted to FOLLOW THE MONEY :(

This does lend a pretty solid bit of backup to that anonymous Ubisoft developer that wrote in to the Bombcast.

What's the next conspiracy target for (company) paid off (company) to fuck over (certain consumers?)

@solh0und: Seeing all the reports from players on AC: Unity has finally convinced me of Jeff's position on never placing preorders before you can read criticism of the game.

They pushed back Bombin' in the A.M. Guess they decided it's better to talk about the game than not.

If the performance is so bad that it impacts review scores I have to be imagine they won't allow for it to happen again. Unless it sells ridiculously well regardless of scores, that is. It still sucks and it's saddening that this sort of thing is becoming more prevalent with the new consoles. Maybe I'm just paying more attention to it now and things have always been this way, I dunno.

I'm just struggling to understand why they didn't push back the game to fix these issues. Did Ubisoft think that the game couldn't be salvaged, and that any more time spent would just be wasted? Or is their annual release schedule so critically important that it was still worth the hit to the series' reputation?

Patrick dropping truth bombs as if the pimp's in da crib.

Since this embargo horseshit has me feeling feisty this morning, I'm gonna bring up something that I know I shouldn't.

Go ahead and give a quick search for Unity in #GamerGate and bask in the silence. At the time of this post, I see a grand total of TWO tweets about this embargo business. Two tweets about one of the more obvious unethical and corrupt things to happen in the games industry in a while. GG is a reinforcement of every status quo in the games industry. That's why they only went after journalists and indie devs. That's why they protect billion dollar publishers at every turn. What a joke.

PC version of the game is great. It's not glitch free but it runs fine and they're pretty easy to overlook with everything else that's going on.

The money is off in oblivion with those missing Ps.

You're kind of obsessed.

Is Patrick breaking an embargo by saying they're "tricking" people into buying it? That tells me the game is bad, or at least disappointing.

As someone that played the first game and a few hours of Black Flag, I'm amazed that this series always gets so much prerelease hype when it's missed so many times.

Perhaps lead by example?

To their credit, Videogamer in the UK have twice this year gone out and reviewed a game before the embargo by getting a copy themselves and not signing an embargo in the first place.

@spraynardtatum: Am I wrong?

Not if he wasn't the one who signed the NDA.

AC2 is one of my favourite games ever and Brotherhood is high up there as well. It's disappointing seeing how far it's fallen.

That's the thing. Despite all of this, I still want to play this game and I'm probably going to pick it up later today for PC along with a couple of others with Target's B2G1 deal.

Goddamnit, I'm probably going to buy it anyway...

I agree with what you're saying, but I don't know if this is the correct forum to discuss this. This topic was about performance issues on the PS4.

Crazy. I just picked up the game on my way home and then saw all this stuff. Good thing I haven't opened it yet. If everyone says it's really broken I can just return it.

I wonder if any of this has to do with it being the first year marketing switched to Xbox. Having the weakest platform be the lead one probably made them have to spend a ton of time on that one, and it sounds like they still couldn't get it running smoothly, and now both versions are terrible. Obviously just speculation.

A well, whatever, if anyone needs me i'll be here playing Valkyria Chronicles.

Hitler-chan kawaii desu ne~