Yeah. The only major thing I've noticed on PS4 is the pop-in.

@tits_matador: well I work in retail and usually with "Buy X get Y free" you tend to have to return all of the items. However GameStop usually gives decent credit a week or two after a game releases so you could probably trade it in there and get Dragon Age or Far Cry for 20 bucks. It's not as good as free but hey at least you save like 40 bucks.

Playstation Lifestyle gave the game 10/10, I understand we all have different experiences with games, but it's scores like that when incredibly apparent technical issues exist that cause people to question review credibility.

@sackmanjones: Alright I'll try exchanging it and if they won't let me I'll do that GameStop thing. Thanks.

It's been pretty much fine for me on ps4 too. It's definitely not always 30 but so far at least it hasn't been terrible. The pop in is crazy though and with the weird way the npc's move around sometimes I can tell there's gonna will be a lot of weird ai bugs.

Fuck Ubisoft. Seriously. I never really get wrapped up in this kind of stuff but the last week or so has just been ridiculous. I'm going to think long and hard before I consider another Ubisoft purchase. If this is the kind of stuff that they are going to do, I don't want to play their games.

If you combine the metacritic scores, it's a 76.5 so far. It's probably going to be the worst reviewed entry in the series. No surprise because previously the worst reviewed entry in the series was also directed by Alex Amancio.

Makes me a little concerned about Far Cry 4. Given that the console version of Far Cry 3 was lacking in performance, I'd be disappointed to see it happen again.

@starvinggamer: Well, you make some great points. People that pre-order have basically said fuck it to waiting for confirmation that the product they want is what it says it is.

But pushing reviews back would give people who do care about that stuff more of a reason to wait past launch day. If reviews came a week or two later I think that could have an positive impact on getting away from the pre-order culture that plagues this industry.

Curious to see if this is the typical '60 fps or nothing' crowd making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Seriously, this is it for me - I am never pre-ordering a game again. Game looks great but runs like shit on the PS4, I mean just "WOW holy moly is this for real" kind of stuff.

@spraynardtatum: Most game reviews are already timed with release and that hasn't stopped people from preordering. The only difference in pushing reviews a week or two back is it prevents people who wait for reviews from playing the game for a week or two more than the current system of prerelease copies and NDAs.

if it were even hitting 30 fps consistently most people around here wouldn't be complaining. The reason this issue is spreading out of control is because it is noticeable enough to effect the enjoyment of the game.

@seikenfreak: Patrick and Alex talked about Unity on the morning show an hour or so ago and they both talked about performance issues. Patrick is definitely not a "60 FPS or nothing" kind of guy. He even said in the show this morning that he is fine with 30 FPS, but he has noticed major performance issues in Unity on PS4.

That wasn't pre-rendered... case in point someone actually found all the missing effects hidden/inactive and proceeded to mod them in

So the only possible explanation is that they had to remove all of it because consoles(and a good number of PCs) could not handle it simple as that, I'm willing to bet that we have a similar case here, they had all the pretty effects enabled for e3, running on an ungodly beast of a PC then removed it all for the actual release.

Doesn't look like a finished product by the standards of our time, really.

The first Watch Dogs demo was prerendered. Also there was a lot of wind and trash everywhere in all the E3 showings that is nowhere in the final game, even after installing the mod.

Assassin's Creed never had good framerate tbh.

Dodged a bullet. I was just waiting to see the reviews because based on my experiences with RE5 and Dead Space 3 taught me that focus on "co-op" is code for bad sequel.

I am sad today. I was really looking forward to this one. Gamefly's sent it out to me, so I'm definitely still gonna play it. It'll just be with a :( I've always liked the assassin's creed series, so as long as it's still that I'll probably have some fun still. I really hope their able to do something about the poor performance though.

I am amazed Gamespot and IGN didn't even mention the framerate in their reviews, it's almost comical because you can see the game is constantly struggling in the videos.

@brandondryrock: Ah okay. Didn't see that yet. A quick glance at the IGN and Kotaku review results didn't list performance issues in the negative bullet points, but I didn't read/watch the reviews yet. Just woke up.

At this point I think they just should have made a ship game instead of an AC game. The ship part of ACIV ran great and looked great, whereas the towns looked and ran like ass. Maybe in some weird way the PC version of Rogue will be a decent new AC.

You're right, I hate when they made Brotherhood so centered around competitive multiplater as well.

What are you guys talking about? Apart from not being able to platinum the game in SP its a fully fledged single player game.

was watching a lot of streams on the ps4 and the glaring fault for me was not the fps performance of the game but how janky it was with terrible A.I. The player character freaking out on the environment , passing through nps. just the general movement all round plus the pop in .

their reliance on having 5000 nps on screen witch adds nothing to the game play seems to have been a bad design mistake .

hoping the game part is still solid as i is looking forward to it and i like me some A.C.

Wow that is awful to see. How on earth would they every think that releasing something like this would ever be a good idea? I guess they thought the same thing with Watch Dogs so it is kind of believable... I guess that's one game off my list this year which is really sad because I love the AC series, but I definitely do not want to relive AC3 again and this looks somehow worse. Even though Far Cry 3 wasn't really my cup of tea, here's hoping for the sake of Ubisofts survival that Far Cry 4 is well done and sells excellently.

Pretty glad I decided to not preorder it. I really want to play it because I love the AC series, but I guess I wait until they fix the game. That is, if they ever fix it.

Digital Foundry is up for the game. XBONE does better in busy areas, PS4 does better in fights/cutscenes. Both struggle to maintain 30fps though.

@whitestripes09: I don't think Ubisoft will have any trouble surviving for the near future.

followthemoneyyyyy

Are people really going to pretend 2 consoles that have basically the same hardware save for PS4 having more RAM, that "oh xbone is better for some things PS4 is better for others" like that bill of goods might have held weight back in the PS3 days when the hardware was farily different but yo how stupid you think people are Ubisoft

God, those videos are rough.

Not true actually - same amount of ram, the PS4 just has faster (GDDR5) ram. The xbone has a slighty faster cpu while the gpu on the ps4 is considered to be quite faster.

Given that people are seeing not great performance on PCs as well this is probably simply an unoptimized new engine on new platforms.

"We want to make Xbox the best place to play games on this planet.”

Phil Spencer

"If we can't have a smooth framerate no one can."

Phil Spencer [citation needed]

I just jumped through the first portal and the lady talking to me said that I would be "running into a lot of incomplete and corrupted code" and I couldn't help but think that I've already been doing that for a while. First Watch Underscore Dogs turned out to be shit and now this is one of the worst games in the AC series. Ubisoft is now in the same group as Bioware in my eyes. They have burned me twice in a row and I am giving them one more attempt to win me back over otherwise I will no longer be buying their products. I'm going to play this a bit more, but like many others in this thread I am extremely disappointed.

Good news: Gamestop will give you $40 for it if you trade it in before December 10th.

I've had a pretty good experience so far with the game. The occasional drop to mid 20s fps and some pop in but nothing game breaking or that annoying. The textures on buildings far away are hilariously bad though, luckily only see them really when synchronizing a view point.

Feel like the technical issues are such a dominating headline right now that I don't know much of anything about the actual game part, the characters, how the missions play, etc. So even for people are able to enjoy the game, its still what they're talking about. So its obviously distraction enough that Ubisoft had to be aware this feedback was headed their way

@trafalgarlaw said:

That's a bit harsh, isn't it?

I'm joking, AC Brotherhood and AC Unity don't require any kind of multiplayer to finish the story.

Are we surprised? Ubi basically has the whole damned company rush to make these games every year - TWO OF THEM THIS YEAR! - and no one expected the floor to fall out?

There's a reason Activision got a third studio to make CoD games. Ubi might want to consider doing the same as well, because going "all hands" every year isn't working anymore.

@lethalki11ler: I would not bet on Far Cry 4 running good either, it's also a Ubisoft game. I know they're just the publisher, but Far Cry 3 had some really bad issues on last gen consoles.

This sucks. Get your shit together, Ubisoft.

Half a dozen studios worked on different parts of Unity. Unity's problem isn't the lack of people building onto it. Quite the opposite. When the left hand is in Montreal, the right hand is in France, left foot somewhere in india, and the butt is in San Francisco well your game is going to have issues when all that stuff comes together. Imagine if Frankenstein body parts were assembled all over the world by separate entities then shipped to a single location and sewn together overnight, that's what AC games are. Torso of a 7 foot tall basketball player, stout muscular dwarf legs and different sized feet. I'm sure all this shit ran like a dream separately.

Uploaded a couple videos of the game. Does this look bad to you guys? It's totally fine and playable to me. I dunno.

@dan_citi: We have proof of how bad the game runs though, I'm not sure why you are being so apologist about it, it's fine if you like it but this game is at the very edge of what's acceptable to release and charge $60 for. For me, the game dropping frames as often as it does in those videos would annoy me a lot, it's definitely not fine. I think it is very disorientating and it affects camera movement and aiming greatly. (but at least aiming is not a problem for AC)

I usually play everything at 60 FPS (a locked 30 is fine for me too) but the videos I see of Unity are horrendous to my trained eyes.

@dan_citi: 720p videos wont help here. needs to have at least 1080p, if not 60 fps to really judge the graphics nowadays. from your videos i would say that it runs fine, but looks muddy.

@robertorri: No, when someone is paying $60-70 a along with some season pass, the least anyone can expect is a functional game on any resolution at at least 30 fps. Only a fool greenlights this game after seeing these attrocious framerates and performance. They should have given it at least another half a year. Incompetence is an understatement.

@mortal_sb: Ah sorry, it is just what the PS4 spits out. The framerate in the video is mostly in line with the game, the fidelity is definitely lower though.

@privodotmenit: Eh it isn't a fighting game (which every frame is always important to me) or an online shooter, so it isn't so bad to me, every AC game basically runs like this for me besides the PC versions. I'm just giving my impression of the game.

You misunderstand me. The problem is the lack of a studio behind the games, not there not being enough people. Say what you will about CoD, each game is clearly the developer's vision of that game. The AC problem is that the whole company seems to work on every game at the same time. The issue isn't too few people on each game - it's too MANY people on each game. At this point, I don't think Ubi can even assemble two or three studios that can do the games in a leap-frog manner the way Activision handles CoD. Hell, for a Call of Duty example, you need only look at Ghosts, where Activision was basically panicking because IW wasn't in any state to develop a game after the West-Zampella exodus. All the sudden, you have the AC style situation where they had to bring in Neversoft and Raven and all these other studios to get Ghosts done, and the result is arguably the worst CoD in the series. The Ghosts issue probably prompted Activision to put Sledgehammer into the fold to begin with, simply to minimize the amount of different people involved in any one game (and to give them room in case they have to deal with another mutiny I imagine, but that's another issue). If AC keeps getting built by every studio in the world every year, the quality's going to get worse, but at this point, I don't think Ubi can pull back and make the needed adjustments before AC goes the way of other over-milked franchises.

This is pretty awesome of Kotaku. They really are paving the way in improving video game coverage and listening to their audience/customers.

Totalbiscuit released a similar statement. This kind of stuff makes me feel good about where the industry is going. This is good for everyone and helps keep people honest and accountable.