Today, Ubisoft released the latest big patch for its troubled Assassin’s Creed game. The patch is supposed to fix the overall stability of the game, but many users are reporting that the patch actually worsens several already-questionable aspects of Assassin’s Creed Unity.
In our review we said “…the game often reveals how it achieves [its graphical detail] with obvious pop-in on NPC clothing, random drops in frame rate and also considerably stupid AI behaviour in some spots.” It’s this pop-in that is apparently hit the hardest.
According to users posting on Neogaf, the pop-in on NPCs as the player approaches them has been increased significantly, sometimes even leading the player to collide with them before they spawn.
Ubisoft also appears to have applied a shimmering particle effect to NPCs when they spawn in, which some users are interpreting as a deliberate and dishonest attempt to “disguise” the pop-in as a feature of the Animus (the game’s fictional simulated recreation of Paris).
The problems don’t’ even end there though, as users on Xbox One are reporting that a bug is causing the patcher to re-download Assassin’s Creed Unity in its entirety – all 40GB of it.
Ubisoft has issued an update on their official patch notes page saying that “We are working with Microsoft on a solution to reduce the total download to the intended size so that you can get back into the game faster, but as of now we have no ETA on when this will be resolved.“
This is the latest in a long line of public outbursts surrounding Assassin’s Creed Unity, which has led a troubled existence ever since it was launched in November. When all is said and done, hopefully users will have a perfectly optimised version of Assassin’s Creed Unity to play.