News - Assassin's Creed: Unity widely found to be slow and buggy

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

With hindsight, it seems crazy now that PC gamers thought x86/64-based consoles would result in a higher quality of console-to-PC ports. After Watch Dogs, Dead Rising 3, Evil Within and now this, I'm beginning to wish Sony and Microsoft hadn't gone with AMD APUs and instead stuck to non-x86 instruction set processors.

I have actually talked to a dev who worked with both generations of consoles,and the newer consoles are easier to develop for. OTH,it was up to the companies who are commissioning the games,to determine where the budget is being spent in the first place. Even things like marketing costs are coming from the same overall budget pool for the game.

Look at something like SWTOR - a PC only title which had loads of bugs on release,but a huge amount of money was spent on the voice acting for example,instead of other parts of the games.

You talk about the The Evil Within - it appears the guy behind it,ie,Shinji Mikami,is one of the artsy-fartsy types and it appears it was locked at 30FPS since it was meant to be "more cinematic",ie more like a film. So basically it was design decision,not even a technical one for that game for instance.

Plus there is another aspect you might not have caught too. More and more console games from the last generation were console-only exclusives,like The Last Of Us. Have you not considered,the lower cost of developing multi-platform games might end up meaning there is a greater chance of more games coming to PC,instead of just being only console exclusives??

It was a very interesting discussion I had with him,and sure he was only one dev of many in the world,but he still gave some interesting insights.

You seem to forget that when the last set of consoles came out,there were loads of problems at the start. The CBE was very hard to programme for(plus the PS3 had lots of quirks),and the XBox360 EDRAM was too small,meaning that multiple passes needed to be taken to do certain things. It took time for devs to get decent performance out of them,and we still had buggy releases like GTAIV.

In fact, the fact that MS insisted on still using EDRAM(which is still not probably big enough) with the XBox One and less memory bandwidth instead of going for a beefier GPU(and the simpler approach of the PS4),means its the decisions made by MS which are holding back everything. Sony learnt from its mistakes with the PS3 and made the PS4 easier to programme for,but OTH MS went the other way.

Plus a number of the buggy games are Ubisoft ones which are Nvidia sponsored and are using several aspects of the Nvidia Gameworks framework,and have had Nvidia people working on them.

Trying to blame this on AMD APUs is daft. This is entirely a publisher issue. Instead of complaining about AMD,you should having a go at devs who are cost saving on the PC versions of games,or going for weird design decisions in games, Its not the first time its happened.

Or are you going to blame all the buggy or poorly optimised PC only releases of the last 15 years on Intel,ie,the company who has sold the most X86 CPUs??

[m_kinder]

Think part of the problem is that sony & microsoft don't want a game that available on all 3 platforms to be miles better on PC that the new consoles as it shows just how poor they really are and are putting pressure on the game developers not to optimize it toward PC's as it'd cause sales to drop drastically.

[crossy]

It seems they have stopped taking community feedback altogether and are instead just doing what they think is best. Not talking about the bugs but the game in general, it's just a mess. How hard really is it ?

• Make the progression noticeable - don't make him a super ninja from the get-go, let him get more nimble and faster as the game progresses
• Make the fighting system a mixture between the Batman system and previous Assassin's games; start off as a button mash, but introduce harder combat elements and more precision-needed-fighting as the game goes on
• Weapons that actually make a difference! Start with weapons that have literally no chance for a first strike kill, to late game weapons that can kill on first strike some of the time...but again mix it up by introducing enemies that are immune to this.
• A real stealth mechanic. Something as simple as lowering the ambient light to let the person know they are in stealth. I literally just thought of that off the top of my head while writing this, you've had 5 bloody years.
• I know you don't have paths but have the game work out that if you're going in an upwards direction, then for your next grab to follow that momentum. Same for down and even horizontal.
• Break up the unlocks and exploring so side missions accomplish something, but are also halted at a certain point, so you don't end up doing them all before you've even done any of the story. Same applies in reverse; side missions should be stories within themselves that break up and help progress
• AI that has different profiles. I don't want to know exactly how they will react to a whistle, or a dead body, or hearing a noise...different people react differently.

And dozens of others but I'm bored now. All these I thought of off the top of my head, due to problems that have always existed. Cmon Ubisoft pull your finger out

Good list. and one I'd agree with (and I've got all the AC games that aren't mobile ones). The annoying thing - for me - is that some of what you're saying was already in AC2, with Ezio having to flurry-kill when a n00b, but as he became more "dangerous" you could instead concentrate on skillful parries etc. Heck, the "training" side missions at the mansion encouraged exactly that kind of "learning experience" which I think made that game more involving (and still my favourite of the series - despite some "interesting" bugs). The weapons thing is also a good point - maybe they need to take a page from D&D type games with hit-points-inflicted = weapon-damage x skill-level. So a "deadly" weapon used clumsily would actually be less damaging than a basic weapon used by Inigo Montoya.

Unfortunately, I'm cynical enough to believe that Ubi are quite happy to concentrate on the shiny-shiny since those screenshots will sell games and leave plenty of room for next year's AC. Actually - there in a nutshell - is what's wrong with EA, Ubi and Activision, they feel that their major titles have to have an annual release. Personally I think games were better when they got updated every two years (or more - which is why I've got high hopes for Just Cause 3).

I think the faces look ace!

Shame they didn't launch ACU for Halloween - it would have fitted in perfectly.

Thank God I didn't splash out €60-90 on this trash.

Ditto here - although £40 in my case. I'll maybe look to buy in March, when these howlers might be fixed and it'll be down to £20-25.

[kalniel]

As for the bugs though, that's par for the course now. Skyrim set a pretty bad precedent there - showed that a game can still be phenomenally successful despite being riddled with bugs. Now, the industry knows that's something they can absolutely get away with.

Bit of an odd comment. Skyrim is the least buggy of all the Elder Scrolls games to be honest. The older games, especially Daggerfall, are far, far buggier, so if anything the standards are improving these days, not getting worse. Ditto the likes of Ultima 7, Baldurs Gate, Lands of Lore 2 & 3 (1 wasn't too bad through). Buggy games are unfortunately common, and always have been - as usual, anyone with any brains is waiting for reviews before playing.

[jnutt]

I can't believe people are surprised by this. It happens all the time. Corporate greed. It won't change. That's why I never buy a "new" game. I always wait a few months until the bugs are ironed out.

[shaithis]

Trying to blame this on AMD APUs is daft. This is entirely a publisher issue. Instead of complaining about AMD,you should having a go at devs who are cost saving on the PC versions of games,or going for weird design decisions in games, Its not the first time its happened.

A number of the problems I have seen in a number of recent ports seems to be related to world-steaming.....which will almost certainly heavily utilises HSA. I can only imagine the performance hits we take on PC with crummy code copying memory locations around as an after-thought.

[spl]

People are surprised? This is Ubisoft we're talking about here.



I've logged many hours in Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind - the worst I had was getting stuck in a few rocks in Morrowind and having to god mode out of it. I haven't seen anything that says Skyrim is 'riddled' to me aside from occasional weird Havok glitches (not enough damping methinks). Similar experiences with Fallout 3 and New Vegas - all good to me. I've seen some hilarious videos, but they've never happened to me.

You want to argue about the buggyness of a game that is literally world-renowned for its bugs? Ask just about any gamer what's the most buggy game they can think of and most will say 'Skyrim'. Open a poll if you don't believe me :-P I don't dispute that a great many of the glitches are physics-related, but that doesn't make it any less of a glitch. And Havok physics has been used in many, many other games without so many bugs being involved.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A number of the problems I have seen in a number of recent ports seems to be related to world-steaming.....which will almost certainly heavily utilises HSA. I can only imagine the performance hits we take on PC with crummy code copying memory locations around as an after-thought.

Skyrim AFAIK used streaming tech too,but considering games like Assassin's Creed: Unity and Watch Dogs are Nvidia sponsored for the PC and have their engineers working on it I would be surprised if they would need an AMD specific tech to do a similar thing - I just get the impression its Ubisoft who effed up in this case.

[this_is_gav]

You want to argue about the buggyness of a game that is literally world-renowned for its bugs? Ask just about any gamer what's the most buggy game they can think of and most will say 'Skyrim'. Open a poll if you don't believe me :-P

Wow! There's a gamer on the planet who hasn't heard of Big Rigs!

[Kjnowak]

Damn - I was so looking forward to getting home for this. Back to Black Flag then...

[spl]

I have heard of Big Rigs actually (and seen the Youtube video of course). Maybe I should have specified most buggy major release. I doubt your average Joe Xbox / Playstation gamer knows about Big Rigs anyway. Seriously, open a thread asking which game is the most glitchy. If nothing else, it'll be a fun thread.

[spl]

Trying to blame this on AMD APUs is daft. This is entirely a publisher issue. Instead of complaining about AMD,you should having a go at devs who are cost saving on the PC versions of games,or going for weird design decisions in games, Its not the first time its happened.

Or are you going to blame all the buggy or poorly optimised PC only releases of the last 15 years on Intel,ie,the company who has sold the most X86 CPUs??

Your interpretation of my post is daft. Your idiotic interpretation is akin to me saying that if I swapped out my CPU for an APU, all my games would become glitchy. That's obviously not what I'm suggesting. That would be stupid. The situation would be no different if the XB1 and PS4 were using Intel processors. I clearly specified processors using the x86 instruction sets. That part is key.

I'll try and spell it out as clearly as possible. 360 and PS3 didn't use the x86 instruction sets. Those CPUs were a totally different architecture to what's used in PCs. Because they're so different, porting was a bigger job. When porting time came around therefore, the devs were looking at a pretty major job and would approach that job accordingly.

Now, PS4 and XB1 are using the same instruction sets. Porting has become an easier job. Devs become lazy as a result and figure this is something that's a quick and easy job they'll hammer out over the weekend (not literally - please don't now start telling me how many man hours are involved in developing a port :-P).

So in summary, perception of formerly-difficult job now becoming quick and easy results in lazy, sloppy dev work. Hope I've made that clear. I'll try and spell everything out in future posts so people don't come up with ridiculous misinterpretations of what I'm saying.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

With hindsight, it seems crazy now that PC gamers thought x86/64-based consoles would result in a higher quality of console-to-PC ports. After Watch Dogs, Dead Rising 3, Evil Within and now this, I'm beginning to wish Sony and Microsoft hadn't gone with AMD APUs and instead stuck to non-x86 instruction set processors.

I have actually talked to a dev who worked with both generations of consoles,and the newer consoles are easier to develop for. OTH,it was up to the companies who are commissioning the games,to determine where the budget is being spent in the first place. Even things like marketing costs are coming from the same overall budget pool for the game.

Look at something like SWTOR - a PC only title which had loads of bugs on release,but a huge amount of money was spent on the voice acting for example,instead of other parts of the games.

You talk about the The Evil Within - it appears the guy behind it,ie,Shinji Mikami,is one of the artsy-fartsy types and it appears it was locked at 30FPS since it was meant to be "more cinematic",ie more like a film. So basically it was design decision,not even a technical one for that game for instance.

Plus there is another aspect you might not have caught too. More and more console games from the last generation were console-only exclusives,like The Last Of Us. Have you not considered,the lower cost of developing multi-platform games might end up meaning there is a greater chance of more games coming to PC,instead of just being only console exclusives??

It was a very interesting discussion I had with him,and sure he was only one dev of many in the world,but he still gave some interesting insights.

You seem to forget that when the last set of consoles came out,there were loads of problems at the start. The CBE was very hard to programme for(plus the PS3 had lots of quirks),and the XBox360 EDRAM was too small,meaning that multiple passes needed to be taken to do certain things. It took time for devs to get decent performance out of them,and we still had buggy releases like GTAIV.

In fact, the fact that MS insisted on still using EDRAM(which is still not probably big enough) with the XBox One and less memory bandwidth instead of going for a beefier GPU(and the simpler approach of the PS4),means its the decisions made by MS which are holding back everything. Sony learnt from its mistakes with the PS3 and made the PS4 easier to programme for,but OTH MS went the other way.

Plus a number of the buggy games are Ubisoft ones which are Nvidia sponsored and are using several aspects of the Nvidia Gameworks framework,and have had Nvidia people working on them.

Trying to blame this on AMD APUs is daft. This is entirely a publisher issue. Instead of complaining about AMD,you should having a go at devs who are cost saving on the PC versions of games,or going for weird design decisions in games, Its not the first time its happened.

Or are you going to blame all the buggy or poorly optimised PC only releases of the last 15 years on Intel,ie,the company who has sold the most X86 CPUs??

Your interpretation of my post is daft. Your idiotic interpretation is akin to me saying that if I swapped out my CPU for an APU, all my games would become glitchy. That's obviously not what I'm suggesting. That would be stupid. The situation would be no different is the XB1 and PS4 were using Intel processors. I clearly specified processors using the x86 instruction sets.

I'll try and spell it out as clearly as possible. 360 and PS3 didn't use the x86 instruction sets. Those CPUs were a totally different architecture to what's used in PCs. Because they're so different, porting is a bigger job. When porting time comes around therefore, the devs are looking at a pretty major job and approach that job accordingly.

Now, PS4 and XB1 are using the same instruction sets. Porting has become an easier job. Devs become lazy as a result and figure this is something that's a quick and easy job they'll hammer out over the weekend (not literally - please don't now start telling me how many man hours are involved in developing a port :-P).

So in summary, perception of formerly-difficult job now becoming quick and easy results in lazy, sloppy dev work. Hope I've made that clear. I'll try and spell everything out in future posts so people don't come up with ridiculous misinterpretations of what I'm saying.

Stop deflecting and trying to save face. Your intepretation of this having to do with APUs is a load of nonsense and unlike the make up crap you have spouted I have actually talked to a dev or two who worked on the both generations of consoles. Maybe I should ask him to post here?

Spell out it out to yourself - you seem to be ignorant about the last 15 years of PC only games with major bugs and poor optimisation or do you want me to spell them out for you in a list??

I have been a PC gamer for 20 odd years,so honestly if you really think games are buggy and poorly optimised now,you really have no clue about how bad things have been.

Its also quite funny how you twist bad reviews about an extensively Nvidia sponsored game into something about another company. Where is all your crocodile tears blaming them?

[spl]

Go ahead if you have nothing better to do. I could list all the ports that worked out very nicely (Borderlands for example) and all the PC-only games that were thoroughly polished, but I have better things to do (such as playing some Borderlands TPS, which is what I'm gonna do now). Knock yourself out.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Go ahead if you have nothing better to do. I could list all the ports that worked out very nicely (Borderlands for example) and all the PC-only games that were thoroughly polished, but I have better things to do (such as playing some Borderlands TPS, which is what I'm gonna do now). Knock yourself out.

Well you are the one twisting a thread about poorly optimised and buggy game from Ubisoft into something about X86 APUs.

Yet,Nvidia has pumped $5million into "optimising" Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed Unity for PC:

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvi...h-ubisoft.html

So what next you are going to say Nvidia has incompetent software engineers or something!!??

Or is Ubisoft just being rubbish??

Watch Dogs was also on the PS3 and XBox360 too.

But,but its the fault of APUs since they are X86...

So you on purpose ignore all the buggy PC only releases in the last 20 years(including many modern RTS games which I play) and plenty of poor early release console games from the last generation. You blame it on "X86 APUs" so using the absurd logic,by extension you might as well blame Intel and Nvidia too.

Have you forgotten how buggy PC games have been,going back 15 to 20 years?? Most of them were not even on consoles either.

Look at GTA4 - developed two to three years into the last generation console lifespan and buggy as crap on PC. A crap port of a major game - the last generation has been around so long people have forgotten how bad some of the ports were,and only remember the good ones.

Resident Evil 4 was terribad on PC,the Dead Space games were officially capped to 30FPS for the PC versions,Saints Row II had framerate problems,Dark Souls would only run at 720P(it required user mods to enable higher resolution),Crysis2 was DX9 for months with lower res textures than the first Crysis and the DX11 and high res textures made for PC gamers were a joke,Skyrim had bugs,a number of NFS game had poor framerates and so on. Many of those games were released years into the product cycles for the last gen consoles.

Just like so many others...

Even Kalniel mentioned that to a similar effect before that games have been buggier in the past.

We have barely been one year into the current generation and the PS3 and XBox 360 are still the lead consoles for many major games due to installed user base. There are around 24 million PS4 and XBox One consoles - as of last year there were over 160 million PS3 and XBox 360 consoles sold and they are still selling well.

If anything gamers need to keep the pressure on games companies to produce decent games,especially with prices starting to go up now.

Edit!!

I agree to disagree with you and will keep it at that.

[spl]

Haha that's typical of people like you :-) "I'll have the last word and we'll leave it at that". Grow up.

I don't even know how you've managed to get this to talking about bugs with regard to CPU instruction sets. The two things are totally unrelated.

My original post made two, clearly separated points which were separated into two paragraphs. The first dealt with CPU instruction sets not with regards to bugs, but with regards to performance and optimisation (evidently I didn't make that clear). My second paragraph (beginning 'as for bugs...') dealt with bugs and made no mention of instruction sets.

Again, you've failed to read things properly and drawn stupid conclusions as a result (you'll find that reading things properly benefits many areas of life - not just forum threads!).

Obviously I wasn't expecting anyone to mash two separate points into one. In future, I'll make an effort to make one point per post to make things as idiot-proof as possible.