UPDATED 09:15 EDT / NOVEMBER 12 2014

Assassin’s Creed Unity launches with serious performance issues

AcunityUbisoft Entertainment is no stranger to player concerns over game performance, and now their latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, is facing a serious fan backlash over severely low frame rates and other performance issues such as bugs and game crashes.

The long awaited follow-up to 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag launched yesterday, but fans are already clamoring for a patch to fix problems that many say make the game “unplayable.”

According to Redditor Daveed84:

The game is a buggy mess, from texture pop-in to characters walking through each other (even in cutscenes!) to the game outright freezing for seconds at a time at random intervals on my PC.

Several videos have surfaced on Youtube showing consistent drops in framerates, such as this one by ZeroX03 Gaming.

The gold standard for frames per second (FPS) in gaming is 60FPS, but footage of Assassin’s Creed: Unity has shown the frame rate dipping well below 30FPS or even 20FPS. This causes the game to “stutter,” which affects both the visual aesthetics of the game as well as the actual gameplay.

Ubisoft had previously been criticized for allegedly downgrading the game’s visual quality on all platforms to the performance capabilities of the Xbox One. Gamers were critical of Unity’s World Level Design Director, Nicolas Guérin, when he said: “You don’t gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn’t look like the real thing.”

Another video on Youtube by Digital Foundry shows a side-by-side comparison of Assassin’s Creed: Unity on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Despite the slightly more powerful specs on the PS4, the game actually performs better on the Xbox.

In a response to a user on Twitter, Ubisoft says they are working to resolve any issues players on facing as quickly as possible.


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