Is AC:U largely fixed yet?

[Zydrate]

I know not to expect much with their PR fuckup with "women are hard to animate", I've gotten over it. Mostly due to the fact that I played as Ezio and Kenway just fine, I liked them. So playing a guy doesn't bother me.

But despite it's hilariously and infamously messy launch, I'm wondering if they fixed some of the game-breaking bugs yet? I watched a podcast that mentioned they did, but the Steam forums are still aflame with topics like "Good job, sheep" and "Game is so bad".

I ask all this because I got paid today and am considering getting it.
Or should I simply wait a while?

 

[Barbas]

It's Ubisoft; fixing one thing breaks two others and there ain't enough refunds in the world. This website will tell you all you need to know:
http://isbf4finishedyet.com/

Meanwhile, in the QA cubicle...

 

[rgrekejin]

It's mostly fixed now. Still some occasional annoying glitches, but it's definitely playable. The degree to which it was buggy in the first place got a little blown out of proportion, and the optimization is actually not that bad, given the limitation of the engine. Plus, the free Dead Kings DLC drops tomorrow.

...all that said, it's not actually that great a game. Certainly in the bottom half of the AC games in my opinion. If you can get it on sale, go for it, but I wouldn't pay full price for it.

 

[Zydrate]

Those are... two very different replies.
I'll await further data.

 

[rgrekejin]

Just to be clear, I can verify that I've actually played the game (on PC) and am speaking for experience. From their reply, it isn't clear to me whether Barbas has or not.

 

[Blitsie]

Welp, out of personal experience, started playing the game on PS4 yesterday (and its up to date as can be) and spotted some small visual glitches here and there (dresses on women especially tend to fly in a direction for half a second only to reset again) and the parkour system has its hilarious moments like Arno making supernaturally far jumps and literally flying into open windows from an insane distance and impossible directions.

Apart from that, I almost played right through the prologue without much trouble, the framerate was alright and I didn't encounter anything largely detrimental to the game (apart from the fact that there's executive meddling everywhere), but there's a part where you have to do a leap of faith to essentially end the whole prologue segment and have the game start proper and... Arno stumbled and I lost all control of him, so he just stood there and nothing ended up happening, couldn't even go to the menu to restart, my only choice being to quit the whole game and start wherever it decided to make a checkpoint. That left me a little bit sour.

I haven't played further but yeah, will get to it sometime later. The game looks absolutely beautiful though and judging from how things are so far, if you are a big AC fan you will definitely enjoy the game despite running into the odd annoying bug or so.

I must admit I deeply dislike the amount of corporate greed present in it though, I die inside every time I open the game menu, the second option leads to the microtransaction store where you can just straight up blow $100 and spend it on the best gear the game has to offer and it just annoys the living fuck out of me that I have to play a cruddy ipad app and level some crappy online Initiates thing to unlock what looks like the real decent chests, I got Unity to play Unity goddammit.

 

[rgrekejin]

Welp, out of personal experience, started playing the game on PS4 yesterday (and its up to date as can be) and spotted some small visual glitches here and there (dresses on women especially tend to fly in a direction for half a second only to reset again) and the parkour system has its hilarious moments like Arno making supernaturally far jumps and literally flying into open windows from an insane distance and impossible directions.

Apart from that, I almost played right through the prologue without much trouble, the framerate was alright and I didn't encounter anything largely detrimental to the game (apart from the fact that there's executive meddling everywhere), but there's a part where you have to do a leap of faith to essentially end the whole prologue segment and have the game start proper and... Arno stumbled and I lost all control of him, so he just stood there and nothing ended up happening, couldn't even go to the menu to restart, my only choice being to quit the whole game and start wherever it decided to make a checkpoint. That left me a little bit sour.

I haven't played further but yeah, will get to it sometime later. The game looks absolutely beautiful though and judging from how things are so far, if you are a big AC fan you will definitely enjoy the game despite running into the odd annoying bug or so.

I must admit I deeply dislike the amount of corporate greed present in it though, I die inside every time I open the game menu, the second option leads to the microtransaction store where you can just straight up blow $100 and spend it on the best gear the game has to offer and it just annoys the living fuck out of me that I have to play a cruddy ipad app and level some crappy online Initiates thing to unlock what looks like the real decent chests, I got Unity to play Unity goddammit.

Yup. There's still a handful of bugs and glitches, and in my experience, none of them are persistent - if something bugs out, you can reset from the last checkpoint and it'll work the second time. At this point most of the things that are wrong with the game are Ubisoft's crappy design choices and the unfortunate proliferation of peripherals Assassin's Creed has going on. So, you know, the things they planned to have wrong with it, rather than unplanned bugs and glitches.

 

[laggyteabag]

From playing the PC version, I can safely say that the game still runs like ass. Well, it still runs better than the consoles (I get around 30-45FPS most of the time on a GTX 970), but if you are expecting a solid and stable framerate, you might want to find a different game. If you are playing on a console, the most recent patch has helped a little; you still wont be getting a solid 30, but you will be hovering around 25 most of the time, especially in crowds. The game is still laden with technical glitches such as dreadful texture pop in[footnote]And I mean absolutely dreadful. If you are looking at buildings across a river, there is a high chance that the textures will not have loaded in completely, and you will be stuck with a blurry mess of a house. Also, the faces of the nearby NPCs fail to load in unless you are around 5m away from them, otherwise you will be stuck with a guy that looks like his face is made of slightly melted playdough.[/footnote], and sometimes climbing up invisible walls, but at least you wont be falling through the floor anymore, so at least it is some progress. To make things even worse, if TB's recent video is anything to go by, if you are playing with an SLI/Crossfire setup, then the water textures are broken and will keep on flashing. To top it off, even if you do persist through all of these bugs and glitches, you will still find a terribly mediocre game underneath it all.

In all honesty, it really isn't worth your time, and it definitely isn't worth your money (I got it for free, and I was still disappointed!). Unless you are a hardcore Assassin's Creed fan, my advice would be just to go and play Black Flag again.

NOTE: The last patch for the game was in mid-December, and they haven't even issued hotfix since then. The next big update is for the (free) DLC content that releases, so hopefully they will sneak in some extra fixes then, but as it stands, there hasn't been much improvement for about a month now.

 

[Irridium]

Playing it on the Xbox One here. It's mostly fixed. Only big issues I've gotten is that sometimes all controls except for the map button just... stop working. Usually happens right when booting up the game, and is easily fixed by fast-traveling somewhere. Apart form that there's just the many moments where the framerate just craps its pants.

Apart from those I've experienced no major issues. Enjoying it quite a bit too. The sense of scale is actually quite impressive, and the combat is no longer "counter to win every fight forever". Bit annoyed the hidden blade isn't a weapon anymore, and that you can't lock on to people.

But anyway yeah the game works fine. Faring a hell of a lot better than the Master Chief Collection, that's for damn sure. That thing's multiplayer is still just straight up broken. It's been TWO GOD DAMN MONTHS AND IT'S STILL BROKEN HOW. It was actually working pretty decently a few weeks ago, but they patched it right before the Halo 5 beta dropped and now it's back to launch-levels of broken. Campaign works fine, but the multiplayer just... doesn't.

...

Sorry for the tangential rant. Just... a lot of anger there

Anyway, yeah, Unity. If you're looking to buy on Xbox One I say go for it.

 

[Zydrate]

I should note that I'm playing on PC, yea.

Thanks for all the input!

 

[bug_of_war]

While it's clear you're gonna play it anyway, I still feel the need to say it's a really average game. Like, REALLY average. As in, I played every other game and enjoyed them all very much, and this one is the poorest of the lot. Buy Rogue (if you haven't) afterwards, it's a much more solid game in terms of everything.


But...you may have fun with Unity, to each their own.