Fourth ‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ Patch Delayed, Paris Needs Refurbishing
Assassin’s Creed Unity is but one of several PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC holiday releases that released loaded with bugs and glitches. At least some of the Unity glitches were amusing, but Ubisoft has now run into another problem. A patch promised for Monday to fix co-op matchmaking and other performance issues has been delayed.
Ubisoft made the announcement on its Assassin’s Creed Live Update blog, which was created due to the issues with the game. The large open-world map of Paris is the focus of the developer’s efforts to improve the inconsistent frame rate and performance with Unity. That means a little more baking time.
Patch 4 is temporarily on hold – http://t.co/jUsiuTJEWe
— Assassin’s Creed (@assassinscreed) December 15, 2014
“Rigorous quality control is of paramount importance to us, and your feedback over these past weeks has indicated that it is important to you as well,” the Assassin’s Creed team wrote.
“As stated last week, we’d expected to release the patch today (and we know that many are anticipating its release), but we are choosing to hold off until we can give you the improvements we’ve promised. We are committed to delivering major performance improvements, which requires that we refurbish the Paris map and that will take a few more days to hit the high level of quality our players deserve.”
How Ubisoft goes about “refurbishing” Assassin’s Creed Unity is open for debate. There are areas of Paris in the game world where the frame rate performs within reason and others where it sharply drops even though you might not think the area is particularly taxing on the hardware. One example is the following video from ZeroX03 Gaming of the assassin climbing the inside of a church where the frame rate is particularly bad.
There was no mention of the co-op matchmaking improvements that were previously mentioned as part of patch 4. That fix must already be satisfactorily complete, but only a real-world test will tell.
While delaying the release of the patch is disappointing, the counter-argument is one of not making a bad problem worse. If Ubisoft released the fourth patch when it wasn’t ready and it turned out to not fix what it promised or make things worse, the developer would be pilloried by gamers. Delaying is the lesser of two evils given the credibility hit the developer has earned from all the issues with Unity.
The issues with Assassin’s Creed Unity were serious enough that Ubisoft revealed that it will give the Dead Kings DLC away for free to everyone that owns a copy. Season Pass owners will be compensated with a free game of choice, as I reported for Inquisitr. The system to select the free game to download is expected to come online later this week, according to an update to the promotion’s FAQ.
What do you think of the Assassin’s Creed Unity patch delay? Sound off in the comments below.
[Images via Assassin’s Creed]
