Assassin's Creed Unity thread

[Carfax83]

This game is due out in only three days, so here's a thread for those that are interested in the game or have already pre-ordered it or thinking about buying it. Ubisoft haters can GTFO. If you just want to bash Ubisoft, go elsewhere..

First review on PS4 (8.8).

Ubisoft promotion to get free DLC for just signing into your Uplay account in this link.

Here are the system specs:

Supported OS:

Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (64 bit versions only)

Processor:

Minimum - Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz

Recommended- Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or better

RAM:

Minimum-6 GB

Recommended-8GB

Video Card:

Minimum-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 (2 GB VRAM)

Recommended-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X (3 GB VRAM)

DirectX:

Version 11

Sound Card:

DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers

Hard Drive Space:

50 GB available space

System requirements are either extremely heavy, or reasonable depending on what you choose to believe. If a GTX 680 is the bare minimum needed to run the game, then Ubisoft has ostensibly failed to optimize it properly. However, if the requirements target 60 FPS, then they are possibly quite reasonable.

The game will use a heavily upgraded version of the AnvilNext engine, which has been used in previous AC titles. This new AnvilNext engine will use a multithreaded renderer, so it should exploit modern multicore processors very well and be capable of reaching higher frame rates than the old AnvilNext engine, which was limited to a single thread for rendering.

It's also a Gameworks title, so it will have PC exclusive technologies, which you can see in the video below.

Videos:

AC Unity PC tech trailer.

AC Unity 101 trailer

Story trailer

NVIDIA HBAO+ adds realistic Ambient Occlusion shadowing and shading around objects and surfaces that occlude light, with a higher degree of precision than other AO techniques, significantly improving image quality in every scene.

NVIDIA Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows add contact hardening soft shadows throughout the game, increasing image quality in every scene.

NVIDIA GeometryWorks Advanced Tessellation adds real DirectX 11-powered geometric detail to roads, rooftops, buildings, and many more game elements, improving the realism and detail level of almost every game scene. Furthermore, with the addition of real geometric detail, enhanced surfaces and objects can be accurately shaded and shadowed by HBAO+ and PCSS, increasing realism and graphical fidelity by an even greater degree.

NVIDIA TXAA temporal anti-aliasing eliminates the distracting movement of anti-aliased lines and edges, and also eliminates other artifacts associated with anti-aliasing. Edge anti-aliasing is comparable with 8xMSAA, but at the performance cost of 4xMSAA.

You’ll also receive the usual PC benefits such as improved textures, effects and assets, along with control options, faster framerates, the ability to render the game at higher resolutions, such as 4K, and the ability to play the game at a higher resolution on your HD monitor with new NVIDIA Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) technology.

Screenshots:

 

[cbrunny]

A must buy for me. Undecided though if I'll grab it on release or if I'll wait for sales. If the reivews are good I'll probably grab it from the green man.

 

[Carfax83]

Well it's actually already had one review, which scored 8.8 on the PS4..

From the feedback of people that are playing the game early, they seem to love the game and have high praise for the sheer amount of detail, which is said to be staggering.

But the current gen consoles are having performance issues, which was to be expected I suppose given how weak their CPUs are and the game is effectively CPU bound by Ubisoft's admission due to the amount of A.I and the baked lighting which uses the CPU for decompression.

This game should both run and look much better on PC, provided it doesn't have the resource management issues that plagued Watch Dogs.

 

[Eric1987]

Anyone know the type of DRM it'll use? Can't wait to play it in 4k.

 

[Carfax83]

Anyone know the type of DRM it'll use? Can't wait to play it in 4k.

It uses Uplay and/or Steam, so the DRM is very light..

 

[chimaxi83]

It uses Uplay and/or Steam, so the DRM is very light..

Unless, of course, Uplay shows off it's very common feature of not letting you authenticate and play your new game.

 

[gevorg]

I love the series, but Ubisoft sure nickel and dime you with all this extra/DLC content.

 

[JeffMD]

Meh, cant believe I missed out on the free dlc.

I actually have not been spoiling myself with movies of the games coming up these couple of weeks, but advanced warfare and its 45 gigs of data have been leaving me struggling on my 460gtx. So when I saw the last trailer released for unity, I knew I had to upgrade. So shortly after unitys release.. I'll have a brand new 970gtx to power it. I'll prolly use the nvidia free game card on unity as well, despite also having interest in far cry 4.

 

[Carfax83]

I love the series, but Ubisoft sure nickel and dime you with all this extra/DLC content.

You saw the link to the free DLC right? I don't know how long the promotion will last so if you haven't done it yet, do it quickly!

Meh, cant believe I missed out on the free dlc

The link and webpage are still active, so you can still get them!

 

[cbrunny]

Well it's actually already had one review, which scored 8.8 on the PS4..

Not interested in the PS4. Plus one review is simply not enough to make that decision for me. How it performs on the PC will be the largest influence. If its going to run crappy I'm going to wait for optimizations/bug fixes.

 

[lilrayray69]

The pre-order bonuses + "free" DLC only discourage me from ever buying a game.

I'll pretty much never pre-order a game. I might buy it a few days after release if reviews are good. But now when you miss 'free' content because you don't pre-order, I pretty much just won't buy.

Anyway, I saw a livestream of someone playing this on PS4 and it didn't look that good. There were definite framerate issues. Hope PC version is good.

 

[JeffMD]

Livestreams are HORRIBLE..HORRIBLE when it comes to video quality. It is a real time encode so it is worse than youtube. And frames drop all the time because the system priorities synch rather then stream completeness not to mention the software encoders might not be able to keep up (the only time hardware encoding is used is if the stream is handled on a pc and you are playing on a console. Otherwise console cast will be software based and pc game solutions are also software based. Nvidias videos cards ARE able to use CUDA to help accelerate encoding, but it fights for performance with the game and will drop frames if not enough gpu is given to it).

 

[BSim500]

The pre-order bonuses + "free" DLC only discourage me from ever buying a game.

I'll pretty much never pre-order a game. I might buy it a few days after release if reviews are good. But now when you miss 'free' content because you don't pre-order, I pretty much just won't buy.

Agreed. They're nothing more than glorified bribes to encourage uninformed "hype" pre-orders vs informed "wait for reviews" purchase. Sad thing is, when they segregate their "pre-order bonuses" (ie, release different x pre-order bonus pack for Amazon, y pack for Gamestop, z pack for Walmart, etc), it's guaranteed the only true winners will be the pirates downloading a cracked "repack" version within 24-48 hours of launch that combines all multi-retailer bonus DLC's in one (which you can't buy as one package after launch from anywhere) with no UPlay / Origin / Steam launcher / Internet connection needed to run the game thrown in as a bonus...

So they whine like hell about piracy yet still go out of their way to actively encourage it by punishing responsible gamers who want to see product reviews before buying, only to be "rewarded" with even less gameplay than blind pre-orders, who in turn get less gameplay than the pirates...

 

[Carfax83]

Not interested in the PS4. Plus one review is simply not enough to make that decision for me. How it performs on the PC will be the largest influence. If its going to run crappy I'm going to wait for optimizations/bug fixes.

Well the game is the same on the PS4 as it is on the PC, minus the PC's better performance, graphics etcetera..

But I do agree that one review isn't enough to come to a firm decision.

 

[cbrunny]

Well the game is the same on the PS4 as it is on the PC, minus the PC's better performance, graphics etcetera..

That's like saying "The PS4 and the PC are the same as long as you ignore all things that make the PC superior"

There will be differences in general playability between the PS4 and PC, and if I'm wrong then I'll grab the PC version on launch. Taking a PS4 version review as a PC review just doesn't make sense in my opinion.

 

[Carfax83]

Anyway, I saw a livestream of someone playing this on PS4 and it didn't look that good. There were definite framerate issues. Hope PC version is good.

Like JeffMD said, live streams generally are terrible on consoles, unless you have a good capture setup.

Case in point, look at this video.

It's the highest quality footage I've ever seen of the PS4 version by far, and I'm pretty sure it's because this guy is using a good capture setup..

If he had used the PS4 share feature like most of the videos out there, then it would look terrible.

 

[Carfax83]

Looks like the PS4 version is slightly over 40 GB, compared to the PC which is 50 GB. That's a good sign, because it means the PC version will have higher quality assets:

 

[futurefields]

looks like the ps4 version is slightly over 40 gb, compared to the pc which is 50 gb. that's a good sign, because it means the pc version will have higher quality assets:

hahahahaha

 

[Carfax83]

hahahahaha

I'm glad you found that amusing :sneaky:

 

[chimaxi83]

Yeah, all about that uncompressed audio D:

 

[Carfax83]

Yeah, all about that uncompressed audio D:

So you think all of that extra capacity is because of uncompressed audio?

I doubt it. Look at the minimum requirements for this game, they aren't targeting low spec machines. If a dual core was listed as the minimum, then maybe I'd agree with you.

The extra capacity on the PC is likely due to higher quality textures and lightmaps.

 

[Fire&Blood]

AFAIK, the devs said that lighting data takes up 25GB.

 

[Carfax83]

AFAIK, the devs said that lighting data takes up 25GB.

Yeah, but that was on PS4. We don't know what the breakdown is on PC.

PS4's total install size is 42 GB, PC's is 50 GB. So that's an 8 GB difference, which is significant.

Uncompressed audio is extremely unlikely for aforementioned reasons. So it has to be textures, and or higher quality lightmaps. We know for a certainty that the PC version will have higher quality textures and overall assets, because NVidia already said so.

Higher quality lightmaps is less likely, because the lighting data is baked and presumably the same across all platforms.

So yeah, it's probably just textures and some other type of assets.

 

[futurefields]

Titanfall on PC did have an issue with uncompressed audio being the culprit for it's massive install size. But I think for next-gen games with a sizeable single-player campaign, anywhere from 30-50gb is going to be the norm. Titanfall just had no excuse because it's nothing but a set of maps.

 

[escrow4]

Honestly every single Assassin's Creed on PC has had issues. Majority of which are related to optimization. They are still using that old ass Anvil engine but apparently have rejigged it, instead of doing the sensible thing - chucking it in the bin and using something that actually works from the ground up. IF those specs are optimized 60FPS then great, but I have a suspicion it will run like a dog.

And really those specs are nothing special, a quad has been recommended for a while now and especially this year, 8GB+ is standard, a 680 is old and midrange, and a 780 is the next logical step up. Fat old HDD space isn't even worth mentioning.