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Ubisoft late on Wednesday issued a statement admitting major issues with its Assassin’s Creed Unity video game. The company apologised for shipping a title full of bugs and performance issues. As a remedy, Ubisoft will provide an expansion pack for the title free to everyone as well as a free game to owners of the product with pre-purchased expansions.
“Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues,” said Yannis Mallat, chief executive officer of Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto. “I want to sincerely apologize on behalf of Ubisoft and the entire Assassin's Creed team. These problems took away from your enjoyment of the game, and kept many of you from experiencing the game at its fullest potential.”
Assassin’s Creed Unity features a bunch of new technologies that have never been implemented into video games before. For example, Assassin’s Creed Unity is one of the first games to feature hundreds of NPCs [non-player characters] is many scenes, which requires tremendous amount of both CPU and GPU processing horsepower. In a bid to support high-quality graphics and a huge number of NPCs, Ubisoft even invented an all-new game engine for ACU. Unfortunately, the company rushed the launch of the title and it contained numerous bugs. For example, an engineer said that the game was issuing approximately 50,000 draw calls on the DirectX 11 API that which only can handle ~10,000 peak draw calls, which resulted in incorrect rendering and disappearance of textures.
While Ubisoft is trying to fix the issues by releasing patches, in a bid to give something back to the gamers the publisher will make the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Unity Dead Kings DLC free for everyone. For holders of Season Pass and owners of Assassin’s Creed Unity Gold Edition (which includes the Season Pass), Ubisoft will offer the choice of one additional game (The Crew, Far Cry 4, Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Rayman Legends or Just Dance 2015).
“In addition to the latest patch and this offer, we are committed to delivering further fixes for other issues you have raised,” said Mr. Mallat. “In the meantime, please keep your feedback coming – it has been both humbling and incredibly helpful as we continue working hard to improve the overall quality of the game.”
While it is good to see when companies admit their mistakes publicly, the situation with games that are buggy or not ready at launch is a very negative thing for the market in general. Game publishers want to act like major Hollywood studios, which announce premiere dates even before the script is finished. As a result, whenever a problem occurs, actual developers do not have enough time to solve it.
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KitGuru Says: Ubisoft clearly wants to sugar the pill with a free DLC or a free game. However, what a lot of gamers really want to know is when all the bug and performance issues with ACU are going to be fixed. Moreover, will all of them be fixed? Will Ubisoft and other game developers learn from the ACU situation?
It really shocked me that they offered mostly newer high profile titles as the free game offerings. That’s a good gesture.
And most of the people are bitching “broken free game for a broken game”. Nothing can satisfy them that is for sure :/
So, if someone sell you a broken car and then give you for free a new radio-mp3 player to put in your broken car, are you going to call it “good gesture”?
You are kidding. If someone can’t play or enjoy the game because of the bugs, problems and bad performance of the game, how do you suppose he will enjoy the DLC?
Or just maybe their sales are tanking and Pre-orders for the CREW *warning delayed reviews* are being canceled….too right.
Mmmm Treating xbox and ps4 customers like they do PC customers starting to have an effect
Im talking about the free games for season pass holders.
Far Cry 4 is amazing and is not broken people claim it to be. So, you can get it
And we’ll be going full circle again on the next Ubi game. Just save yourself a headache and not buy from them. Saved me from so much grief, and money.
Does it covers all the buyers? What about those who already bought both games? Those who wanted only Unity and not another game from Ubisoft? Do you buy one game to play another? Do you really expect everyone to be happy paying for Unity and ending up playing FarCry4?
Ubisoft’s “good gesture” is a nice marketing trick. First it pocketed the money from Unity, then it gives free a DLC that costs nothing to them and another game that could bring extra money in the future by introducing it’s buyers to another game. A good gesture would have been a full refund to anyone wanted their money back. But that would have been too honest for Ubisoft and at the same time too bad for shareholders.
Too little Too late quite frankly,they knew it was buggy and released it anyway and even now they try to spin it after blaming everyone but themselves.This “statement” is just more PR Bullshit from what has become one of the worst company’s around.It would be better for the industry if Ubisoft just died, maybe then these company’s would start putting out games that work at launch.
I get the whole dissapointment towards Ubisoft on this matter (or generally) but your example is way off mate. A buggy AC unity game (but still playable) + a free Far Cry 4 deal isn’t quite the same as a broken car and a free mp3 player, right?
Using your analogy…in this case, they’re giving me a newer car while allowing me to keep the broken car that they’re working on fixing. So yes, to me, it’s a good gesture.
The DLC is the mp3 player. As for FarCry 4, as I said in another post, maybe a few don’t want it, don’t need it, don’t care about it, or they have already bought it. And of course the offer of FarCry4 is not for everyone if I am not mistaken.
The free DLC is not a free car. It’s a free bicycle for paying an expensive car. On TV sales they are doing it all the time.
I bought the season pass, which likely would have cost at least 3 times more than the single piece of DLC. That’s why I’m getting a car, and you’re getting a bicycle.
Enjoy your car. It’s a different model than the one you ordered, but who knows, maybe you wanted the free car more than the one you actually bought.