AC: Unity's NPC number is impressive to this date. Ubi at least had ambition 10 years ago.

Loved this game back then, first time I believe I've ever went to actually just walk around a few blocks in a game city. It was just so good!
Too bad it got a slight graphics downgrade with one of them updates due to the performance issues..
 
Reizo Ryuu said:
It was a crowd simulation though, not individual npcs, they were split up in groups and they would swap in being actual "entities" based on how far away from you they are; there would still be some actual real npcs roaming around at all times, but even those would only get their full behaviour set up close.
Origins swapped it out for scheduled behaviour for all npcs, odyssey+ removed the scheduling, probably because of CPU time being required elsewhere, but allowed for more unique npcs.
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I wonder if that's what happens irl in group dynamics when people start acting as crowds instead of individuals. Maybe peer pressure is just part of the programming so that it'll be easier to simulate reality.
 
It was probably their most ambitious game ever and they got absolutely annihilated over it.

- They released this game a year too soon and paid a heavy price because some dumb glitches turned a cutting-edge technological marvel into a laughing stock
- They added a lot of nuances to the parkour system and got wrecked because people either didn't bother to learn or straight up missed the mechanics completely making playing the game way more frustrating than it needs to be

It still holds up incredibly well, it's probably my favourite AC. The vibes, the massive city and its design, the visuals, the parkour, the lighting. It's all immaculate.
 
Larxia said:
I think this all the time. Lately I've been replaying Battlefront 2 (2017), the game almost looks like a movie sometimes, and the thing only uses 30 to 40% of my GTX 1080 on PC.

While we have some tech that is technically more advanced today, I think that in general, games used to look better and were fass less demanding. I think 2015 to 2018 is where graphics kind of peaked so far. After this it's just been at the very best diminishing returns, and at worst games that are blurrier, uglier and 10 times more demanding than better looking games from years before.
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I ran through Uncharted IV on steam over the holiday break and the upgrade from that to where we are now is an amazing case of diminishing returns. Side by side with something like Star Wars Outlaws if you want a good laugh.
SmokedMeat said:
Assassins-Creed-Collectible-Map-Unity.jpg


Here's a reminder of the Unity map, and its ten billion icons. People were sick of the bloat, and the fact that the game was more of the same with each iteration.

Sure it was pretty looking and had lots of NPCs. It was still the typical AC game, which at this point people must miss so badly that they're now saying Unity wasn't so bad.
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That's no different from Valhalla. Putting thousands of square feet of empty, barren countryside between the markers is not a proper fix.

The real knock on AC Unity is the fucking bizzaro comprehension of French history that the writers have. Good grief. Brutal, but I guess they could just be bad people. Can't rule that out with what we learned about the people who work in that industry. At release I just assumed they read all the wrong books.
 
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I own this apparently. Ubisoft gave it to me for free at some point it seems. Thanks I guess. Maybe I will check it out. By now it should be patched up good, right?
 
I don't understand what's going on in those videos. I swear I remember this game had some the most extreme npc pop-in of any game out there.
 
simpatico said:
The real knock on AC Unity is the fucking bizzaro comprehension of French history that the writers have. Good grief. Brutal, but I guess they could just be bad people. Can't rule that out with what we learned about the people who work in that industry. At release I just assumed they read all the wrong books.
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Could you elaborate in detail what was wrong with it?
 
AC Unity has one of the best gameplay reveal.



backthen when AC was interesting.

Edit : this reveal has feeling of next gen almost at everything too.
 
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Embearded said:
I remember they has technical problems because of the NPC numbers and also i remember reading that it was hardcoded in the engine and they couldn't easily reduce them to increase performance.

I agree though, at least they tried to do something new back then.
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This is for sure true. Its borked in a huge number of ways and they can't fix it. They internally consider it a good idea but poorly decided when it came to putting it into the game in the way they did.
 
nemiroff said:
I don't understand what's going on in those videos. I swear I remember this game had some the most extreme npc pop-in of any game out there.
Click to expand...
It does and it ruins the game. Huge crowds mean nothing when NPC are glitching in front of you all the time.

By the way, there are way too many people on the streets there. More than now. Overrated like all the other AC.
 
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Gonzito said:
The facial animations in their latest games is a complete damn joke. It all started with Origins, and it reached his peak with Oddissey. Its awful and it looks terrible, you play older games like Watch Dogs, or old AC and the cutscenes are so fucking good in comparison, its honestly embarassing
Click to expand...

I haven't researched a lot of Ubisoft's facial animation system (I've been interested in a bunch of what they do with body motion but haven't seen anything specifically about what they do with faces,) but would assume a lot of it comes down to the tech used.

In the earlier games, digital characters in those days would have been done with a lot of mocap of actual actors performing lines. That's great for the English-language version, but international versions either have to use the same mocap process for each country (and remap all the animation for every language toggle available) or go towards a more modern system of mapping the speech phonemes and tics to the facial rig for various audio tracks. So the mouths move accurately (*although that gets complicated by something I'll get into later...) but it loses some of the human element of the actor capture. Probably now you can blend one key performance and a retargetted alternate language performance, along with the parts of speech motions and all of that in one character stew, and get something workable for countries not using the English track, but it's a different process, and also you have issues with the timing of how long words are in different languages and all of that; even when it's done really well, the results falter the further you get away from the original (usually English) performance.



Digital characters now are also way more complicated and detailed, with subsystems upon subsystems for every aspect of human motion... which makes all the detail work incredibly hard and time-consuming to do, and AC just keeps adding on dialog, not all of which can get ace-level treatment. Dialog sequences also tend to get closer to characters in each generation of graphics since characters can generally hold up to closer scrutiny (even if aspects of AC characters were more pleasing in previous games,) which leaves more to go wrong right up front of view. Now that the tongue and lips and teeth can move, we expect that fidelity, and even though the pop-jaw faces of previous characters were not as complex and exact to anatomy, it sold the motion easier because it didn't try as hard and there was less that we needed convincing of.

Performances were also more "puppety" in the past, for better or worse. Actors acted big, and that translated into theatrical performances. And not only would they have acted out their parts, they would have acted out their lines, with big gestures to emphasize the meaning of specific words, for big soap-opera type performances. We have finer capture devices now, and the rigs are more anatomically accurate (even though we're just talking 1 or 2 gens of tech difference.) Performance actors are also more experienced. There's less gesturing "for the back of the theater" in performance at this level of fidelity. Although that creates a more lifelike performance, broad acting is often more fun! (Also, our digital characters might still struggle to actually perform all that nuance even though their rigs are technically capable of fine detail.) Similar to body animators and actors, face animators might have also over-animated a digital performance (either by plussing some of the mocap results or hand-tweaking for more dynamic results.) The work now is closer to "technically correct", but the end results aren't always as pleasing unless you ham it up. Uncanny valley isn't the only reason why Pixar people don't look much like people, even though so much natural detail simulation goes into the simulation of people-like skin and hair and muscles and eyeballs.

That's the * of earlier, that you could fake a great performance a lot easier back when the whole thing was a digital muppet show (even with mocap and pro actors and all of that.) Now that the computer is saying, "This is the correct performance for these lines of dialog from this actor data," how much do you overrule those results and redo it by hand? (The answer is, a lot more than people give animators credit for, but still probably not enough...)

 
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I love pissant threads like this. When the game was launched it was the butt of all jokes for characters faces disappearing and poor performance. Now its a classic
 
The lighting and some interiors looked amazing, but everything else? Cmon, it was a buggy pos, the LOD was a massive turd, you could see low textures 5 feet in front of you loading, the story is the worst thing ever in all AC history, etc.
 
The Cockatrice said:
The lighting and some interiors looked amazing, but everything else? Cmon, it was a buggy pos, the LOD was a massive turd, you could see low textures 5 feet in front of you loading, the story is the worst thing ever in all AC history, etc.
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The history revisionism topics for ac unity and the order that we have on gaf sometimes always manage to make me chuckle :lollipop_grinning_sweat:
 
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Where were you in 2014? That game is a technical masterpiece. Still more impressive visually than most games coming out. Better looking than rdr2. Yes the shitty consoles gimped them heavily. But ultimately, gamers rejected the game and that's when ubisoft stopped trying.
 
SJRB said:
It was probably their most ambitious game ever and they got absolutely annihilated over it.

- They released this game a year too soon and paid a heavy price because some dumb glitches turned a cutting-edge technological marvel into a laughing stock
- They added a lot of nuances to the parkour system and got wrecked because people either didn't bother to learn or straight up missed the mechanics completely making playing the game way more frustrating than it needs to be

It still holds up incredibly well, it's probably my favourite AC. The vibes, the massive city and its design, the visuals, the parkour, the lighting. It's all immaculate.
Click to expand...

I think they got hurt so bad they stopped trying and just went very basic for their next games. Which is too bad because it is one of their best and for me ambitious ubi was the best one. (watchdogs was also super ambitious and they got slapped, rightly so, for the downgrade. At least it tried to do something different).
 
This game is visually impressive, but I didn't like the changes to the gameplay. I died a lot because I was used to the gameplay of the North Atlantic trilogy games (III, Black Flag and Rogue). They added more realism, with weight and many combat animations, which made the game slower.
 
Animations (e.g. climbing) went also for worse with Origins and following titles. Environmental NPC interaction was also great in Unity with some NPC actually transporting things and loading/unloading carts. Face details wäof NPCs were also declining with Origins. In a game series heavily focusing on characters and cinematic cutscenes focusing on faces.

PC-Version also introduced percentage closer soft shadows (they also used in Syndicate) which acted like a lite version of ray-traced sun shadows, giving a penumbra and feathered soft look the greater the distance between illuminated object and shadow ground.
 
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The Cockatrice said:
Including the people in this topic calling the game amazing.
Click to expand...

I actually believe that in terms of gameplay, with mods, the game is really good. But its true like you said that the story is not good, but I always revisit the game because its really fun for me to play it personally
 
Filben said:
Animations (e.g. climbing) went also for worse with Origins and following titles.
Click to expand...
They're supposedly changing how climbing and parkour works in the new AC.



I don't particularly like the heavy bruiser-style gameplay they went with for Yasuke, but Naoe gameplay seems like it could turn out really good.
 
So many games are "garbage". Then ten years later, they are the "good ol' days".

Some of you just aren't happy unless you're not happy.
 
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TGO said:
It was Ubisoft Montreal, they did Origins & Valhalla and to my knowledge took over the Prince of Persia Remake.
Click to expand...
Nah they did black flag the year before. That team did black flag , origin then valhalla. This was a secondary team within Ubisoft Montreal which was never given a chance to make another game.
SJRB said:
It was probably their most ambitious game ever and they got absolutely annihilated over it.

- They released this game a year too soon and paid a heavy price because some dumb glitches turned a cutting-edge technological marvel into a laughing stock
- They added a lot of nuances to the parkour system and got wrecked because people either didn't bother to learn or straight up missed the mechanics completely making playing the game way more frustrating than it needs to be

It still holds up incredibly well, it's probably my favourite AC. The vibes, the massive city and its design, the visuals, the parkour, the lighting. It's all immaculate.
Click to expand...
spot on. My favorite thing about the game wasn't even the graphics, it was the city design and the incredible use of city monuments and neighborhoods by tying them into puzzles.

You got some vague hint about a location which you then had to cross reference against their massive paris history database or simply go by memory then go take a picture there. It was ingenious in that it made me learn the history of Paris as well as the game map inside out. It is still the only game that does this.

I spent maybe 20-30 hours just running around the city doing those puzzles.

My biggest regret is not buying this game at launch and falling for the hate campaign. Never did that again. Fuck the haters. They don't like ambitious games and simply reward safe basic games with their goty and sales.
 
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SlimySnake said:
Nah they did black flag the year before. That team did black flag , origin then valhalla. This was a secondary team within Ubisoft Montreal which was never given a chance to make another game.

spot on. My favorite thing about the game wasn't even the graphics, it was the city design and the incredible use of city monuments and neighborhoods by tying them into puzzles.

You got some vague hint about a location which you then had to cross reference against their massive paris history database or simply go by memory then go take a picture there. It was ingenious in that it made me learn the history of Paris as well as the game map inside out. It is still the only game that does this.

I spent maybe 20-30 hours just running around the city doing those puzzles.

My biggest regret is not buying this game at launch and falling for the hate campaign. Never did that again. Fuck the haters. They don't like ambitious games and simply reward safe basic games with their goty and sales.
Click to expand...
Origins or odissey (or both) have these type of puzzles that gave you vague hints about a location where to find loot.
 
I can't forget the PC launch mess at the time, but I glad bought on both PC and console.
Years later, still held up pretty well.
 
Gonzito said:
I actually believe that in terms of gameplay, with mods, the game is really good. But its true like you said that the story is not good, but I always revisit the game because its really fun for me to play it personally
Click to expand...
Not everyone use mods and console users can't mod to begin with.

I'm strongly against judgying the quality of games in their modded form.

Mods are not the developers work.
 
Karak said:
This is for sure true. Its borked in a huge number of ways and they can't fix it. They internally consider it a good idea but poorly decided when it came to putting it into the game in the way they did.
Click to expand...
Didn't you do a "Walk the walk" with Unity? I don't remember.
I remember Origins & Syndicate, those were great.

I love your "Walk the walk"s 😃❤️
 
This was another game like Cyberpunk that I wanted to play but avoided it like the plague once the early impressions came out. I only played it after the final(ish) patch and had nothing but good experiences with it. I've never played the 1.0 versions of either game and I remember both fondly.

Also Syndicate was even better than this game and the last great Assassin's Creed game.
 
LectureMaster said:
What they have now? A bloated 20k+ employee company that repeats the same formula year over year.

Click to expand...

I love Unity, and the crowd system is impressive, but the LOD is THE worst I've ever seen.

Watching this video you can see NPCs changing models right in front of you. It's very jarring. If it wasnt for that, it would be amazing.

Sadly, this LOD problem was never fixed by mods in the PC version
 
Funny how this AC is quite the technical marvel, especially for its time. It actually was ahead of its time, which sadly did make it a buggy mess. But graphically & animation wise it's an impressive game.
I still remember the PC screenshot thread here on Gaf at the time and it showed some incredible screenshots from the interiors.
 
I played Unity like a month or two after it came out on PC and it was fine, and looked amazing. I played it in French with subtitles to get around the weird British VA thing. Comparing it to other games like CP2077 is just totally uunfair.It was a bit rushed - but a year early? Come on. If the game had any issue, it was that it was too ambitious for the PS4 and Xbox One.

AC Unity, 3, and Black Flag were all pretty bold titles, that moved away from what made the series so popular with the AC2 series.
 
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Larxia said:
I agree. The worst looking part about the game is the LOD distance. Some buildings and other assets are WAY too low resolution even at close distance.
Outside of this, I think the game still looks fantastic. It has the best art direction and lighting in the series, and overall I think it looks better than the latest AC games.



I think this all the time. Lately I've been replaying Battlefront 2 (2017), the game almost looks like a movie sometimes, and the thing only uses 30 to 40% of my GTX 1080 on PC.

While we have some tech that is technically more advanced today, I think that in general, games used to look better and were far less demanding. I think 2015 to 2018 is where graphics kind of peaked so far. After this it's just been at the very best diminishing returns, and at worst games that are blurrier, uglier and 10 times more demanding than better looking games from years before.
Click to expand...
We look back at it fondly because the consoles were underpowered pieces of SHIT and you could brute force games on a €1000 PC.

Case in point this game. Unplayable on a console but sure it looked good if you had a beefy gaming PC.
 
John Marston said:
Didn't you do a "Walk the walk" with Unity? I don't remember.
I remember Origins & Syndicate, those were great.

I love your "Walk the walk"s 😃❤️
Click to expand...
Thank you very much. They will return. It is hard to do as they arn't normal breakdowns cause I do have to get devs info first. But they are my favorite vids. Well maybe the AI Reviews this game are my favorite cause the old AI cracked me up
 
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