@captain_felafel: They were probably well aware of a lot of the issues and were working to fix them but ultimately they have a release date to hit and Ubisoft isn't going to miss that date, especially with it being a holiday season release.

It is far more likely that Ubisoft corporate and the development team were well aware of the issues. In fact Microsoft and Sony probably also knew about them as the games passed certification on both platforms. The more likely explanation is that this is one of the biggest releases of the year and barring widespread catastrophic game breaking bugs (most of the ones I have seen don't seem to cause the game to crash, lose save data, etc.) it was going to hit its release date.

Wow! Crashing during Co Op, can't get of hay carts, delay on menu screen at start. I mean the graphic errors of fun internet meme material but that's serious problem. You know I'm surprised this even got as far are pressing discs.

I kept having a bug where the game would crash/freeze as I entered Sorbonne or tried to get to the viewpoint there. I kept trying and eventually it stopped doing that so I was able to get the Sorbonne viewpoint and the game never crashed again (I have no idea why).

... What was wrong with FC3? I played it on launch with no problems. On PC, though, same as I'll be playing FC4.

Optimization issues for lower end rigs, late drivers and general UPlay issues. Not nearly as bad as AC4, Watch Dogs or this but it did have problems.

People keep saying that AC4 was a bad port too but I never had any issues with it it always ran fine for me.

Ah, sure. UPlay is essentially a giant-sized bug in itself, so I'll give you that.

Please don't fix this game Ubisoft.

It's so generous they're gonna fix the game they are charging $60 for!

Never fix this. Ever. It's wonderful.

In a strange way it seems more realistic this way..

Feel sorry for the suckers folks that bought this turd.

Stop preordering games people! This would be a large step to making untrustworthy corporations work harder to submit working games.

What a giant bummer. It's almost comical how badly they screwed up this launch.

I don't know much about making games but maybe if they removed all of the faces they could boost the framerate a bit.

please reconsider the practice of pre-ordering games. it gives those behind them incentives to release unfinished products, and "fix" them later. the practice of pre-ordering, among other things, rewards them for a product that has not even been released yet.

people are motivated by money. it isnt a bad thing, but when the money starts rolling in before you even did your work, what is your incentive to finish your work? how motivated would you be if you knew you didnt have to show up to your job to get paid? how hard would you work if you were still paid, despite being horrible at your job? i urge you all, to think about what you say as a consumer when you allow companies to take your dollars before delivering on the products they offer.

we will continue to get broken, buggy, and unfinished games, with review embargoes and all the like, until we collectively demand otherwise. one way we can do that is by voting with our dollars, and refusing to pay for products before they are finished.

Even with the release date being 3 days later in the UK, I still didn't have time to cancel my pre-order before my copy was shipped. Maybe Jeff is right when he says don't fucking pre-order games haha

Same.

Assassin's Creed III was the last time I buy an AC game at launch. It was the exact same situation. Rampant bugs, game-breaking, scripting issues, falling through the world, bad mission design, frame rate, etc. I was so pissed, especially because I bought it digitally and couldn't return it; I should've contacted Sony. They kept patching it over the next few months but I doubt it got that much better.

I'm still interested in playing it, but luckily by the time I get around to it, they'll have had a few more months to fix their QA testing and patch it up, and it'll be at a reduced price. Win-win for me.

I just downloaded and started playing this game. Hope they roll out fixes before I get too deep in to it.

the way I see it this is an annualized franchise so delaying the game is not an option for Ubisoft. I'm sure they were well aware of the issues when they shipped the final code and immediately began working on the post-release patches. I'm not sure how many teams are working on AC at this point but we know Activision has shifted to a 3 team, 3 year dev cycle with Call of Duty and so far seems to have kept the quality standard pretty high.

@mustainium: framerate is fine????? What platform are you playing it on? If pc have you traveled to the future to purchase a video card? If console do you find 20 fps acceptable for "next gen" hardware?

Banal? Your opinion on the matter is banal.

@thefriend: Those are lessons that should have been learned a long time ago. I don't get how there are still people that lament that they pre-ordered...

It's time to reintroduce fees to patches again, but this time, charge 100k per patch. Can't believe it's acceptable to charge first and fix later nowadays.

Far Cry 4 is out next week? How crazy is it that Ubisoft are launching three huge games on top of each other? That has to have a monumental financial impact, for better or worse.

That pic gives me an electrocuted Marv vibe from Home Alone 2.

The big budget industry sure is giving us every reason to never preorder over the last many years.

Keep the faces broken. It greatly amuses me.

Every AAA game that makes preorder-folk sad, makes me hope that they learned their lesson and won't preorder again. That way eventually the preordering + fix the game months later-practices can come to a stop. Sadly, there are always people out there that haven't gotten burned before or don't give a fuck.

I've preordered numerous games before without broken launches. It's publishers preferring hitting deadlines to quality assurance and in the rare case utter developer incompetence like Bethesda aka. wedidn'tbugtest-a

I really hope this triggers a lot of people to stop buying this franchise yearly. Speak with your money!

I stopped after III and from this year's disastrous launch, I'm definitely not going back.

Hot tip for those of us that bought the game. Apperntly if you disconnect your console from the network it improves the frame rate it haven't had a chance to try it but will report back.

No, I played through it day one with an i7 GTX 580 maxed out only thing not turning anti aliasing past either 8 or 16x. I also put about 90 hours into the game the first few weeks I had it.

THe game was not broken whatsoever.

It's cool guys, they are making good progress, check it out!

Now people can properly spend more money on this broken product!

@doctordonkey said:

It's cool guys, they are making good progress, check it out!

Now people can properly spend more money on this broken product!

Awesome, it's nice to know they have their priorities straight...

Google Farcry 3 stuttering, it was a very subtle micro-stuttering which tons of people didn't notice but it was there for a VERY large portion of the population across many different rigs. There were people who couldn't play it even after six months because it was so bad for them. Most folks couldn't tell and if you didn't notice it, than like I always say, ignorance is bliss. People out there can't tell a difference between 30 and 60 fps, or 120 and 60 fps but it doesn't mean there isn't a difference. Hell! I've heard people say the don't see "HD" which is ludicrous since some are still using old 480p TVs .

Maybe your rig had just the right combo of motherboard, GPU, drivers and it worked smooth for you at launch. If it did I envy you greatly because I didn't get a chance to ever beat it and it was an awesome game.

And I didn't even bring up the bait and switch that happened between the E3 demo and the actual release of the game. Which strangely enough also happened in Watch Dogs and I expect to happen in The Division as well.

@doctordonkey Hey man, priorities!!! :p

Though let's be fair fixing micro transactions is much easier than trying to fix weird bugs than can break other things in the process. But it is funny that Helix Credits were taken care of asap.

@jetimus:

I'm on the Xbone

I'm still early on, but the only point where the frame-rate went to hell was the cathedral, where Arno is inducted. I've had no issues anywhere else.

Oh exactly. This is the video game equivalent of "too big to fail", which is disgusting. Ubisoft shouldn't be expected to push a game this big because of technical problems, but this should never have gotten past certification.

I was done buying Ubisoft products long ago.

And that's why Ubi have taken Uplay completely offline. As much as Unity is getting all the press for being broken, the press keep failing to mention that Unity also broke Uplay. Which ties every Ubisoft game together. Not just Unity.

Every single time Ubisoft release a major title Uplay collapses under the strain. Usually this means it takes forever just to login to a game but this time around Ubisoft borked the entire thing. Which means any paid purchases fail on install authentication. Profile rewards and actions do not load into the game. DLC is inaccessible. Multiplayer breaks. Assassins Creed Initiates (which was barely finished anyway) is completely useless. Those stupid enough to pay for Helix points got hosed ... etc.

Now Ubisoft have less than four days to not only fix what went wrong this week, but to make sure that they anticipate the load when FC4 is released next week. Which they do not have a great track record with based on the last few years. So even if FC4 is bug free, if the Uplay network is still it's usual unreliable crap then the game will still be fucked.

Very happy I passed this game up.

@korwin said:

@doctordonkey said:

It's cool guys, they are making good progress, check it out!

Now people can properly spend more money on this broken product!

Awesome, it's nice to know they have their priorities straight...

Ubi what the fuck are you doing?

With the shear amount of games available for download from the past generation and seeing as it's so easy with sales to have a huge backlog, there's no reason to buy a game day one anymore. Pay $60+ for a glitchy game and a frustrating experience as a beta tester or wait 6 months or so and get it half price or less when 4 patches have already come out to get the game to a runnable state.

@thizzle7xu: Only if everyone did that there would be no new games.

If they could at least fix their online stuff i would be satisfied, the 20-30FPS and random open world glitches i can live with. Its hilariousg that after Drive clubs huge failure Ubisoft repeats the exact same mistake. They even call it "online clubs".

Would have been nice if they'd done this, y'know, BEFORE release...