Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag will be released in a few days on PC, and since Ubisoft sent us an early copy we of course captured a few videos. Unfortunately none of our usual PC capture software worked correctly with the game, so we could not use Miguel's monster PC and had to settle with my new gaming computer hooked up to my 1080p60 capture card. Sadly my quite powerful machine wasn't able to run the game at a smooth 60 fps with all graphics option enabled, so don't expect perfectly smooth videos.
Update: Switching the environments quality from very high to high made a huge difference for me, the game is now basically locked at 60 fps even in cities, with a very acceptable graphical downgrade.
All comments (27)
At first, I gave the first AC a 4, but after playing and finishing this year, I give it a 6, the problem is that if you want to catch up you have to play it as it is the starting point of the franchise, and this is is very off-putting to a lot of people. Ubisoft should consider remaking it with improved gameplay mechanics and activities.
I got what ACIII was trying to tell and it is a very good game, I gave it 9/10. It somewhat plays differently than the previous entries in the series - both in story-telling and gameplay mechanics, which might be the reason a lot of people disliked it. Its only fault was being too long, they should have decreased the number of chapters and their length.
To me, from best to worst (plus rating):
AC-B (10) > ACII (10) > AC-R (10) > ACIII (9) > ACIII-TOKW [DLC] (7) > AC (6)
Hopefully Black Flag will be a 10, haven't read or seen any reviews so far because I want to judge it for myself, but I know a lot of people liked it, so that's great. :)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11/18/introducing-the-...
"It's always a question of compromise about the effect, how it looks, and the performance it takes from the system. On PC, usually you don't really care about the performance, because the idea is that if it's not [running] fast enough, you buy a bigger GPU. Once you get on console, you can't have this approach."
I really hate that sort of thinking, as if just because PC gamers want to play on the better technical platform, we should be buying a new GPU every year even if most games don't even use all the power of GPUs from 3-5 years ago.
I have seen so many games require more resources than they actually use, like Ghosts needing 6 GB of RAM - now 4 GB with the patch - when it uses less than 2 GB when running.
The best optimized game I have ever seen is Borderlands 2, with my previous and very old crappy card I was able to get 2 instances of the game running on different windows on max settings with PhysX enabled at 20-30 fps.
Yet Ghost Recon - Future Soldier is almost unplayable at the lowest settings with my new GPU, can't beat optimization.
My dream is that Rockstar hires the people responsible for Borderlands 2's PC version to port Grand Theft Auto V - and even Red Dead Redemption - for PC. One can dream. :D
Both of those games were developed w/ Windows as the lead platform. Crysis isn't even poorly optimized.. and Metro is only a bitch because of extensive use of tessellation. A thing you can turn off and make it run awesome.
The thing that's right: Unreal Engine 3 games scale extremely well. This has more to do with Unreal being awesome than Gearbox.
My point here: Ubisoft's attitude is wrong and is exceptionally shitty. It is not the norm.
The thing that's right: Unreal Engine 3 games scale extremely well. This has more to do with Unreal being awesome than Gearbox.
My point here: Ubisoft's attitude is wrong and is exceptionally shitty. It is not the norm.
"So many games?" Yes, and I wasn't talking specifically about system requirements, if a software isn't properly optimized, it will require far more resources than it actually needs, or you can think of it as "it requires more resources than it should need".
"5 at the top of my head", I will give you more, just looked at my list of PC games, the ones I either played extensively or the ones that were so bad you noticed immediately, hopefully you don't find that to be a "research" as no one holds all that information on their brain, unless you have eidetic/photographic memory. They are all unoptimized and whether or not they are console ports, all of them require more resources - better PC specs - than they should, I know this because I have tested all of these games with different configurations and on different machines throughout the years:
Crysis, Dark Souls, Dead Space 3, Dragon Age 2, Driver: San Francisco, Grand Theft Auto 4, Hitman: Absolution, Homefront, L.A. Noire, Lost Planet 1, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 - Full Burst, Need For Speed: Shift, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Remember Me, Resident Evil 5, Stranglehold, The Last Remnant, The Lord of The Rings: War in The North, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Venetica and etc...
I'm not going into detail because I would need to install and play each to point out all the differences, but the best way to see if a game was unoptimised is by comparing it to other games in the same genre with the same PC specs, please take note that the year of release can be taken into consideration, but when you have a 2007 game like Crysys running worse than a 2012 game like Far Cry 3 based on the same PC specs, taking the years into account does little benefit:
Crysis vs Far Cry 3, Metro: Last Light vs Battlefield 3, Dead Space 3 vs any Batman: Arkham game, Grand Theft Auto 4 vs Sleeping Dogs, Dragon Age 2 vs The Witcher 2, Need For Speed: Shift vs Dirt 2, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands vs Prince of Persia (2008), Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier vs Spec Ops: The Line and etc...
There's a ton more, but for the sake of time I won't list everything, it isn't just Infinity Ward who screws up.
Yes, Unreal Engine 3 is amazing, but Gearbox did a phenomenal job with it, I have never seen any other game developed in it run as smootly as Borderlands 2.
"My point here: Ubisoft's attitude is wrong and is exceptionally shitty. It is not the norm." <- Don't disagree with you, hence why I said: "I really hate that sort of thinking..."
There's a big difference between what Call of Duty Ghosts is doing in contrast to your list of "unoptimized" games. Call of Duty does not simply use more resources than it should. It "requires" more resources than it actually uses. It is for one reason or another an artificial restriction. That's an entirely different issue. It's important that we make that distinction right now.
Okay and really quickly: Some of your comparisons don't really work either. You're making apples to oranges comparisons. You can't simply use Sleeping Dogs as evidence that GTA4 runs poorly. The games attempt to do things differently on two very different engines. GTA4 is not very well optimized, but it's an entirely different beast. And then some of those games, like Metro, aren't even that poorly optimized if you don't try to use advanced settings (tessellation is a killer, HBAO can be expensive, etc).
I think more recent uses of Rockstar's engine on the PC indicate that GTA5 should be in much better shape (I hope).
Now that's not to say that there aren't issues with optimization.. especially when it comes to half-baked port jobs. It happens. But what Ghosts is doing is technically not even poor optimization.
If it didn't, there would be no gap between consoles and PC gaming, the only reason Ghosts had the "fake" 6 GB of RAM in the minimum requirements was because it was poorly optimized, whether it used all the 6 GB of RAM is irrelevant.
The PC version of Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 - Full Burst doesn't use everything I have and still runs poorly, it requires more than it actually uses.
Just because the games compared are on different engines doesn't mean you can't compare them, it's how each accomplishes the same things in very similar structures/restrictions.
Saying Metro isn't poorly optimized because it has advanced settings is... nevermind. Optimization has to do with 'how well" a game's code scales with the hardware, bad optimization happens when a game requires more resources because the code is a mess.
This is a problem very unique to Call of Duty Ghosts. What you're talking about are games that use more resources than you think they need, or use less of your resources than they could.
Totally not the same thing.