Delayed just one day for most players, Patch 4 for Ubisoft’s premiere Q4 2014 release, Assassin’s Creed Unity, is out today for Xbox One and PS4 (PC later this week). It’s massive.
Ubisoft explained the need for a super-sized patch on the official Assassin’s Creed website:
Part of the team’s effort to enhance frame rate for players involves replacing and updating portions of the Paris city map where we are seeing issues. This explains the large size of this title update (6.7 GB). However, since a large portion of the patch replaces existing files the net increase to the game’s overall size will be less than 6.7 GB.
This new patch addresses just about everything you can think of, from the game’s performance in singleplayer to multiplayer matchmaking and more. (Full patch notes below.)
Ubisoft has patched Unity a few times since the game’s launch on November 11 launch. While many of the issues I’ve had with it (I reviewed the game) had nothing to do with technical performance, the game’s been a technical mess for others.
Ubisoft apologised for the game’s rough performance late last month. Part of that apology was a promise to give a free game to anyone who had paid for the game’s Season Pass. Today, Ubi reps said that the free game offer would be made available by Christmas. It also sounds like the start of Club Competitions, a feature that would have groups of Unity players in some way competing with one another, has been backburnered in lieu of work on performance patches.
Company reps have repeatedly pushed back talk about Unity‘s undated Dead Kings expansion, which will now be free to all owners of the game. The company has said that it was prioritizing getting the game to run well for more players. Dead Kings has been in development primarily at Ubisoft Montepellier, a team we don’t think was heavily involved in making the main game.
Full Patch 4 notes, via Ubisoft’s forums:
Here are the details of Patch 4. This Patch is rolling out to PS4 now, and will be available for Xbox One players later today (December 16). PC players can expect the patch later this week.
Patch 4 release date: December 16th
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One
PC coming later this week.
Size: 6.7 GB
Stability, Performance and Save Game
- Fixed numerous random crashes both on Campaign and Coop
- Implemented multiple optimizations and fixes to improve overall performance
- Fixed save issue caused by the companion app on the main menu (loss of data)
- Fixed save issue caused by contacts list (crash occurring). Users should now have access to save
Gameplay (navigation, fight, stealth)
- Fixed various navigation issues
- Fixed issues with lock picking chests
- Fixed additional haystack issues
Character, AI and Crowd
- Fixed various character, crowd station and NPC issues
Online, Matchmaking, Connectivity and Replication
- Fixed various matchmaking and connection issues both in matches and when starting a match.
- Fixed various issues with voice chat
- Fixed join-in-progress issues
- Fixed various replication issues between host and clients
- Fixed issues with player rank and COOP/heist rewards
- Fixed issues with Helix credits
- Fixed issues with the My Club feature
Menus and HUD
- Fixed HUD icon issues and issues with map information
- Fixed various Initiates issues
- Fixed additional issues with notifications
Mission tweaks (campaign, coop and side content)
- Fixed various low occurrence walkthrough breaks in both Campaign and COOP
- Fixed various NPC issues
- Fixed issue with the quest log disappearing for specific side missions
World and 3D
- Fixed various collision and mesh issues
- Fixed additional issues where player would fall through the world
- Fixed specific areas where textures were missing
PC-Specific
- Fixed crash on “Quit to Windows” in free roam mode
- Fixed crash on accepting multiple “Join the club” requests
- Fixed issues with TXAA
- Fixed issues with PCSS
- Fixed issues with textures on NPCs
- Fixed black texture issues on MSAA-4x, MSAA-8x and TXAA
- Right Control now can be assigned as a hotkey
- Minor UI fixes
Readers who get the patch, let us know how it goes!
Comments
42 responses to “6.7GB Assassin’s Creed Unity Patch Issued To Fix Framerate, Other Stuff”
Someone needs to take Unity out the back and shoot it.
They already did that to Assassins Creed after Brotherhood and they’ve just been Weekend at Bernieing it since. Starting to smell a bit…
Pirate’s Creed was awesome. Possibly not a resurrection, but at least a very effective taxidermy job that covered the stench, presented the corpse in an appealing manner, and dressed it in a very appealing new suit of clothes.
John Constantine is pretty good at dealing with the undead.
*Pirate’s Greed
I’d say the same thing about you!
their fix for the game was to just redo it, and have you download the game again
been out over a month and still patches are massive and the list of fixes to things that are broken are quite extensive, must be a ubisoft release
…or Bethesda.
Just turned on my Xbox and it said it’s a 40GB update.
Maybe it’s 40GB cumulatively?
Entire game is 41GB
They’re apparently wholesale replacing several parts of Paris in order to fix framerate problems in those areas. The game’s enormous data-wise because of the crazy complicated lighting system they’ve used. All the lighting info is pre-baked and takes a ton of space.
EDIT: However at 40gb it sounds like maybe it’s re-downloading the whole game for you? :\
6.7GB patch. Thats not a patch… thats a tarp to cover the carcass.
I think it’s more akin to an organ transplant and an optimistic bolt of lightning.
“It’s alive! Aliv- wait, no, it’s dead.”
So basically the game was rushed out the door about 6 weeks before they were actually finished developing it?
Incidentally this happened with AC3 and to a lesser extent Black Flag (PC) as well. I’ve always gotten into the habit of not picking up AC games and playing them until after Christmas. By that time, they’ve usually patched the game to the point that it actually works.
Yeah it’s really funny that most people have completely forgotten that AC3 was buggy upon release and required a massive patch a few weeks after release to fix it up.
Yeah. Basically both times they’ve moved to a new technology base, they’ve had a ton of teething issues. When they’re just doing a minor iteration on the same tech, there’s a lot less problems.
Next year’s AC will probably be pretty solid. Rogue and Black Flag were – Black Flag’s issues at launch were mainly PC hardware compatibility and driver issues and some odd glitches.
I never really thought of it like that. But it does make sense. It’s just a damn shame, because under all the bugs and glitches, you can see AC Unity is a good game.
Black flag wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t (still isn’t) super optimised for PC, and had a few odd ship bugs. Compared to Unity / FC4 it was excellent though.
The Ascension of the Jackdaw bug is so amazing I’m not even sure if it’s truly a glitch or if it’s actually some kind of art.
Hahah I’d seen the bug before but the music makes it
No way will I be downloading this patch at 6.7Gb. I’ve decided the way to fix this issue is to just trade the game in and hope to never have to deal with this franchise again.
Can I send Ubisoft an invoice to pay for my internet that they are wasting on me? Some of us people only have a limited amount of internet for each month.
They really should have the option to mail you out a disc free of charge when the patches start getting enormous. Those of us stuck on satellite internet really can’t keep up with these massive patches.
Damn straight. My monthly internet usage (on my Xbox One alone) has risen from roughly 30GB per month to around 150GB since the start of start of October. The relentless updates, most of which are nearly as big as the games themselves are chewing through my monthly limits. Living with 4 other people doesn’t aid the situation, nor is it particularly fair.
That’s why I’m with iiNet (XBL is unmetered).
Technically I only get 40gb a month, but last month I downloaded over 100gb of unmetered data.
Everyone is constantly complaining, but the game has run pretty smoothly for me.
Apart from the pretty flaky multiplayer servers for the first few days, I fell through the floor once, and there’s been the occasional bug online with invincible/invisible enemies, and that’s it.
So either I got the only magical working copy, or this has been blown way out of proportion.
(or possibly it’s worse on other platforms)
At the risk of angering everyone (I’m just speculating here), I wonder how much of it is aggregated hatred of Ubisoft for an assortment of other missteps over the past 5 years rather than an objective assessment of this game on its own merits.
I remember thinking the heat Ubisoft got for not having female playable characters in the game and thinking it was a bit excessive, TONS of games don’t let you select your gender particularly for games involving lots of dialogue or story.
2K recently pulled female create-a-wrestlers from this year’s WWE game for the first time in a WWE game since the late 90’s and while people were pissed I don’t remember seeing too many “my gender is not a feature!” articles.
That’s not to say this game isn’t shit (it’s the first full console AC that I’m skipping) or that I’m not happy to see Ubisoft get a kicking for being a bunch of DRM loving, DLC abusing, annual franchising tosspots for the past few years. Just that a 6gb patch is (sadly) not unheard of these days and I have heard a few people say the game doesn’t run that badly.
…..the fact that the patch apparently “enhances the frame rate” 6 weeks after launch doesn’t look good for them though.
Complaints about not having female characters are kind of funny, since you still play as Arno in the multiplayer (yes, that means 4 Arnos at once).
The framerate has also been pretty stable for me. Yeah, there’s been the occasional drop, but it was never so bad that it affected my enjoyment of the game.
I completed the campaign and played some coop and had no issues whatsoever on ps4
Thank you for endorsing the “it works for me, test once” school of software testing.
I never said that, I just don’t think the issues are as bad as most people are making out.
Besides, I played the game a lot more than once. :p
EDIT: According to the stats on TrueAchievements, I’ve logged almost 69 hours.
And I have 176 hours in Empire Total War and have never had an issue, but that doesn’t stop the game from having a reputation for being buggy as hell.
I’m an IT tech, I have next to no issues on Windows, Mac or Linux, but I spend my days fixing peoples issues many of which aren’t their own.
My friend has issues with many games which I don’t, even though we have practically the same setup save for him having AMD graphic cards and I have NVIDIAs.
One persons experience does not represent the whole, especially when it comes down to computers.
Agree there needs to be a new term used, 6.7 gig is Not a patch, its more like the definitive edition or what we had for sale was beta.
Shit like this basically means i can’t play this game. I buy retail games because i don’t have the bandwidth to download a lot of data. and when you get broken ass shit that requires 5+ gigs download just to work it leaves me and people in my circumstance (quite a few in the land of the rare internet) in the lurch 🙁
Devs TLDR: Just take the extra month to make a game that fucking works on the disc you ship…
The execs who pushed the game out the door early are at fault here. The Developers don’t like releasing buggy games, the Testers have logged every bug you deal with and more. But the guy who makes the decisions doesn’t know anything about the game. He just needs something to pad this quarters revenue so he can get his bonus.
Pre-ordering games is what encourages this behavior because they see they have X amount of people who will buy this game day 1, no matter how broken it is, and as the old saying goes Forgiveness is easier to get then Permission.
Next they will be selling game discs in EB where only thing on it is the menu screen that prompts you to download the entire game. Tsk tsk tsk. Welcome to the future of gaming. Always changing…..because nothing is ever finished before they sell it to us.
Soon EB will only stock PSN, XBL and Steam cards. Could be fully automated!
Funny how some are complaining about the 6.7GB patch, you must have a PS4 …..
Official thread – on Xbox One the patch is 40 GB
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/976075-Tells-me-size-of-the-update-is-around-40-gb-Xbox-one
If you have physical media, uninstall the game, go offline, reinstall via the disc, go online and then and only then will the patch be only 6.7 GB.
If you have the digital version, like myself, you’re screwed, particularly if you kicked off the download in the morning with assurances from Ubisoft that it was just being displayed incorrectly in the Xbox One UI and that it is only 6.7 GB.
Fantastic. This should take me about two weeks to do (that’s how long it took me to get AC Unity downloaded in the first place).
I will preface this by saying I haven’t played Unity (yet) on any platform, but this really must show Ubisoft the benefit they could get from moving from a 12 month release cycle to a 15 or 18 month release cycle. In one month they’ve done 4 patches which have been major bug fixes and performance improvements, why not push out your deadlines, stop aiming for the holiday season and just release a half polished game.
That is not a patch, I have games smaller in size than that.
I’ve been enjoying the game and haven’t encountered any issues so far, but if these heads them off before I encounter them then I call it a win
I got no problem before this patch ,and now its crashing whenever i click continue which is the only thing i can do because there’s no new game option in this game