The upcoming “Dead Kings” expansion pack for Assassin’s Creed Unity will be free for all players, Ubisoft announced today. It’s their way of saying sorry for shipping a broken game.
There’s no release date for Dead Kings just yet, but anyone who buys Unity on PS4, Xbox One or PC will get this DLC for free.
“Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues,” Ubisoft Montreal boss Yannis Mallat wrote in a blog post today. “I want to sincerely apologise 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.”
With the DLC free, anyone who bought the season pass or Gold edition of Unity will also receive a free game from Ubisoft. When the offer goes live, season pass owners will get to select from Far Cry 4, The Crew, Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Rayman Legends, and Just Dance 2015. No word on whether refunds will also be offered for the season pass.
If you got that $US30 season pass — which is looking like a good move, in retrospect — you’ll also still get a copy of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, a new sidescroller that’s slated for early 2015 and will not be included as part of this “we’re sorry” free DLC deal.
The newest patch for Assassin’s Creed Unity, which goes live this week, is full of fixes and tweaks to the much-maligned action game. You can see all the patch notes here.
Comments
40 responses to “Ubisoft Apologises For Assassin’s Creed Unity With Free DLC”
Would you get a free game if you bought the Season Pass now? $30 quite cheap for one of those.
EDIT: Nope just read season pass has been halted for now.
DAMN. Because a free copy of Unity+season’s pass would be a nice bonus to buying Far Cry 4.
Even if Ubi thinks it’s the other way around.
My thoughts exactly, I have it already but a friend bought creed and she is a bit gutted with it but wants to try Far Cry 4 but she’s relatively new to gaming and the whole first person thing puts her off.
FC4 is my GOTY
FC3 was mine for 2012 and while I do love FC4, not sure if its my GOTY….yet. Loved Shadow of Mordor.
I cab stand by that choice also
Exactly – then you’ll have two games you can’t play 😛
Eh? I’ve only heard good things about FC4, all my friends are having a blast with it…
What platform? Also, it was in jest – but like a lot of games, sometimes some people have dramas other don’t. On PC, there are issues with stuttering and sli shadows to name a few.
No probs here on xbone
Yeah I believe the reports are that the console version don’t have the texture streaming problem, mainly cause it’s a far inferior version that only needs to display 16 bit graphics – 8 bit for the Xbone 😛 I joke…I have one too, but prefer my PC.
Ahh. My friends are playing on PS4 and PC. There are probably some playing on xbone too, but if they own xbones, then what kind of friends can they really be? (I joke. Console wars!)
Yeah. There’s always going to be SOME issues. I don’t think there’s a single game on Steam that doesn’t have at least one thread or review from someone complaining that their configuration is experiencing issues (which are totally the developer’s fault) and that the game is broken, but there’s a big difference between, say… FC4 and Unity. 🙂
Yeah I saw the digital foundry article on the console versions of Unity and man, I don’t know how peeps can play that game at below 30 and even 20 (ps4) – or maybe Ubisoft for going for the “Art house” feel, making it more like a slide-show….wait a second, 24 fps DOES make it feel more cinematic! Ready at Dawn were right (The Order 1886) – what do we know, we are just the players.
I eventually managed to get my copy of Unity returned this morning with the official apology being released. Free DLC for a broken game, what a joke.
Sorry for my ignorance but what exactly is wrong with it and what platform are you paying it on? I am awear of frame rates issues and that’s it
I was playing on PS4. Where do I start, besides the completely pointless story, horrible characters and pointless grinding to finish aforementioned story. Single player also saw technical glitches like falling through and getting stuck in objects, not just payer characters, but mission critical NPCs.
Not to mention the fact that the game was marketed as a co-op experience, however, the co-op was unplayable due to server connection issues, massive lag and NPC AI errors which caused mission restarts. If you need more, read the long list of patch notes.
Holy crap, i hated Unity for entirely creative reasons but this is some damn hyperbole. The game is average with bugs and the internet doesn’t understand restraint or reason. The game is nowhere near broken, you can complete it – it’s not broken. It’s an average game with bugs that’s getting fixed.
Might this be a lesson to developers and publishers; gamers expect a fully finished product on launch, not after 3-6 months worth of patches and DLC? No, I think it won’t. Just continue pumping out tosh in order to make a deadline. Unless you’re CD Projekt. They’re about the only developer developing with the gamer in mind that I can think of
Or Nintendo. I don’t think they’ve ever released a broken game.
Blizzard, too. “When it’s done,” has been their catch-cry for decades, now.
(Edit: Well. Developing with a certain type of gamer in mind, who isn’t me anymore. They’ve shifted to this esports bullshit focus with all their recent games. TCG, MOBA, PVP lobby shooter… I couldn’t be more bored with a type of game unless it was sports or racing. But some people like it, and the quality’s always high.)
Id rather they fix it, before I play more of it. (maybe its unfixable?)
Same. I stopped after playing for abit. Main reason is the companion app. My app won’t synchronise after I login. Never worked from the beginning and it pisses me off. Device is enabled in ps4 and companion app enabled and still fucked.
I wonder how the cost of these free games and free DLC stack up against what it would have cost to just delay the game and get it working right before releasing it?
Is it a DLC that’s already on the disk that they were planning to unlock for free anyway?
Supposedly it was originally part of the DLC included in the Season Pass. I believe they’re extended the Season Pass to compensate those that bought it.
Doesn’t seem like a good deal to me…
I bought the PS4 version at release and have been playing the game on a daily basis since then and in all honesty never experienced any of the bugs that have been reported in many articles.
These bugs obviously diminished the overall enjoyment of the game for some people as well as reviewers and so the game has gotten a pretty bad wrap. Bugs aside, i think the game has been somewhat judged way too harshly, would be interested in peoples thoughts or even a fresh review once all the bugs have been ironed out.
In saying all this, ubisoft is a an A-grade publisher and this game should have never been released in the state that it was.
On the DLC front, like many games these days sometimes the developers get out of hand with this stuff, in truth a lot of DLC that gets offered should just come with the game as a standard feature. Paying $ for a 1.2MB download that simply unlocks features in a game that you already own that’s just wrong. Paying a bit extra for something like the Assassins Creed Chronicles: China sidescroller game, that i can understand.
On a side note, the biggest issue I’ve had with the game so far has been mainly in relation to all the external links its tried to build with Uplay and that damn AC: Initiates site. They say it’s on its way to being fixed but i still have yet to see any of my AC outfits from all my previous progress in other games in the series. Very frustrating that they dangle these carrots and yet make it virtually impossible to gain access to stuff that we’re all entitled to.
Hopefully Ubisoft learn some valuable lessons from all of this…. my 2c
I’m with you (only I’m playing on Xbox One).
Besides falling through the floor once, the only issues I’ve had were with connectivity (mostly Uplay and Initiates).
The servers were pretty buggered for the first few days, which made co-op pretty unplayable, but that’s pretty normal for games to have server issues at launch (I know that doesn’t excuse it, but other games with similar issues don’t seem to have been chastised as badly). Then there was the invisible enemies in co-op fiasco, which was annoying, but also pretty hilarious.
Initiates has only recently given me credit for all my past AC games, but chests I’ve unlocked in the companion app are still a little buggy, and sometimes won’t open in game.
I have no problem with having “DLC” to unlock items/features quicker. There’s obviously a market there for people who don’t have much gaming time.
Overall, my AC Unity experience has been pretty positive.
Uplay has been broken from Assassin’s Creed 2. They haven’t learned any lessons in regards to that, and they won’t in the future. It’s debatable if they have learned any of the right lessons from this even! Probably the only one they have learned was “don’t piss off the shareholders” rather than the far more pertinent “don’t piss off the customers”.
I have bought every single Assassin’s Creed (minus Revelations) on day 1 except Unity. I just had this bad feeling / apathy about it and I couldn’t work out why. Really glad that gut feeling stuck, because all this buggy nonsense sounds terrible.
I giggled a little bit at the idea of “We are sorry our game is terrible, have some more terrible game to make up for it.”
Though the free game for those who bought the season pass is nice.
In fairness their refund policy is usually very good too. Though I guess it has to be…
This made me think of the South Park Episode where BP runs the “We’re sorry” campaign rofl.
How many sales has Far Cry 4 racked up btw? I’d imagine almost everyone with a season pass will be grabbing that, unless not many people have actually picked up the season pass so they won’t be giving too many games away when it comes round to it
Far Cry 4 will make you love Ubisoft again.
It’s one of *those* relationships, I guess.
EA and Ubisoft. They love to really shaft you over, but then they put out games like Dragon Age and Far Cry. What a bunch of bar stewards
It’s actually insane how much content is in Dragon Age: Inquisition. As someone who didn’t like the previous games I’m really impressed. And I haven’t been asked for extra money once! Could EA actually be learning something??
It has it’s issues, but I’m totally loving FC4 so far!
Really good on them. Idk how bad the game was, maybe it was their way of heading off a lawsuit, but I just was thinking comparatively of a game like Colonial Marines and how there wasn’t any “we’re sorry” makeup product from that.
Aside from some slow loads I haven’t hit a bug or glitch yet, buy won’t say no to a free game!
So having bought the Xbox One bundle with Unity and Black Flag, I don’t get shit because I didn’t get the ‘gold’ edition or the season pass.
Pro apology is pro.
This is actually a really nice offer – and if it was still available, I’d definitely swoop in on it.
I wonder what we get after we receive the possibly broken DLC?
Now all they gotta do is apologize for the crap story and bring back the Black Flag team.
First week after a games release feels more like a Beta now. I bet if we removed the ability to patch games after release they’d actually test these things. If they didn’t they would go bankrupt easily.