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Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos
RogueyWon (735973) writes "The latest entry in the long-running Assassin's Creed game series, Assassin's Creed: Unity released this week. Those looking for pre-release reviews on whether to make a purchase were out of luck; the publisher, Ubisoft, had provided gaming sites with advance copies, but only on condition that their reviews be withheld until 17 hours after the game released in North America. Following the game's release, many players have reported finding it in a highly buggy state, with severe performance issues affecting all three release platforms (PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One). Ubisoft has been forced onto the defensive, taking the unprecedented step of launching a live-blog covering their efforts at debugging the game, but the debacle has already had a large impact on the company's share value and the incident has drawn widespread attention to the increasingly common practice of review embargoes."
It's one thing to prevent game review sites from playing one-upsmanship over each other by "leaking" early reviews (that are often incomplete and based on beta versions of the game). However, once you can buy the "finished" product, the only reason to have a continuing embargo is that you know the product sucks but you don't want to share that information.
Another strategy: Have game review sites flat out say that an embargo for a certain game is NOT lifting prior to the game going on sale. I know lots of NDAs have Fight Club clauses (you do NOT talk about the NDA).. but a clever game review site could probably get around that without actually saying "The Assassin's Creed Embargo Does Not Lift Until 11PM" or something similar.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
In fairness, while they'll probably get away with it this time, recent history suggests that with major franchises, you can fool people once, but you pay the price on the next game. Some examples here:
Final Fantasy XIII: sold extremely well on the basis of hype and the brand. Was a terrible game in almost every respect. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a rather better game. Lightning Returns (the third installment) is actually a very good game. Both sold terribly, due to reputational damage from their predecessor.
Resident Evil 6: near-universally panned. Sold pretty well on the basis of a massive marketing campaign. Resident Evil releases since then have had a much better critical reception, but much lower sales.
Call of Duty: Ghosts: Its predecessor, Black Ops 2, was actually a pretty interesting game, integrating RTS elements and branching storylines. Ghosts was a lazy, by the numbers pile of spunkgargleweewee. Its sales weren't fantastic by Call of Duty standards, but were still insane. The latest installment, Advanced Warfare, is much better, but is the slowest selling installment in the franchise in years.
So if Ubisoft put out another Assassin's Creed next year, expect it to tank in sales terms, no matter how good it is.
Nvidia plays the game every bit as dirty as Intel. In this case, Nvidia has created something called 'GAMEWORKS'- a proprietary closed-source library of routines specifically designed to collapse the performance of games on AMD hardware (or older Nvidia hardware). Nvidia pays shills to counter information like this in forums like this one, so let me give you one example.
The best current ANTI-ALIASING is a FREE, OPEN-SOURCE collection of methods from Crytek (the people behind Crysis and the original Far Cry). Their methods run with excellent performance on older hardware, and slightly favour AMD (because AMD hardware is always more shader-powerful than Nvidia at a given class). Not good for Nvidia. So Nvidia 'invented' TXAA- an horrifically bad AA method both in appearance and 'hit' on performance- but a method that runs far better on new Nvidia hardware than it does on new AMD hardware.
Nvidia actually PAYS developers like Ubisoft to NOT include the best, SMAA methods from Crytek (remember, they are free for any publisher to use). Instead, Nvidia only allows FXAA (also Nvidia created, but lightweight on all hardware, at the cost of not being so good), MSAA (the old fashioned hardware anti-aliasing that comes with horrible restrictions), and TXAA (hated even by Nvidia fanboys because of its impact on performance). EVERYONE is asking where SMAA T2X is on Unity- but as I said, Nvidia paid Ubisoft to exclude it.
TXAA is universally loathed (even HardOCP- the elitist PC gaming site that insists on benchmarking games with every possible setting set to max, regradless of the trade-off- stated that TXAA was such an atrocity, they'd always use SMAA in preference), but for Nvidia it is the perfect model for how they seek to ruin the gaming experience of everyone, in order to synthetically make Nvidia GPUs seem 'better'.
GAMEWORKS increases the number of TXAA like performance destroyers in a modern engine (Xbox One, PS4 or PC) exponentially. Ultra slow GPU libraries to handle trivial things like particles, AI pathfinding, occlusion calculations and the like. Remember, gaming PCs and new consoles are CPU rich- with CPU performance going begging across the commonplace 4-7 cores. No serious PC gamer runs less than a 4-core i5. The consoles have 8-cores a-piece.
Nvidia literally doesn't care if bouncing ten simple particles on your screen uses 30% of your GPU performance, so long as the same effect on an AMD GPU takes 80%. Nvidia is this dirty.
Disgustingly, Epic have taken a large Nvidia pay-off to make Gameworks the EXCLUSIVE 'enhancement' library of Unreal 4 (the current most successful licensed engine), and the team behind Witcher 3 (the most anticipated open-world fantasy game ever) have agreed to ruin the performance of that game on AMD GPUs (when it is released early next year) in order to gain Nvidia funding.
Remember how a week back, more than a decade after the crime, Intel got a TINY court punishment for paying sites like Anandtech to use bent Intel benchmarks 'proving' that the putrid Intel Netburst x86 CPUs were 'better' than the vastly superior (at the time) AMD CPUs? The owner of Anandtech himself made a point of informing his readers that one core was better than two (when only AMD had gone dual core), that 64-bit was pointless joke (when AMD invented x64, long before Intel licensed the tech from AMD), and that Netburst's intent to reach 10GHz showed that only Intel had the right tech and ideas.
Nvidia no more fears punishment (in the courts or court of public opinion) than does Intel. Nvidia relies on the vicious trolling of its PR teams to hurt its opponents, and to fool the public.
For how Unity looks (far, far from remarkable), it should run at least THREE times faster on given hardware, with the most pointless settings notched down. Or, it could be THREE times better at the current framerates- and truly appear 'next-gen'. Nvidia steals our possible, doable gaming experiences to enrich itself. Just as Intel loves bloated abstracted, buggy junk like .NET on Windows, because it synthetically needs a much more expensive Intel CPU to run well.