Ubisoft’s (EPA: UBI) stock has dropped by 9.33% to $16.50 from yesterday’s closing of $18.04, following the glitch-filled launch of Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
Traditionally big-name publishers like Ubisoft enjoy the post-launch benefits of a well-received game; when a game does well, their stocks will sometimes climb shortly after launch.
But when a huge annual release like Unity suffers a heap of performance issues across all platforms, things tend to go badly for the company.
Owners of AC: Unity have reported a swath of frustrating bugs that range from comical glitches to game-breaking frame-rate issues, all of which have served as substantial roadblocks for progression.
Ubisoft has been criticized for releasing the game before it was ready, and with nearly every gamer complaining of some issue or another, it certainly seems Unity wasn’t ready for launch.
I’ve played about three hours or so of the game’s campaign on Xbox One and so far I haven’t run into any clear glitches, but I have noticed frame rates dropping here and there, especially with a ton of NPC’s in the area.
But how did all this happen?
It appears that Unity‘s prestigious massive-scale content has worked against it, leading to clashes and glitches in environments, NPC’s and in-game physics systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PkzIGSyjLQ
A bit ago an anonymous dev affirmed Unity was one of the most demanding games Ubisoft has ever produced. With the rigorous higher-end PC requirements for the game, this certainly seems the case.
The dev continued by saying that the game is “so huge in terms of rendering” that it took Ubisoft “months to get it to 720p at 30fps”. They also went so far as to say that the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 could barely run it at 30fps at 900p.
But in the same stroke, the dev claimed that Unity is “crazily optimized for such a young console generation”, especially in terms of the massive amount of NPC’s and environmental content contained in the cityscape.
The glitches and bugs have caused a stain on review scores, and as a result, gamers are thinking twice about picking up the game. Ubisoft has an opportunity to remedy the situation with hotfixes and patches, but it might take more than a few updates to fix all the errors.
Unity comes free with Microsoft’s special edition $349 Xbox One bundle, but in light of these reports, consumers might hold off for a bit. Either way Ubisoft will have to address the situation and offer a fix, or Unity will become a burden instead of another AAA hit.
