Dec 3, 2012

Why Ubisoft's Two Big Holiday Games Are Better On PC (Hint: It's Not Uplay)

Far Cry®

The last couple of weeks have given us two of the biggest games of the fall, both from Ubisoft. Assassin's Creed III continues the historically focused swashbuckling adventure series, and Far Cry 3 lets players loose on a violent South Pacific island paradise.

Both games feature the number "3" and both games have a second word that begins with "Cr." Both are very ambitious, open-world games that push the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to their limits. And as a result, both games shine brightest on PC.

The PC version of ACIII came out last week, and I've been playing it since then. While it still has most of the problems that left me disappointed with the game, the PC version is certainly an improvement. My PC has an Intel i5 with a GeForce GTX 660Ti, and the game runs pretty smoothly at mostly high settings (I keep anti-aliasing and environmental detail set to "normal").

The biggest difference between the Xbox version and the PC versions of ACIII is smoothness. ACIII runs mostly at 60 frames-per-second for me, slowing to around 40-50 when I'm in open cities. As a result, everything in the game feels more responsive. In a game where the controls are as generally unresponsive as Assassin's Creed, every bit of tightness matters. Even on PC with the settings turned up, Assassins' Creed III isn't a beautiful game—the landscape has a plane-like, hard-edged quality, like everything has been cut out of cardboard and built on a theater set. But Connor himself looks crisp and animates beautifully, and combat on PC is fluid, fast, and enjoyably brutal.

The PC version of Assassin's Creed III is the superior version, though not in some ridiculous way: mainly because it runs more smoothly. It's not a quantum leap, more of a solid port. I should say that I haven't played or seen the Wii U version of ACIII, though I can imagine that moving the map and HUD elements to the gamepad would make the game pretty cool. I'd be surprised, though, if it performed or looked much better than the other two consoles.

The differences between the PC and console versions of Far Cry 3 are much more stark. On console, Far Cry 3 runs with a low framerate, texture pop-in, screen-tearing, and some generally sluggish performance. The game is still fine looking, particularly if you've never seen it running on PC, but as the Xbox or PS3 attempt to render the Rook Islands' hills, valleys, and flora and fauna, you can almost feel the years-old consoles groaning.

On PC, meanwhile, this is one of the best looking games of the year. On my setup, the game runs at a solid 50-60 FPS no matter what I'm doing, with a lengthy draw-distance that has me watching battles on the ground play out as I hang-glide hundreds of feet over-head. It is possible to snipe guys from the top of a mountain several clicks out, and the world-state remains consistent even over very long distances. The only place where the framerate chugs is during the first-person cutscenes, when the hyper-detailed, performance-captured characters come front and center. But, if there's one place where I'm okay with a framerate dip, it's during cutscenes, the one place where my life doesn't depend on performance.

The PC version of Far Cry 3 is also much more adjustable than the PC version of Assassin's Creed III. FC3 offers scads of adjustable options, including some good Directx 11 features like multithreading and several types of ambient occlusion, which remove the weird shadow-like outline that ghosts the characters and items on consoles. It should be possible for just about any modern PC to run Far Cry 3 without a hitch; the team making it clearly care about the PC, and have gone to great lengths to make the PC version the strongest of the three. (The only bummer: Amid all those tweakable options, you can't make Far Cry 3's invasive HUD go away. Why, Ubisoft? Why??)

Uplay is a nuisance, inferior to Steam in every way.

So: Two big Ubisoft games, two superior PC versions. Assassin's Creed III is a strong port, and while it doesn't take advantage of everything modern PCs can do, it still offers a crisper, smoother experience than consoles. Far Cry 3's PC version offers a markedly superior experience to consoles, and is easily the definitive version of the game.

The only downside to both of these games, then, is that they require the use of Ubisoft's "Uplay" game portal, which is basically Ubisoft's answer to Valve's Steam service. You can still buy the game through Steam, but then you'll have to launch it from Steam, which will open Uplay and you'll have to launch the game again from there. Two types of DRM for the price of one! Or, as is doubtless Ubisoft's plan, you can just buy the game direct from them and bypass Steam entirely.

Uplay is a nuisance, inferior to Steam in every way. It's a pain to examine a game's achievements, I can find no way to track my playtime, and since no one is using the service, it's very difficult to tell which of my friends is playing the game. I've already spent so much time accumulating Steam and Xbox LIVE friends; must I really do this all over again for Uplay? The user-interface is a bummer, and it takes far too many clicks to get to a game. Worst of all, there doesn't appear to be a way to put a shortcut to a game on my sidebar; the shortcut I have just brings up Uplay, where I have to click "play" one more time to launch the game. In the case of Assassin's Creed III, that brings up yet another menu where I choose between single- and multiplayer. Three clicks may not sound like a lot, but in this day and age, it feels like two too many.

I like the idea of Uplay rewards well enough—you earn points for in-game achievements and spend those points on little perks for any of your Ubisoft games, like a gun or an outfit. Unfortunately, most of the rewards aren't that hot, and the single-player mission you can unlock for Far Cry 3 is a random crawl through an underground bunker filled with komodo dragons that eventually gets filled with gas (?) and you have to escape. (??) Plus, Ubisoft left off the best reward of all. To plagarize my own joke from this weekend:

I wish there was a UPlay reward where for like 400 UPlay points I could just use Steam instead.

— Kirk Hamilton (@kirkhamilton) December 2, 2012

(I mean, seriously.)

But no, there's no way to do this. And if you buy a Uplay game in Steam (including both ACIII and Far Cry 3), starting the game in Steam kicks you over to Uplay, where you have to start it again. Jeez!

While I get why Ubisoft would want to build its own game portal and get out from under Valve's shadow, I'm surprised they've done such a crap job of it. Both of these games, Far Cry 3 in particular, are banner PC releases in a year where Ubisoft has already earned goodwill (or at least, undone bad-will) with PC gamers by relenting from their draconian always-on DRM scheme. Far Cry 3 will be, I suspect, many gamers' first encounter with Uplay, so it's that much more of a shame that it's such a drag to use. Considering that I'm playing both of these games in front of my TV with a controller, the fact that neither one can be accessed using Steam's big-picture mode is a hassle, and makes Ubisoft look one step behind Valve yet again.

That said, an annoying game portal is merely a portal, and both games are very strong on PC. And hey, at least there really isn't any sort of always-on DRM. If you're considering which version of Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 3 to pick up, go with the PC. As is usually the case, you'll get more or less the same core game on consoles. But, particularly with Far Cry 3, the PC is the only platform that feels powerful enough to really manhandle these outsized, ambitious games, which makes for a noticeably more enjoyable overall experience.

Except for Uplay. Have I mentioned? I don't care for it.

Nov 30, 2012

Assassin’s Creed 3 review

Assassin's Creed™: Director's Cut Edition

I am pursuing a man in a tricorner hat through the streets of colonial New York. In the top-left of the screen, Assassin’s Creed III instructs me to chase him. In smaller text just below it, there is a secondary objective: ‘do not shove or tackle anyone’. I turn sharply into an alleyway and barge past a woman, earning myself a red X on the mission log and losing my ‘full synchronisation’ bonus. I’m not sure why I want to be fully synchronised, but the completionist in me insists that I try again.

A few attempts later, I’ve figured out a system. Stop sprinting when the alleyways give out onto open streets, edge carefully around pedestrians, and continue. It’s ludicrous - why on Earth would I not shove someone, if the fate of a nation was at stake - but I’ve not incurred the red X, I’ve not lost my bonus. I chase the man and, as is tradition, wait for the cutscene where I catch him. It doesn’t come. We pass through the same fishmarket for the second time and I realise that we’ve done a lap of central New York. The game is waiting for me. Oh! I think. This is an assassination. I do those.

I can’t get close enough to use my hidden blades so I wait until we’re running down a clear alleyway, pull my flintlock, and fire. Desynchronised! Target was killed. Try again.

It takes another couple of tries before I figure out that the game wants me to catch him - tackle him, if you will. My objective is to give chase. My sub-objective is to not tackle anyone. The solution is to tackle someone. You may Google your own facepalm jpeg.

Assassin’s Creed III features the silliest and most self-defeating mission design in the the series’ history, and it’s a huge shame. When it isn’t directly hamstrung by constrained mission areas, flakey AI, and imprecise movement, it manages to steer you into the path of these flaws anyway with optional objectives that encourage you to game the system - and Assassin’s Creed III’s systems do not hold up well to gaming. When full sync bonuses were introduced in Brotherhood, they were designed to encourage creative use of the tools at your disposal. Here they more often tamp down your options, exposing the emptiness of the game underneath. You can ignore them, sure, but you can’t ignore the signal sent by that big red X.

Lafayette got a street in New York. Connor fights in every battle in the revolution and doesn't even get a bench.

There’s a lot more to an Assassin’s Creed game than its missions, but the fifth in the series drops the ball with such regularity that it resonates through the entire experience. A pervasive sense of frustration is the snare drum that accompanies Assassin’s Creed III on its march through the American revolution.

You undertake that march - for the most part - as Connor, a young assassin with a British father and a Native American mother. Connor’s quest to negotiate a future for his people against the backdrop of revolutionary war is well written and often well acted. The game’s treatment of issues of race, class, democracy and empire even manages to be insightful, and Ubisoft have no qualms about turning America’s founding mythology on its head. Characterisation is strong. Connor will get some flak simply for not being Ezio, but he comes into his own in the second half of the game. Assassin’s Creed III has a cracking villain, too, in a senior British Templar that the writers seem to like more than they do their ostensible lead.

The game suffers for a lack of female characters - the only real exception being Connor’s mother, who after a brief period of activity retreats from the stage to usher in the series’ next male protagonist. It’s a shame that the game does not do more, given how laudably it addresses themes of repression in other contexts.

There is also, of course, Desmond. Creed’s sci-fi metanarrative splutters to a stop, pulling together its various precursor races, ancient artifacts and cosmic threats for a conclusion with the dramatic impact of a wheezing cat finally sicking up all over the carpet. It’s not all bad: a handful of present-day missions let you see what Desmond’s time in the Animus has taught him, and Danny Wallace’s character has somehow metastasized from the human equivalent of Clippy from Microsoft Word into a likeable person with something to say about history.

"Why?!" "Why?!" "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!"

There’s a lot going on, then, and a lot to do. The new Animus bombards you with side-missions, collectibles and challenges, often without heed to what you’re doing or whether the tone will be ruined by the sudden notification that you’re in the top 50% in the world for whistling. Its three main explorable areas - Boston, New York, and the compressed frontier that links them - are liberally sprinkled with men to stab, lists to fill out, and every other form of open-world busywork you can think of.

"Oh wow, that goat really does yell like a man."

Crafting returns, expanded from Revelations’ bomb-making into something far larger and far harder to rationalise in the context of a game about a man who stabs people. Combining materials gathered through hunting and purchased from settlers in your homestead allows you to make a wide array of items for further crafting or trade - from barrels to booze, venison jerky and Franklin stoves. You can top up your supply of arrows and other consumables in this way, but it’s far quicker and not very much more expensive to just buy them. The system feels irrelevant and the cumbersome interface prevents it from simply being a breezy distraction. It’s one example of the many ways that Assassin’s Creed III manages to draw the player away from what is fun or meaningful. It’s like thrusting a pile of dried fruit and a bottle of Captain Morgan into the hands of a pilot and telling him that he’s allowed to make rum and raisin ice cream now. That’s nice, Assassin’s Creed III. Do you mind? I’m flying a plane.

Puppeteer-style controls are gone, replaced with traditional keybindings: interact, attack, secondary weapon and so on. The verisimilitude suggested by the old arms, legs and head system has been lost, but the new way is clearer and for the most part it’s a worthy change. The animation team deserve credit for the way that Connor moves through the environment - the seamless transitions from ground to tree-branch, from street to interior, from attack to canned takedown animation. Assassin’s Creed III manages to incorporate detail that other games would force into quick-time events into the flow of regular play, and as a result it’s substantially less compromised than you’d expect by its cinematic ambitions. If ‘less compromised than you’d expect’ sounds like guarded praise, then that’s because it is.

Counter-riposte combos are still the dominating force in combat, but what exactly constitutes a riposte has been diversified: firing lines mean grabbing an enemy to use as a shield, and heavy foes are better responded to with quick, aggressive jabs at their defences than waiting for them to attack. No more Ezio-style multi-man murder sprees spring from a single tap of the attack button. Hoisting the leader of a roaming patrol into the trees with a rope dart before slamming to the ground and taking out his friends with a few precisions strikes builds on the best of what the series is good at, which is self-contained, satisfying bursts of action. Moments like this are one of the key things that protect Assassin’s Creed III from outright mediocrity, but the problem is that they have to be staged by the player in the open world: the game’s main missions, which should be an opportunity to encourage creativity, more often actively punish it.

Tree-climbing feels and looks great.

The game looks substantially better on PC but otherwise this is an underwhelming port. Keyboard and mouse controls can’t be rebound and feel like an afterthought, so play it with a gamepad. The game ran at 30-50 fps on full settings on an Intel i5 760 system with 8Gb of RAM and a Radeon HD 6970. A few dips to 20 fps while in busy cities necessitated dialing back shadow quality a little. The game uses Ubisoft’s Uplay system, but a permanent internet connection isn’t required and all you lose for switching to offline mode is a few entirely missable unlockables.

The root of my issue with Assassin’s Creed III is this: that for as much stuff as it provides, the amount that it actually allows you to do feels thinner than ever. A vast amount of its content can be reduced to ‘get from A to B and push a button’, and stealth rarely strays from minigame territory: ‘try to stay in the circle’, ‘try to stay in the circle when it’s moving’. It’s about pattern recognition rather than creative thought, binary reactions with no room for life or dynamism. Ubisoft clearly hope that top-grade presentation will be enough to convince you that holding forward to make Connor walk between cutscenes is somehow satisfying - but it isn't. Players deserve the freedom to make up their own minds. Isn’t that what Assassin's Creed purports to be about?

Assassin’s Creed III’s basic mechanics fare much better in multiplayer, where human opponents - or allies, in the co-op Wolfpack assassination challenges - provide the depth and dynamism that the single-player game lacks. The other area where the game excels comes entirely from left field: naval combat.

Connor's dapper Captian's garb is only available outside of naval missions if you pre-ordered from specific retailers.

Connor moonlights as a privateer captain in a series of optional sea missions that thread in and out of the main plot. During these you take the helm of an Assassin frigate, barking orders at your men and steering your warship into broadsides and boarding actions. It’s absolutely spectacular - weather and ocean effects create a phenomenal sense of place, and control is just arcadey enough to be exciting while retaining the heft associated with 18th century naval warfare. What’s more, the mechanics are actually interesting, rewarding tactical thought in a way that sits flush with Assassin’s Creed’s broader historical mission statement. Why is Assassin’s Creed suddenly the best Master and Commander game ever made? I have no idea, but I’m glad that it is.

It is not that the rest of the game feels rushed. The production values on display hit the heights of what this industry is capable of. It’s quixotic, but often admirable for it. Assassin’s Creed III is not a half-assed game: but it is approximately half ass. Frequently during my twenty hours with it I’d find myself wishing that other body parts had played a bigger role. Brains, perhaps, for rethinking the necessity of crafting or trading or courier missions or Desmond. Hands for testing and determining that, no, it is not fun to be whacked with a great big red X for failing to abide by pedantic and inartfully implemented rules. Assassin's Creed III rises above mediocrity by virtue of its ambition, its writing, and the set-piece moments where its best ideas form ranks and push. It's the sequel that proves that a revolutionary rethink is needed, but not the sequel that pulls it off.

Nov 21, 2012

Far Cry 3 review

Far Cry®

I don’t know what an Undying Bear is exactly, but I’ve vowed to kill it. I hope it’s just a name. This is a mission for the island’s Rakyat tribe, and Rakyat tradition dictates that I must defeat the creature with the infinite-ammo pump-action shotgun they’ve given me. A recent tradition, I would guess, but one I’m happy to honour. The truth is, I have an ulterior motive for finding and killing the legend: I’d really like a new rucksack.

A lot of what you do in Far Cry 3 raises perplexing questions: why would a rucksack made from the skin of the Undying Bear hold more than the one I made from four dead dingoes earlier? Can’t I just make one out of six dead dingoes? What is it about Undying Bear skin that facilitates a particularly capacious rucksack design? And more to the point: if it’s never died, how would anyone know?

But as I scramble away from it, panic-firing my traditional tribal pump action, what I’m actually wondering is this: when did Far Cry 3 become so good?

We’d been told it was an ‘open world’ game, but everything Ubisoft showed of it made it look like a monologue-heavy, tightly scripted adventure, its freedom limited to small mission areas. That is in there, it turns out: there’s an absurdly long series of missions about rescuing your friends from the pirates who’ve captured them. But it’s just one of the many different games you can play on this vast, freely explorable tropical island.

Hunting wild game to make bags out of their skin is another. Guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition require their own special container, and every size of every container can only be made from the skin of one particular species of animal. And while guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition are abundantly available on the island, its people have apparently never invented the bag.

So you, American tourist Jason Brody, must bring your container technology to the island by personally inventing and reinventing various types of harnesses, wallets and sacks, culminating in your magnum opus: the Undying Bear Skin Rucksack, a masterpiece of dermatological engineering capable of holding up to 96 leaves.

If you’re going to ask players to buy into a system so hilariously removed from its origins in real-world logic, it had better work. It does. Making the island’s wildlife the fodder for your personal upgrade system turns you into a hunter, forced to study and understand the jungle as you explore it. The place teems with life, to the point that you’ll often just sit in a bush and watch it. Check out the leopard stalking those boar! What are those dogs howling at? Ooh look, a Komodo dragon mauling a villager!

They don’t just fight amongst themselves: the island is dotted with pirate outposts, and the roads are travelled by trucks and cars full of pirates, Rakyat rebels, and civilians. Almost any pair of these have some reason to scuffle if they blunder into each other on their randomised routes, and hearing it happen around you makes the place feel alive. Distant gunfire or beast growls are never just ambience: something’s actually happening over there, and you can go and find out what. Maybe steal its skin.

Those outposts are what the game is really about, and conquering one demonstrates everything that makes it great. Your first job is to scout: you’ve got an entire island of free space to circle this small settlement, and the zoom lens of your camera to study it with. The first Far Cry let you tag enemies with your binoculars: once seen, they’re marked on your map in real-time. Far Cry 2 ditched that for being unrealistic. Far Cry 3 brings it back with a vengeance: not only does your camera mark enemies on the map, it lets you see them through walls from then on. As with the skin-crafting, the philosophy is clear: screw reality, this ability makes the game more fun. It does.

Once you’ve scoped and tagged the 5-10 enemies guarding the outpost, you have perfect situational awareness. You could open fire, but at least one of the pirates will make it to an alarm panel. That brings a truckload of goons to reinforce, and things get very messy. So priority number two is to disable the alarms, and the systems for this are deliciously clever.

You can shoot them. OK, that one’s not clever, but it has an interesting complication: only the panel you shoot is disabled, and even a silenced shot will make enough of an impact noise to send the guards running to the others. If it’s a small camp, and you’ve scouted it thoroughly, and you’re sure you have line of sight to every panel, you can speed-snipe them all before the guards can set them off. This is cool.

Trickier, but cooler still, is to methodically eliminate each pirate without alerting the others. This is tough, but your tools support it: you can lunge for any unwitting enemy nearby and impale them on your machete before they can call for help. A perk system lets you spend experience points to upgrade stuff like this, including a great trick that lets you steal the dying guard’s own knife and throw it at someone else for a second silent kill.

My favourite method, though, is often more practical. If you can get to one of the alarm panels in person, you can tamper with it to disable them all. It’s silent, instant and comprehensive. But the panels are always in the heart of the outpost, watched by everyone. Getting to one requires perfect scouting, obsessive planning and steady nerves.

That generally means creating a distraction, and that’s another thing Far Cry 3 is great at. You have a dedicated button for throwing a rock, and the sound will distract any idle guard in earshot. It’s not a new feature for the series, but short-sighted enemies, more predictable AI and the see-through-walls thing make it massively more useful this time. And those same factors apply to other distractions: a car-full of rebels showing up, a stray bear wandering past, or the pirates’ pet leopard suddenly finding its rickety bamboo cage shot open.

Last time I did the cage trick, the leopard savaged every pirate in the camp, waited for my Rakyat allies to show up and take over, then savaged all of them too. That camp is under leopard control now. I gave him sovereignty.

Part of what I love about all these systems in Far Cry 3 is the way they chain together. I find myself hedging my bets: I want to take an outpost down undetected, but I’ll try to sneak in and disable the alarms first in case I screw it up. And before I do that, I’ll drop some C4 under a nearby truck: if I’m close to being discovered, detonating that’ll take their attention off me. Often, halfway through carrying out my plan, the guards catch sight of something they want to attack outside the outpost walls, and rush off to shoot at it. So you have to be ready to restrategise on the spot, and sneak through any window of opportunity that opens up.

Once, when I couldn’t get to an alarm panel, I was rumbled halfway through eliminating the guards. I finished the rest off before the reinforcements arrived, but that left me trapped in an empty building with eight angry pirates hunting for me. It was heart-poundingly tense. I’d peek out of windows to tag them with my camera, then watch their silhouettes through the walls until one strayed close. I couldn’t risk leaving the huts, so I’d just throw a stone near the doorway. The sound would lure him inside, I’d impale him on my knife, drag his body out of view, then wait for my next target.

If you do manage to disable the alarms, your reward is an even more satisfying second phase to the fight. You still have to eliminate all the guards, and it’s still good to remain unseen, but now it doesn’t matter how panicked they get as their friends drop around them.

Far Cry 2 had outposts too, though they were smaller with fewer ways to approach. They were also the source of my biggest problem with that game: they repopulated. Far Cry 3’s solution to this problem is: they don’t. You can conquer the whole island, outpost by outpost, turning each into a rebel base with hunting and assassination missions to help secure the area. It’ll just take you a while, because it’s huge.

Taking over an outpost gets you a new safehouse with a built-in shop, selling a fairly ridiculous array of guns and attachments. These are unexpectedly satisfying to use, and Far Cry 2’s slightly tiresome habit of causing them to randomly jam is gone. It’s also very generous about which ones you can fit silencers to - I ended up taking a silenced SMG, a silenced sniper rifle, the silent bow, and a grenade launcher for emergencies (leopards, basically).

Yes, it’s a game in 2012, so it has a bow. Along with the endlessly distracting rock and the brutally effective machete, the bow makes you feel like a hunter, stalking and butchering teams of heavily armed guards with nothing but blades and guile. You’re never forced to get it, and it’s not actually as effective as a good silenced sniper rifle, but it gives you a sense of identity the other two games never had. As you walk through a silent town of corpses, pulling your arrows back out of their skulls, you can’t help thinking, “Christ, I’m glad I’m on my side.”

Your captured outposts become hubs for two types of missions: assassinations and hunting quests. Both are fun, but assassinations are the highlight: you’ve got to take out an enemy commander with only your knife.

I’ve been putting it off, but I should probably talk about the story missions. The pirates have captured - no kidding - you, your brother, your brother’s girlfriend, your girlfriend, your friend, your other brother, and your other friend. By the end of it I was surprised we didn’t also find my mother, niece and high-school English teacher somewhere in the compound.

It’s not all bad. About half of the Jesus Christ /thirty-eight/ missions give you enough freedom to have fun with the predatory combat systems that make the outpost fights so great. The other half... erk. They’re like a guided tour of all the clumsiest ways to mash story and videogames together until both of them break.

You left the mission area! Restart! You lost the target! Restart! You failed the quicktime event! Restart! A plot character got themselves killed! Restart! We spawned some enemies in a spot you knew was empty! Restart!

I don’t feel like you have to be that smart to predict this stuff won’t work. You don’t have to play a lot of games to see how it backfires. And you don’t have to talk to a lot of gamers to find out how much we hate it when you cheat or punish us to make a scene play out the way the story needs it to. It’s so painful to see clumsiness like that in a game that’s otherwise so elegantly designed.

The island itself is so rich and interesting to explore that it’d be a fantastic game even without any main story missions. So the question is, does the presence of a half-rubbish campaign hurt it? A bit, thanks to one unwelcome quirk of the level-up system: most of those neat perks, including the knife-throwing one, are locked off until you reach certain points in the plot. That pretty much forces you to play it, though thankfully not for long. Most of the good ones unlock at the same time as knife-throwing, a few hours in. You can safely stop there and get back to the good stuff.

Elsewhere in Far Cry 3’s efforts to be all things to all people, it somehow has four competitive multiplayer modes and a separate co-op campaign. Playing this pre-release, it’s too soon to review the competitive stuff. The co-op missions are a lot of fun, though: brisk, ridiculous shooting galleries about helping each other plant explosives and repair vehicles. There’s no server browser, unfortunately, but they’re best played with friends where possible. My favourite moment was taking a stealthy loadout and playing scout for a heavy-gunner friend in a dark cave: I’d ‘spot’ targets in the dark to highlight them on his HUD, he’d gun them down and draw all their fire.

Another caution about online stuff: Far Cry 3 uses Ubisoft’s Steam-like service uPlay, and if you play online, your game can get interrupted temporarily if your connection or their servers go down. It’s just a brief pause, though, and you can always start the game in offline mode to avoid it entirely. You miss out on uPlay achievements and a few lame unlockable rewards that way - I didn’t particularly care.

Other than that, it’s a nice PC version: responsive mouse movement, specific graphics and FoV options, tutorials reflect your custom controls, and it runs decently on Ultra-everything on a modest 3GHz dual core machine with a Radeon HD 5800. The engine doesn’t quite suit the jungle as beautifully as it did the African desert in Far Cry 2, but it has some beautiful views.

The original Far Cry’s developers Crytek used to describe that game’s philosophy as ‘veni, vidi, vici’: you show up, you scout out the situation, and you decide how to conquer it. Ubisoft kept the Far Cry name, and Crytek tried to stay true to its spirit in the Crysis games. But only Far Cry 3 really feels focused on doing that concept justice. You’ve got a huge island to explore, ridiculously effective tools for scouting every hostile situation, and so many clever intersecting systems to inspire creative ways to conquer them. It’s a better stealth game than Far Cry 1, set in an open world that feels richer than Far Cry 2’s. That’s an amazing thing to play.

Nov 21, 2012

Far Cry 3: The Kotaku Review

Far Cry®

Here's what happened: I was soaring above a gorgeous tropical island in a hang-glider when I heard gunfire below. Waaaay down on the road below, a gang of friendly islanders was going toe-to-toe with a band of ruthless pirates. I banked around and dropped in low, landing just inside the treeline. I pulled out my high-tech bow, then crept up to and took down one of the pirates with an arrow before another spotted me. Shouting and gunfire erupted from all sides.

Forty-five seconds later, burned bodies lay strewn in every direction; a deadly tiger had come roaring out of the jungle, and the grass and trees to my left were ablaze, deadly-hot flames spreading as fast as I could scramble. Cutting my losses, I sprinted toward a cliff overhang, violently jerking my dislocated thumb back into joint as I ran. In one smooth motion, I swan-dove into the open water a hundred yards below. A crash as I broke the surface, then silence. Sun-rays sliced into the murky depths as I regained my bearings. And that was when I saw the first shark.

That's Far Cry 3 in a nutshell.

Repeat the above encounter five times in the game, and you'll get five different outcomes. Maybe you take out all the bad guys without raising a ruckus. Maybe you stay high up on a hill and blow everyone up using rockets, only to get chomped by a tiger you didn't hear behind you. Maybe your allies win the firefight before you land, and you've got nothing left to do but clean up. Or maybe the fight spills over into an enemy outpost, and before you know it you're up against an army of troops, trained dogs, and helicopters. It's all possible, and every permutation is as fun as the last one.

Far Cry 3 is an open-world shooter through and through. The setup is simple: You're set loose on a massive island in the south pacific and tasked with gradually conquering it, one dead pirate/tiger/shark at a time. Here's a gun. Have fun.

WHY: Far Cry 3 does so much right: It's an exhilarating and empowering adventure that marvelously combines player freedom with shiny technical polish.

Far Cry 3

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC (Reviewed)
Release Date (US): December 4

Type of game: Open-world first-person shooter with an emphasis on exploration and stealth.

What I played: Completed the single-player story and a ton of side content over the course of around 30 hours. Played an hour or so of co-op and an hour or so of versus multiplayer.

My Two Favorite Things

Realizing that my 20th base raid had been just as exciting and unpredictable as my first.
Running up a winding mountain ridge before hang-gliding off. It never gets old.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

Every time Jason Brody would pipe up to tell me how he was feeling about things.
The inability to turn off the HUD, mini-map or objective markers.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

"My leopard army and I are coming for you."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
"I swear I saw a hatch around here somewhere."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
"Why doesn't this game just star Vaas?"
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com

There's also a story you can play through, though the distinction between the "story parts" of the game and the "non-story parts" is an important one: It's in the balance between the two that Far Cry 3 finds success. The game casts you as Jason Brody, a twentysomething layabout whose drunken island vacation is interrupted by pirates (the scary modern-day kind). They kidnap him, his brothers, and his friends, and set to ransom them and sell them into slavery. The story parts are a long series of mostly linear, welcomely varied adventures Jason undertakes in service of this rescue/revenge plot.

The non-story parts, on the other hand, are the emergent action that happens all over the island between missions. As with many of the best open-world games, the story parts are fun, but the non-story parts are what make Far Cry 3 special.

The tale begins with Jason narrowly escaping captivity, then quickly taking up with a group of friendly island dwellers called the Rakyat, who are led by a charismatic, bespectacled dude named Dennis and a sexy, mysterious (and kind of ridiculous) woman named Citra. Dennis believes that cowardly Jason is, at heart, a warrior, and the rest of the game follows Jason's (and your) quest to rescue his friends and take down the men in charge of the Rook Islands' slave- and drug-trading empires.

It's a perfectly workable setup, as these things go, but the character at its heart—Jason Brody—is little more than a party-boy nebbish. Despite the fact that he was likely cast because the highest percentage of young male players would see themselves in him, he's never all that relatable, and while his journey from zero to hero sure looks convincing as you're blowing apart enemy helicopters, it never feels convincing when he talks about it. He's an overwritten tryhard who frequently yells exposition in the middle of action sequences, just in case we forgot what was going on. "I have to find Riley, Liza and the others!" he hollers to himself, running through the jungle in terror. "I can't take any more of this heat!" he grunts, as a burning building collapses around him. At one point, he actually looks down at his hands and asks, "What have I become?"

But even though the story is something of a mishmash, it certainly has its moments. The motion-capture technology used to portray the rogue's gallery of quest givers—a paranoid CIA operative, a deadly renegade hostage-taker, a sultry island woman, a drug-addled scientist—is some seriously impressive stuff, in some ways even surpassing Naughty Dog's work on the Uncharted series. The primary antagonist, a pirate named Vaas Montenegro, is marvelously brought to life by actor Michael Mando, who gives a magnetic, menacing performance. Whenever Vaas was on the screen, I couldn't take my eyes off him.

The single-player campaign also contains a welcome amount of variety—a series of tomb-exploration missions in the middle play out like first-person Uncharted, and a number of hallucinated drug sequences are creative, pure goofy fun. The story missions are best thought of as a garnish, a way to break up all the sneaking, shooting, and exploring you'll be doing in between them.

That the story is inconsistent is perhaps Far Cry 3's primary failing, only because the rest of the game is so good that the story holds it back from true, we'll-still-talk-about-this-in-five-years greatness. The more compelling story is the one outside of the proper narrative, the age-old video game story of progression and mastery. As players earn experience points, Jason levels up, and his arm-tattoo grows more and more elaborate with each new armor-upgrade or takedown ability. The transformation from the start of the game to the end of the game is remarkable, if not as cleverly tied to the narrative as the writers would have liked. You'll begin as dead meat—a weakling with no health and a pistol, running for his life. By the game's end, you'll be a deadly predator, silently skittering through the jungle and dealing death with monstrous precision. You'll toy with your foes, and you'll like it. Rarely has progression in a game of this sort felt so satisfying.

You'll toy with your foes, and you'll like it.

The Rook Islands make for a spectacular video game playground, one part Ling Shan from Crysis, one part The Island from LOST. From the dense jungles and murky swamps of the northern island to the wide fields and sweeping overlooks of the southern, the whole map is jammed with fun distractions and rewarding stuff to occupy your time. And the most remarkable thing isn't that there's so much to do, it's how well it all works together.

The game revolves around five core mechanics, more or less: Sneaking, shooting, driving, exploring, and hunting. All five work well and are fun in their own right, and all five tie in with the leveling and progression system so that every time you do something, you feel like it's making you more powerful. It's that sense of seamlessness that elevates Far Cry 3—there's a feeling of "concert," of interlocking systems that have found a hell of a groove together. That encounter I described at the top of this review is a good example, and that sort of thing happens more or less constantly. The game encourages you to quickly hop between driving, hunting, hiding, swimming, shooting, and hiding again, all with astonishing fluidity.

The item-collection, experience/leveling, and crafting systems are all well-balanced, too. You're encouraged to go hunting because if you skin animals, you can use their pelts in the crafting system to make better holsters and containers for your gear. Animals roam different parts of the islands, so if you want to go hunting, you'd better explore. To craft better health upgrades, you'll need to harvest the best plants. To carry more plants and syringes, you'll need to hunt the animals to make the proper cases. To get upgrades for your gear, you'll need money, which is perpetually in short supply—so to get money, you'd better go looting, hunting, or undertake side-missions. It's all balanced, and the game maintains scarcity in its resources very effectively. The "gaminess" of it all might be a turnoff for some—Far Cry 3 exists in some middle ground between the complex micromanagement of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the minimalism of Far Cry 2. The balance worked very well for me, and felt like something of a sweet spot.

Each of the islands' many non-storyline diversions net you experience points, money, and gear. Enemy bases are the most satisfying of these distractions, encampments of pirates that you can conquer and take for yourself. After you've killed everyone at a base, you'll raise up a blue Rakyat flag, and the base's bulletin board will open up with additional hunting and assassination challenges you can undertake. In a smart touch, the hunting challenges must be tackled with specific weaponry (usually the game's outstanding bow and arrow), and assassinations must be performed up close and personal with a machete. You can sit down and play a number of poker games around the island, or engage in fun, arcade-y "Trials of the Rakyat," which give you a specific challenge ("Shoot guys, and each time you kill a guy your gun instantly changes.") and then put your final score up against your friends. On top of all that, there are story-based sidequests you can undertake ("Take photos of dead pirates") that could have been filler but frequently feature funny writing and interesting challenges.

In fact, the biggest complaint I have about the side-stuff is that the signal-to-noise ratio can become a bit overwhelming. There is no way to turn off the mini-map, HUD, or objective markers, meaning that no matter what you're doing, the game is constantly throwing information at you, and constantly reminding you to get on with your next story mission. As the wubby soundtrack churned, and the hud popped up and nudged me back on track, it was hard not to resent the game a little bit for being so up in my grill all the time. Back off, game! I want to explore you! As an avowed fan of the notoriously HUD-minimal Far Cry 2, I found the lack of display customization somewhat dispiriting. I'd love to play this game with the HUD turned off, particularly on a second playthrough. Why won't you give me the option, Ubisoft? Surely it isn't that important to give me all this information if I don't want or need it.

The Far Cry 2 Question: This comparison isn't that important for the majority of people, but it matters a great deal to me. How does Far Cry 3 stack up to one of my all-time favorite games, Far Cry 2? Basically, Far Cry 3 is a mechanically fine-tuned, more-complex upgrade from Far Cry 2 that adds a crapload of very enjoyable, but very video-gamey junk to the the equation. Far Cry 3 lacks the dark, oppressive magic of Far Cry 2. You have a mini-map, and HUD data litters the screen. Your guns never degrade, they only get more powerful. The Rook Islands are lovely, but they lack the haunting grandeur of Far Cry 2's Sub-Saharan Africa. The story has much higher production values, but is less sophisticated. The music, while enjoyable in its wubby way, is inferior to Far Cry 2's eerie strings and hand-drums. But what Far Cry 3 lacks in focus it makes up for in functionality. Enemy AI is greatly improved. Stealth works. Surround-sound audio is more locational and useful, and hunting is easier. You have a reason to drive other cars than the machine-gun jeep. Hang gliders are no longer a cruel joke. I really like Far Cry 3, but in a more traditional way, in the way I like well-made, highly enjoyable video games. The majority of players, I sense, will vastly prefer it to its predecessor. And most of us who retain a preference for the second game will still have a good time with the new one.

Ubisoft has performed a smart lift from their own Assassin's Creed series by adding radio towers to Far Cry 3, which you must climb and activate in order to un-fog sections of the map. There are 18 of these strewn around the islands, and climbing them gets progressively more challenging as you go. The radio towers could have been rote or boring, but instead are delightful—perilous ascents that can be downright tricky, but almost never frustrating. It's not quite first-person platforming, more first-person climbing, with a focus on figuring out how to get to your next point of ascent. When you stand at the top, the tower lightly buckles and sways beneath you, creaking in the wind. This kind of attention to detail runs through most every moment of Far Cry 3.

None of this stuff is all that new, but it's amazing how well it all works, and how well it all works together. It feels great to play an open-world game where all of the systems are polished to this extent—the game is rarely buggy, and dishes out surprises on a regular basis. Cars handle with a realistic sense of physics and momentum. There's an organic first-person cover mechanic that works so well it feels like a revelation. Press up against a wall, and you take cover. Hit the "aim" button and you pop out to take a shot. Please, other first-person shooters, borrow Far Cry 3's cover mechanic!

The stealth is just as polished as the gunplay—taking down an enemy base without anyone spotting you is an exercise in caution, observation, alarm deactivation and enemy-manipulation. But full-on combat works just as well—on normal difficulty, enemies are deadly and will frequently overwhelm you, and you must play smart to win. Enemy types—chargers, shooters, snipers, heavies—all run varied and complementary routines, and force constant improvisation. And none of that's to mention the (truly) wild card: Those deadly animals. Cobras, tigers, leopards, boars, komodo dragons, sharks, and the world's most startling crocodiles—all will conspire to throw a wrench into your best-laid plans.

Talk to ten people, and you'll get ten different highlight reels of their time on the island. Shark hunting off the northern coast, fleeing from a collapsing Chinese ruin, zip-lining from the top of a rickety radio tower, or demolishing an enemy encampment with a ton of strategically placed C4. The one constant is that island, gorgeous and deadly, sprawling out before you. Running along the top of an open ridge, the sun setting in the distance, feeling for all the world like an extra on LOST… it's something that has yet to get old for me, even after around 30 hours with the game.

Far Cry 3 looks fantastic on PC—I played using both an AMD Radeon 6870 and a newer GeForce GTX 660Ti. Particularly on the GTX, with Directx11 enabled, this one's a real stunner. I would recommend that anyone who has the means play the game on PC—while I don't have final retail console copies of the game to compare it to, I was less impressed by the PS3 version at a recent press event I attended. The 360 version looked okay, but neither console comes close to the crispness and high framerate of the PC version. Far Cry 3 feels as close to a true "next generation" game as anything I've played this year, and it requires current hardware to run at its best.

(This video is from a preview I did of the game a little while back. My opinions are much more solidified now than they were then, but this gives a good sense of what the game's all about.)

In addition to its lengthy single-player campaign, Far Cry 3 also comes with separate co-op and competitive multiplayer offerings, though both are much harder to judge at this point in time. The game still isn't out for another couple of weeks in the states, and there are few people playing it on PC at the moment. I teamed up with some press friends to play around an hour of co-op and found it to be fun enough, if buggy, but not really in the same league as more polished co-op games like Gears of War and Left 4 Dead.

Co-op has its own story and characters, but they're mostly weirdly acted clichés, and it's all very removed from the events in single-player. Enemies in co-op are damage-sponges who can take what seems like 400% more damage than their single-player counterparts. Un-upgraded multiplayer characters move and aim quite slowly, and the levels are all linear. You won't be able to grab your friends and tear around the main single-player island, which feels like a shame—that's really all I wanted to do! I'll still probably play through all of the co-op missions, but so far I've found co-op to be much less satisfying and enjoyable than the single-player game.

I also had a tough time scheduling sessions to test out the competitive multiplayer. I played a few rounds of both "firestorm" and "transmission" modes, both of which are riffs on capture-and-defend. They worked fine, though in general they felt sluggish when compared with both Far Cry 3's single-player and with other popular first-person shooters like Borderlands 2 and Black Ops II. A lot of that could just be tied to my low-level character, though. So, the jury's out, and at this point, two weeks in advance of the game's release, it's just too early to say whether the multiplayer is any good. My sense? That it's fine, and that it'll find some longevity in the fantastic map-editor, but that it won't attract a huge multiplayer following. Far Cry 3 is a single-player game at heart. I'll play more multiplayer once the game is out, and will update this review after that.

Even if Far Cry 3 shipped with no multiplayer at all, the game would be a cinch to recommend. It's a smart, challenging, and polished adventure that does what it does very well. Some missed storytelling opportunities don't overshadow its fun, occasionally daring narrative successes, and the whole thing revels in a luxurious sheen of high production values and extraordinary design talent.

Far Cry 3 is an example of the rare ambitious, big-budget game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do—chaotic yet controlled, with a brilliantly-balanced mechanical ecosystem that challenges and empowers at every turn. It's a wild ride, and one well worth taking. Just watch out for crocodiles.

Nov 16, 2012

Massive Assassin's Creed III Patch Promises To Solve Many of the Game's Problems

Assassin's Creed™: Director's Cut Edition

Ubisoft promised a big patch for Assassin's Creed III and it looks like they're delivering. The game's huge "Thanksgiving" patch, set for release next week has a lot of fixes.

Some of the fixes will be spoilers (there's a boring non-spoiler version of the changes here). Read on at your own risk. But let me make something clear: they say they are fixing the chases.

Here's the full list of patch notes, via the Ubisoft forums, with some notes from me for emphasis.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer Modes

ASSASSINATE - Instances where it was possible for players to kill players that were not their target in Assassinate have been corrected.

ASSASSINATE - Bodyguards no longer fail to stun when they are locked by the pursuer of the player they protect.

DEATHMATCH - In Fort Wolcott, fixed a bug where players would remained stuck on warmup screen.

MANHUNT - The cooldown boosts for loss streak bonus are not permanently active for all abilities during a manhunt round anymore.

Multiplayer Abilities

Loss Streak now correctly triggers when players lose their contracts five times in a row.

Disruption now breaks the hitting player's lock.

The Smoke Bomb's drop behavior has been updated. It now drops at the user's feet instead of dropping in front of them. However, if players drop it from a ledge, it will drop below them.

Throwing Knives used against players hiding in haystacks will now make them get out of this haystack.

Using Throwing Knives against a target now prevents the target from contesting the kill.

Players are no longer stuck after using the Money Bomb from a ledge.

Multiplayer Ladders

Several issues which occurred when players would quit a Manhunt pre-session lobby and join their friends the same session later have been corrected.

After a session ends on a draw, both teams will now receive the same rate for Abstergo ladder, instead of one team getting a winning rate and the other getting a losing rate.

Players are now granted Abstergo points normally even if one or several players get the idle state at the end of the session (The idle players do not get any Abstergo points)

Multiplayer Misc

It is now possible for players to lock their target when their target has just stunned them.

Changing the ability set three times during a game can no longer reset the ability's cooldown.

The X icon no longer inaccurately persistently displays.

It is no longer possible for players to get up and perform a kill under certain conditions while they're vulnerable.

Transitions to join Multiplayer sessions after an invite now work correctly.

Warm up games are no longer interrupted when the host player leaves.

It is now possible to stun a vulnerable pursuer.

The X icon no longer displays above the pursuer's previous target when they have been stunned after being vulnerable.

Singleplayer

Platform: All

Location: Sequence 1 - 12:

Mission - "A DEADLY PERFORMANCE" - Mission result screen could show an incorrect sync reward

Mission - "A DEADLY PERFORMANCE" - Players could be stuck in the opera if they backtracked in a certain way after killing the target.

Mission - "INFILTRATING SOUTHGATE" - Target would not be spawned if the player failed to perform a meat shield during the firing line tutorial

Mission - "INFILTRATING SOUTHGATE" - Fixed multiple bugs where the guard on the boat could walk in circles, stay stuck or jump on the railing. [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: We chronicled this bug during launch week... we'll miss the rail-jump.]

Mission - "JOHNSON'S ERRAND" - Fixed floating muskets after a cinematic.

Mission - "JOHNSON'S ERRAND" - Moved HUD icon on the explosive barrel on the ground instead of above the cart, because that's what the player needs to shoot.

Mission - "JOHNSON'S ERRAND" - prevent the player from using hide spots during part the mission to avoid a possible mission break.

Mission - "THE SOLDIER" - Fixed a missing audio line.

Mission - "THE SURGEON" - Fixed a bug where the eavesdropping tutorial couldn't be completed if the mission was restarted.

Mission - "THE SURGEON" - Fixed NPC not reacting to the player's presence during the steal tutorial.

Mission - "THE SURGEON" - Fixed optional objectives that could fail too easily.

Mission - "WELCOME TO BOSTON"- When replaying the mission, when asked to buy a sword and pistol, those items would already be purchased.

Mission - "WELCOME TO BOSTON" - Fixed Possible mission break if the player shoots the horse he's supposed to ride.

Mission - "UNCONVINCED" - Fixed a bug where the player could enter the tavern too early and break the mission.

Mission - "UNCONVINCED" - Blocked accidental blending during the tavern fight, which could break the mission.

Mission - "FEATHERS AND TREES" - Fixed a bug where the optional objective "Do not touch the ground" could fail too easily.

Mission - "HUNTING LESSONS" - Fixed the issue where the bear could flee and eventually freeze. [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: Good news for the bear, I guess.]

Mission - "A BOORISH MAN" - After the mission, the candelabra would display an interaction effect while the secret door to the basement was already opened.

Mission - "RIVER RESCUE" - Blocked the player from diving in the river too early which could break the mission.

Mission - "STOP THE PRESSES" - Cinematic could sometimes not trigger, breaking the mission.

Mission - "THE HARD WAY" - Fixed the optional objective "Do not take any damage" that would fail if the player hits rocks even if it doesn't deal damage to the ship

Mission - "ON JOHNSON'S TRAIL" - Fixed issue where Chapheau could become inactive if the player dragged the fight far from where it started.

Mission - "THE ANGRY CHEF" - Fixed issue where the "limit health loss" optional objective would wrongly fail if the player reloads a checkpoint or dies. Also fix the displayed limit to 33% as that's what's actually used.

Mission - "THE ANGRY CHEF" - fixed missing butcher hatchet during cinematic if blood option is turned off

Mission - "BRIDEWELL PRISON" - Closed the cell doors while being escorted to prevent the player from getting stuck in them

Mission - "BRIDEWELL PRISON" - fixed voices becoming muffled mid-eavesdropping

Mission - "SOMETHING ON THE SIDE" - Fixed missing ocean during the chase

Mission - "SOMETHING ON THE SIDE" - Made the chase part easier [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: This is the much-hated Hickey chase that I passed only when he bumped into a wagon. Hooray!]

Mission - "A BITTER END" - Fixed a camera glitch if the player reloads last checkpoint during a certain cinematic

Mission - "A BITTER END" - Fixed a glitch that could happen if the player restarted the mission during a specific cinematic

Mission - "FATHER AND SON" - Fixed a bug where the guard you're supposed to kill would not reappear if the player starts fighting him and then runs away.

Mission - "FATHER AND SON'' - The mission could not be completed if the guard the player kills the target he's supposed to steal using a stealth kill from bench or a rope-dart hanging move.

Mission - "MISSING SUPPLIES" - Disabled a patrol that would almost guarantee failing the mission if they detected and started fighting Haytham

Mission - "ALTERNATE METHODS" - Made the chase section easier

Mission - "BROKEN TRUST" - fixed a bug where the player could be stuck on a horse if he exited and re-entered the Animus at a specific moment

Mission - "LEE'S LAST STAND" - removed a destructible barrel that could cause problems if used as part of a contextual counter-attack.

Mission - "CHASING LEE'' - Adjusted difficulty on the Charles Lee chase [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: This is the other hated chase in the game that many players complained about. It is/was the hardest mission in the game.]

Mission - "LAID TO REST" - Fixed a bug where the mission could be failed if redcoats start fighting the mission targets

Location: Side Quest:

BOSTON BRAWLERS - Mission "PETER BUNYON", prevent the player from hiding, which would break the mission

BOSTON BRAWLERS - Mission "THE TOURNAMENT", fixed a bug where the player could blend with spectators and break the mission

BOSTON BRAWLERS - Prevent using anything else than the fists during all fistfights

Boston Liberation Missions, North District - fixed an issue where some events would not complete properly if the player used an assassin recruit to kill the target.

COLLECTIBLES - fixed some chests that were not properly aligned when lock picking

COLLECTIBLES - removed the glow effect from chests during lock picking

COURIER MISSIONS - fixed a bug where mission update popup messages could be missing or wrong when delivering letters

FORT ST-MATHIEU - fixed a bug where the player could respawn inside the fort's reset zone, which could break the fort's logic

FRONTIERSMEN - Challenge 3, fixed a bug where objective "visit every tavern" would complete after visiting only 1 tavern

FRONTIERSMEN - mission "MONSTER OF THE SEA", fixed a bug where sometimes eavesdroppings could not be completed

HUNTING SOCIETY - mission "THE MAN-EATER", fixed a bug where the smaller locate zone would disappear if the player scans all clues outside of it

HUNTING SOCIETY - mission "THE PATRIARCH", fixed a where the search zone could disappear from the map after interacting with the 1st clue

New York Liberation Missions - mission "PROTECT THE CLINIC", fixed the mission not failing if the player goes too far from the area to protect.

New York Liberation Missions - West District, fixed a bug where the NPCs guarding the infected blankets could sometimes not be there.

Location: Boston: Removed map icon on the door of Molyneux Tavern in Boston, until it is required by a specific mission

Location: DLC: Fixed a bug where the wrong language could be selected even if the proper language DLC is installed

Location: Epilogue: Animus Synching tutorial, forced subtitles on off-camera voice, so that the player doesn't think the game is frozen

Location: Frontier:

Fixed a bug where players could respawn and desync immediately in a loop if he died in the Valley Forge region before unlocked. Also patches players which savegame are already stuck

Fixed a bug where the player could respawn under the ground in a loop, in two different places

Plugged a hole in the ground where players could fall through the map [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: Aww. Bummer.]

Location: Global:

A text message is now visible on-screen at all times while a skippable cinematic is playing

Added a failsafe to the animals navigation, to prevent them from getting stuck

After the end credits, put the hood back up when not in Homestead [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: Oddly, this seemed to be requested a lot. Well, there you go.]

Disabled special attacks with heavy weapons on animals

Fixed a bug where the player could not equip a color change on the normal outfit from a shop if they are currently wearing a special outfit.

Fixed a bug where the player could not finish enemies on ground if they were thrown in deep snow

Fixed a bug where there wouldn't be any reticle when precision aiming if the SSI option was turned off

Fixed a few rare bugs where the player could fall through the map while swimming or diving

Fixed various rare crashes

Greatly reduced the probability of animals to get stuck inside an object [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: Sounds good.]

Location: Homestead:

Fixed a rare bug where the Homestead upgrade progress could be lost after fast-travelling to the homestead

Mission "BOWLS BEGINNER" - Removed possibility to quit the bowls game after a reload, which would fail the mission.

Mission "CUTTING TIES", fixed a bug where the NPC could react to fights or dead bodies and flee away, breaking the mission

Mission "NORRIS GOES COURTING", fixed a bug where Norris would not reappear if the player goes too far from him.

Mission "THE PROPER TOOLS", fixed multiple glitches where the Quest Log could become inconsistent

Mission "THE WEDDING", fixed a missing audio line

Mission "THOUSAND-POUND IDEA", fixed a bug where NPCs required for the mission could disappear and break the mission

Mission "TOOLS OF THE TRADE", fixed mission not failing if Lance falls in the water

Mission "WHITE TROPHY", make the cougar immune to explosions to prevent a possible mission break

Side-quest "ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE COMMON MAN", fixed a bug where the quest could sometimes not be completed

Location: Menus:

Added a wait message for some cases where the game could appear frozen if some servers are unresponsive

Animus Database, fixed updates of Kaniehtí:io entry that would be unlocked too early and spoil the fact that... [censored] [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: This is a good fix, because it spoiled one of the game's last twists way too early.]

Fixed a bug where the player's friends' Uplay wall would get spammed by previously completed missions and sequences when the player reloads his game

Fixed leaderboards ranking the player as #1 when he's actually alone on it

Homestead mission icons are now displayed on the map when selecting the "Missions" filter

Present pause menu, fixed a possible glitch if the player enters the controls section and leaves it very fast

Platform: PS3

Fixed wrong message after purchasing a DLC and leaving the store

Westpoint DLC - mission "A SPY AMONG US", fixed a bug where required characters would disappear and not come back if the player went too far from them

Westpoint DLC - fixed a bug where the player could fall through the map by going through the gate while in conflict

Platform: Xbox 360

Location: Menus: Removed Benedict Arnold icon from the map legend

Wow, that's a lot. Anything fixable that they missed?