Ubisoft has already acknowledged the problems AMD users are experiencing, noting that performance may be "adversely affected" by certain CPU and GPU configurations. But the game's issues extend beyond certain specific hardware issues. Now, they've mapped out some of the other pressing concerns that they should probably get around to fixing.

The next update, Ubi says, will address some specific issues. That is, issues more specific than, "this game runs like a man whose legs have been encased in Camembert."

• Arno falling through the ground.
• Game crashing when joining a co-op session.
• Arno getting caught inside of hay carts.
• Delay in reaching the main menu screen at game start.

Beyond that, Ubi is planning to address the game's bigger problems. "This list doesn t capture everything," explain the team, "but here are the most widely-reported problems we ve heard about from you."

• Frame rate issues.
• Graphical and collision issues.
• Matchmaking co-op issues.
• Helix Credits issues.

Taken in totality, that is a lot of Assassin's Creed Unity problems that need to be addressed. I've been playing on a Nvidia GTX 670, and can confirm that the frame rate issues are consistent and noticeable. While my game can run at around 30 FPS in open play, it does suffer frequent stuttering. Moreover, it tanks during cutscenes—dropping as low as 10 FPS for no discernible reason. Then, of course, there's the fact that sometimes characters just straight up walk through each other. It's an strange old bit of software.

Many adventure game heroes are borderline sociopaths and kleptomaniacs. Randal is just a little more honest about it than most. He's a user. He's a layabout. He's the bad friend who gets you into trouble, then simply shrugs or goes "Whatever..." depending entirely on his mood. Were you to drunkenly give him the engagement ring you were planning to give to your would-be fiancee, he'd pawn it for rent money. After all, if you don't remember, it's OK.

In this case though, there's a problem—a curse has trapped him in a Groundhog Day loop, played out in classic point and click style. That's pretty bad. It gets worse in a hurry. Everything Randal breaks or otherwise changes also gets unstuck in time, with the universe thrashing around each time to fit in the changes—every day getting more complicated (if not always as a result of much obvious logic). The one constant is that things only ever get more complicated, up to and including his best friend repeatedly committing suicide in hideous ways that would be hilarious if they… nope, they re just plain funny.

Dark as the humour is, though nowhere near as much as, say, Hector: Badge of Carnage, Randal's Monday pulls it off. The dialogue, while overwritten, is sharp, especially when playing around with fourth-wall moments like Randal firing the player, and his growing boredom with dealing with the cast, like the gruff cop convinced he's a murderer. In particular, Randal usually manages to avoid the trap that—without wanting to cast aspersions on specific games here—I think of as the 'Simon The Sorcerer 3D mistake. If a protagonist is too nasty, at least to people who don't deserve it, they become intolerable. Randal hits the right level; he's always an ass, but rarely too much a dick.

Quest for Cameos

Even before his messing around does things like unleash a plague of koalas though, his world is a weird one. Just about everything on every screen is a pop-culture or gaming reference. He lives on Threepwood Street. A psychiatrist has screenshots from The 7th Guest, Maniac Mansion, and Ghouls and Ghosts on his wall. The courier company he works for just straight up uses both a Portal logo and the Planet Express shield from Futurama. Almost never are they actually connected to anything, or there as an actual joke, right down to having Harold from Day of the Tentacle do a cameo, but then calling him Robert and giving him a different personality. At times it's like playing a comedy version of Limbo of the Lost.

Pop-culture referencing is common of course—Scott Pilgrim and Spaced spring to mind. The difference is that when they did it, it was with a purpose; as part of their characters' worldview and to reflect what's going on rather than simply to be seen. On PC, games like Space Quest have thrown stuff in, but even then usually in a subverted context, like Obi-Wan and Vader's fight simply stuffed in the background, or the Enterprise visiting a drive-through.

Here, most of them don't even get hotspots. It's just "Yep, you recognised Sophia Hapgood's amulet on that shelf, have an imaginary cookie , and far more jarring than cute. What makes it especially strange is that when Randal does actively riff instead of just show, it's usually worth a smile. Like a Gandalf stop sign declaring "You shall not pass! or a gold Tim Schafer.

Sam and Max Hit The Skids

Still, whatever. It's all harmless fan-service. And when you have a funny adventure game with a decent script, a clever gimmick, solid voices and good art, what could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right. Puzzles. And this unfortunately is where it all crashes down. At best, Randal's Monday has puzzles that professors at the Institute of Moon Logic would point to and ask "What the hell?" They're nonsensical, poorly explained, reliant on the most painful 'try everything on everything' guesswork, and feel longer than being strapped to a board until Stephen Hawking's voice synthesiser has read out the entire works of Dostoyevsky. An early one, for instance, involves combining a support pin from a globe with a nut from a broken radio to create a key which winds a clock to make a crook think he has to be somewhere else. This isn't close to the worst, just the only one there's space to even quickly describe here. Later puzzles are whole coiled up snot-strings of this nonsense.

It's a common misconception that in a comedy game, anything goes. No. Look at Day of the Tentacle and you'll see how the logic and goals have to be clear, even if the solution is from Toon Town. Randal's Monday gets it painfully wrong, mistaking convoluted and crazy for funny and logical to the point of being tedious and infuriating to play even with an in-game walkthrough for when you've had enough. Just reading some of the solutions is tiring.

An adventure can survive dropping the ball in many ways, even get away with skimping on puzzles, but when they're bad, the whole experience suffers like a hamster in a microwave. Or the person who thought that was a good idea, when Weird Ed Edison sees what they did.

While it took me around 80 hours, here's Dark Souls 2 completed in less than an hour. Usually when I see a speed run stat this impressive it's wise to assume glitches have been exploited. But that's what makes this run so mind-boggling: Twitch broadcaster Allakazzaror has managed to beat the game in 59 minutes and 15 seconds, and not once does he break the rules set down by From Software.

While Allakazzaror naturally foregoes all of the non-essential boss battles, it's fun to watch his minimally attired build evade the vast majority of the game's grunt enemies on his way to the final showdown. It's not a perfect run either: there's one avoidable death in the playthrough below, indicating that Allakazzaror's record could easily be challenged by someone patient and willing enough.

[Update: AMD has sent us a statement pointing out that Ubisoft's efforts to fix Assassin's Creed: Unity are not focused specifically on AMD hardware, which Ubisoft itself acknowledged in a recent forum post. "As previously reported on the Assassin s Creed Live Updates Blog, our team is furiously working to resolve bugs and performance issues for Assassin s Creed Unity on all platforms. On PC, some media outlets have misinterpreted a forum post indicating that we were working on resolving issues that were AMD-specific," it says. "We apologize for any confusion and want to be clear that we are working with all of our hardware partners to address known issues that exist across various PC configurations. We care deeply about a smooth and enjoyable Assassin s Creed experience and we will continue to update customers as these issues are fixed via the AC Live Updates Blog."

Ubisoft's progress fixing Assassin's Creed: Unity across all platforms can be followed on the Live Updates blog.]

Original story:

The Assassin's Creed: Unity Steam review page is not a happy place. Red "thumbs down" images abound, as users report crashes, sluggish frame rates, and poor performance all around. Not everyone is having trouble, and some people are reporting problems even on relatively high-end Intel-based systems with Nvidia GPUs. But AMD owners seem to be the ones who are suffering the most.

"We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations," Ubisoft Community Manager Justin Kruger wrote in an Assassin's Creed forum post. "This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available."

In a separate Steam forum post, Kruger asked anyone who does run into a technical problem with the game to contact Ubisoft with the details. As for our own review of Assassin's Creed: Unity, it's still in the works, and should be up soon.

Here's the last bit of our coverage from BlizzCon last weekend. I chatted with Blizzard's Kent-Erik Hagman about Heroes of the Storm, the studio's brand-Voltronning foray into the MOBA genre, due to enter beta next year.

Have you heard of Stasis? It's an isometric sci-fi horror adventure that pulled in $132,000 on Kickstarter last year. In a recent update, developer The Brotherhood detailed the current state of the game, which appears to be coming along nicely, as well as a new trailer showing off some previously unseen locations and visual effects.

I don't think we've actually talked about the game before, so a basic breakdown is probably in order. Stasis is a point-and-click adventure set on the Groomlake, a desolate spacecraft in a decaying orbit around Neptune that serves as a platform for the Cayne Corporation's "horrific experimentation and illicit research." You play as John Maracheck, who awakes from stasis—hence the title—alone, injured, and missing his wife and daughter.

There's a powerful Aliens/System Shock vibe to the whole thing, and despite being developed by a tiny indie outfit from South Africa, it's managed to attract the attention of composer Mark Morgan, whose previous work includes Fallout and Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Wasteland 2, and the upcoming Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera. The trailer demonstrates the "vision light" that Maracheck will use in place of a conventional flashlight, as well as the variable "mood lighting" and other visual effects.

No release date has been set, but developer Chris Bischoff says the team is working "furiously" to have Stasis ready for release in the first quarter of 2015; at the very least, they hope to have it in beta for the 2015 Game Developers Conference in early March. In the meantime, if you find yourself intrigued and want to know more, an alpha demo for both PC and Mac is available at stasisgame.com.

That Dragon, Cancer tells the real-life story of Joel, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 12 months of age but fought the disease for four years before finally succumbing earlier this year. It was originally announced as an exclusive for the Android-based Ouya console, but developer Ryan Green, Joel's father, has decided to release it for PC and Mac as well, in order to bring it to the widest audience possible. A Kickstarter campaign to help make it happen is now underway.

The game is a 3D point-and-click adventure, but with no puzzles and a simplified control scheme that will ensure it's accessible to players of all stripes. The objective is "simply to be present in each moment," and it obviously won't be an easy game to play: The developers state flat-out that That Dragon, Cancer is an "emotionally trying experience." If you want to know how trying, read Jenn Frank's article about the game from 2013 and do your best to hold back the tears.

"We created That Dragon, Cancer to tell the story of our son Joel and his 4-year fight against cancer. Our desire is to craft an adventure game that is poetic, playful, full of imagination and of hope," Green and his wife Amy wrote. "This is how we choose to honor him and his memory."

Much of the game has already been completed, but another $145,000 is needed to finish the project, which is expected to take around eight months. The developers are seeking $85,000 through crowdfunding, while the balance of the budget, if the campaign is successful, will be covered by a private loan and the Indie Fund. The Kickstarter for That Dragon, Cancer is live now and runs until December 12.

Wildstar hasn't had a particularly smooth ride since its release in June. Phil liked it a lot, but content updates have been buggy, PvP servers have been quiet, Halloween and Christmas events were canceled, and in October, developer Carbine Studios laid off somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 employees. But in spite of that inauspicious beginning, Product Director Mike Donatelli says publisher NCsoft remains committed to the game.

"They specialize in MMOs, that's what they do. And they see a future for WildStar," Donatelli told Eurogamer. "We have legs. And as far as NCSoft is concerned, they're going to support us, and I take them at their word for that when they've made a commitment to us for the future, so I feel very comfortable making that statement."

The layoffs, he explained, were unfortunate but necessary, since Carbine had hired a large number of people prior to Wildstar's launch in order to ensure that it was ready for release. He also said that the cuts were "NCWest wide," affecting both the development and publishing parts of the business. "We still have hundreds of people working on Wildstar," he said. "As far as I was concerned it [laying people off] sucks, but it's part of game development."

Carbine Creative Director Chad Moore acknowledged that Wildstar hasn't focused on solo players as much as it should have, but promised that the next update will help address that shortcoming. "There hasn't been as much for players that hit level 50 who aren't raiders—there haven't been other things for them to experience and enjoy at that level range and throughout the game," he said. "The content stuff that we're working on for our next quarterly update focuses a lot of our efforts on making sure solo players and smaller-group players have lots to do."

The third Wildstar content drop, adding a new zone, solo story, and numerous bug fixes, went live yesterday.

When it launched last year, Arma 3 was a huge, beautiful, empty sandbox. It was an ambitious work-in-progress, lacking essentials like a tutorial or single-player campaign. But Bohemia Interactive s ethos is that it s better to shove the big picture out the door now, then circle back around and fill in the details later.

Seen in that context, the Helicopters DLC is a logical next step. It adds new mechanics, advanced damage modeling, a detailed flight model, and three new helicopters. The whirlybirds have always been there, of course, in a perfectly serviceable but basic configuration. Now Bohemia has come back, given the textures an upgrade, and added a flight simulator experience. In addition to being challenging fun, the result is a flight sim that offers experiences that no other program can touch.

First, let s talk about how Arma s helicopters have controlled up to this point. Simply put: the collective is the stick that makes a helicopter go up and down, the cyclic controls the horizontal direction, and the tail rotor spins the bird in place like a top. (That noise you just heard was all the helicopter pilots grunting with disgust.) The computer interprets your actions, meeting you halfway to round you up to a competent pilot. If you release the button raising the collective, for example, the computer assumes you re trying to get into a hover and adjusts the collective to a neutral position. You and the game are working together to keep the bird in the air where it belongs.

Pitching yaw

Now the training wheels have come off, and the helicopter is a multi-ton hunk of metal desperate to convince itself it s a bird. The advanced flight model physics are no longer interested in friendly compromise. A mouse and keyboard control scheme is ineffective at dealing with the minute variables of the new model. Keyboard control of the new analog collective is touchy business that leads to splintered landing struts and compressed spines. I flew for this review using the Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X and a TrackIR headset. I think you d have a pretty tough time without a headtracking peripheral of some kind.

Even my bottom-of-the-budget control setup cost north of $160, so there is a notable bar to entry here. It s easy to see why the founder of the Arma gaming group Shack Tactical told me in August that the group would not be adopting the advanced flight model for its regular play sessions. The loss of accessibility is too high.

So the new flight model has more detailed controls, but is the modeling any good? Well, yeah—depending on what you mean by good. To be clear, hours flown in Arma won t count toward your helicopter pilot s license. This is not a reality-standard physics simulation. You can move in some ways that real helicopters can t, ways which other helicopter sims won t let you get away with. The vortex ring state, a deadly feedback loop of choppy air caused by fast descent, is still not a problem Arma pilots can run into.

All of those caveats aside: yes, the physics is great for a flight sim newbie or an Arma pilot looking for the next challenge. I specifically enjoy that the weight of troops and equipment affects my hover threshold, and I can feel the aircraft getting lighter as each heavily equipped soldier hops off. I curse the name of strong ocean crossbreezes, and trying to fly a jeep to a canyon FOB made me sweat like a Sriracha enema.

New toys

Bohemia has added two new mechanics to play with that will benefit all players. Being able to fire a personal weapon from vehicles has been the community s most popular wishlist item, and it has finally arrived. Now any player can shoot a primary weapon, reload, throw grenades, and switch to a sidearm while in any open-facing seat. In practice, this means that the beds of pickups, the running boards of helicopters, and the last seats on troop transports are now hot.

As much as I love the new firing-from-vehicles mechanic, its current incarnation is pretty poorly executed. The seat view has been turned into a turret view without a turret, basically, which means that you have a limited arc of fire—about 120 degrees. It s a restriction that feels weird and artificial. Tactically, each shooter should pick a direction and cover it, but being unable to turn makes me feel like I m wearing a rigid back brace. Shooting from the running boards of a helicopter is much more fun and the view restriction, with your back against the aircraft, makes a little more sense. I look forward to seeing video of a sniper popping headshots while on a hovering Littlebird, but I wasn t a talented enough marksman to make it happen.

The other new mechanic is slingloading —suspending heavy loads beneath a chopper—which has actually been available as a community-made mod for some time now. The official version is much smoother, though, with nicely animated rigging ropes and fluid-body physics allowing crates to swing up and out as I change direction.

Perhaps my favorite part of this DLC is the improved helicopter damage modeling, which makes even extreme crashes much more survivable. Clipping a tree or lightpole with your main rotor will snap it off—previous incarnations of this damage model simply made you explode. High-speed runner landings are also possible now (again: previously, you d just explode), which makes losing the tail rotor is now one emergency landing away from an awesome story. For large-scale multiplayer operations, having a damaged helicopter and stranded flight crew is mechanically much more interesting than a fireball and a respawn. Rescue missions can now happen organically, wherever and whenever a pilot makes a whoopsie.

The damage model needs one big improvement, however: being upside-down causes an instant explosion. Surviving a crash landing only to slowly tip over and detonate is frustrating and ridiculous, as though Arma is set not in the near future, but on the set of a 1980s action movie. For all the ways that helicopters have become more robust and realistic in this DLC, this specific fragility is really annoying.

Fresh blood

Three new helicopters have been added to the game. The smallest, the M900, is a barebones civilian version of the AH-9 Littlebird, and doesn t really add much to the game. It s light and has quick controls that might be a good way to introduce a new pilot to the advanced flight model, but I didn t feel much of a difference between the M900 and the AH-9. If anything, I think it may be a nod to Bohemia s game Take On Helicopters, which ran on a version of the advanced flight model back in 2011.

The two new heavy lifters are much more interesting. Blufor s new CH-67 Huron is a pretty standard take on the dual-rotor Chinook, but the cockpit interior is gorgeous and it can carry two full weapons squads and a fully loaded jeep anywhere on the map. Opfor s new Mi-290 Taru is my favorite addition. The Taru is a humpbacked heavy lifter with a modular cargo area, with variants for troops, medical supplies, ammo crates, and a few others. With proper application, it can get a mobile headquarters, hospital, or repair depot anywhere in the map in a few minutes.

The new choppers are part of the premium DLC package, but anyone can use them if they re willing to put up with a pop-up ad and a little icon reminding you, somewhat passive-aggressively, that you re in a thing that you should have paid for. I can t fault Bohemia for including the reminder, though, as it s a good way for them to get paid without fracturing the playerbase between helo fans and everyone else. The advanced flight model, slingloading, and firing from vehicles all work with the original helicopter fleet without pestering, which makes this paid DLC a generous free update in disguise.

This isn t the most high-fidelity helicopter flight sim on the market, and it doesn t pretend to be. That s not what it s for. Think of this update as a way to add a big helping of that flight sim flavor into the rich Arma playground. It gives up some sparkle when it compromises on some aspect of flight physics or aerodynamic minutiae that Flight Simulator X or DCS models correctly, sure. But Arma s high-res ground model, civilian infrastructure, and infantry integration make the Helicopters DLC perhaps the greatest flight sim in terms of accessibility and context. In that respect, it s a huge success.

Ubisoft cranks out a lot of trailers, but the new one for Far Cry 4 is actually useful, at least as far as these things go. It's an eight minute breakdown of just about everything the game has to offer, from the basics of the story to weapons, vehicles, central characters, multiplayer, and the proper application of mysticism on the modern-day battlefield.

The video covers a lot of ground, and yet much of it will be familiar to veterans of the previous Far Cry: Knocking out radio towers, collecting animal skins to craft items, enthusiastic firearms retailers, employing vehicles as offensive weaponry, interacting with a charmingly crazy (and preternaturally attractive) cast of characters, and all that sort of thing. It's a far cry from revolutionary, in other words, but as an open-world arena for creatively blowing stuff up, I expect it'll fit the bill.

We'll find out in six days: Far Cry 4 hits on November 18.