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Was Assassin's Creed Unity simply too ambitious for its own good? Revolutionary Paris - densely populated, rich in detail - looked beautiful on a high-end PC, but the experience didn't translate well to less capable hardware, including PS4 and Xbox One. Riddled with bugs at launch and suffering from severe frame-rate problems, our sense is that Unity's heart was in the right place, but its execution was brand-damaging stuff. From what we've seen of its successor, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, perhaps Ubisoft is executing a course correction that could see tangible improvements in stability, but the question is whether it comes at the expense of the raw ambition behind the core technology.Of course, what we've seen so far is indeed 'pre-alpha' - and it shows, mostly via some occasionally jarring geometry pop-in - and while we can debate just how much more can be achieved in the few months of development remaining until Syndicate is released, what's clear is that Ubisoft's reveal is at least authentic. In the current marketing climate, that is refreshing - we're pretty convinced that what we're seeing in the two launch videos is indeed actual gameplay, and while there may be some use of debug cameras in the shorter trailer, we're fairly sure that this is the actual game as it currently looks in Ubisoft's studios. There's no CG trailer fakery in effect here: Syndicate may well have unpolished elements in its current form, but crucially, real code is used to market the game - and that's important. There's the sense that Ubisoft is giving it to us straight, and that kind of honesty should be recognised and applauded.
That's not to say that Ubisoft isn't afraid to use PC technology to aid the presentation though. We're fairly sure that it's the PC version taking centre-stage in these initial materials, and there's a likelihood that the game is running at 2560x1440 resolution downscaled to 1080p, perhaps via Nvidia's DSR super-sampling technology. Despite this, noticeable shimmer and pixel-popping artefacts are still evident, when Ubisoft could have SLIed a couple of Titan Xs and scaled down from 4K to tidy up the imperfections. In terms of anti-aliasing, there does seem to be an upgrade over the FXAA offered by AC Unity - it still looks like a post-process solution, but the presence of some ghosting suggests an additional layer offered by a temporal component, where information from previous frames is retained and integrated into the new image for better coverage. Again, Ubisoft could have used the AnvilNext engine's MSAA support to make these initial materials look smoother and cleaner, but it elected not to.
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