And OG Bioshock was better than the remaster as well. Console games getting remasters usually means downgrades for the PC versions.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Ubisoft removes Assassin's Creed III from Steam, Uplay
- Thread starter Zero-ELEC
- Start date
You need to be patient and know that removing AC3 from stores is a good first step. We should cheer that step, not knock it.
Sure it would be good to have the tech to erase playing it from our minds as well, but we are just not there yet. Maybe in five to ten years we can live in a world where modern ubisoft games never ever existed at all.
Makes sense to be fair, the original Bioshock was delisted when the remastered edition came around.
Anyone that doesn't think the remaster is a downgrade just needs to see this side by side of the characters.
They're included with purchase of the remasters though. I don't understand why all remasters/definitive editions/director's cuts/whatever don't do this if they're making the effort to delist the originals and make them unavailable for purchase anyways.
I think there is legitimate reason to not like a move like this regardless of whether it personally affects you.
Sort of. The original purchase options were removed when the remasters released, but on PC, you also get the original game when you buy the remaster, so they were unnecessary as the remasters are priced the same ($20 each or $60 for the collection that also includes Infinite).
Edit: This is also true of the Minerva's Den DLC.
You can still install it. this just prevents new people from buying the original
Removing the old version from sale is very bad from a preservation viewpoint. It doesn't matter if the new version is better. The old version should still be available. You can't buy the old version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution on Steam anymore, for example. You're stuck with the buggy Director's Cut. That is plain not good.
That said, let's not forget how terrible the old version of AC3 is. I'm seeing some bizarre rose-tinted lenses on the internet. Have we forgotten the game breaking bugs? AC3 is literally impossible to finish unless you reboot the game before trying to trade things, and never touch the mouse while navigating the trading menus. There is a bug related to leaving Boston as Connor where the fast travel menu breaks so you can't board the ship unless you engage in a complicated workaround. Have people forgotten that the first episode of the King Washington DLC has a game breaking bug if you install the second episode?
As an aside, the remaster makes some changes in response to feedback that not everyone is happy with. For example, some people complained that the opening of AC3 is too long. In response, the remaster streamlines the ship sequence as Haytham. Some people liked the gentle tedium of ship life. This is why keeping the original around is important. You can't please everyone.
It gives me Shadow of the Colossus flashbacks where people only cared that Wander's face looked weird sometimes. At least unlike SotC, AC3R is likely to be extensively tuned post-release to address complaints like this. Heck, just this week you had Ubisoft patching Far Cry New Dawn so that Hurk's tattoo matches the one in Far Cry 5. (And also improving the graphical effects of the final boss.) They are surprisingly flexible when it comes to addressing even somewhat anal complaints like, "This character's tattoo doesn't match the previous game. This game is ruined."
That said, let's not forget how terrible the old version of AC3 is. I'm seeing some bizarre rose-tinted lenses on the internet. Have we forgotten the game breaking bugs? AC3 is literally impossible to finish unless you reboot the game before trying to trade things, and never touch the mouse while navigating the trading menus. There is a bug related to leaving Boston as Connor where the fast travel menu breaks so you can't board the ship unless you engage in a complicated workaround. Have people forgotten that the first episode of the King Washington DLC has a game breaking bug if you install the second episode?
As an aside, the remaster makes some changes in response to feedback that not everyone is happy with. For example, some people complained that the opening of AC3 is too long. In response, the remaster streamlines the ship sequence as Haytham. Some people liked the gentle tedium of ship life. This is why keeping the original around is important. You can't please everyone.
The original is bizarre. It is broad daylight, yet the water is pitch black. Why is the water so dark? What the heck is with the black line on the horizon? Why is the ship unlit in broad daylight? Why are its sails black? Cloth does not look like that in sunlight. An argument can be made that the original is more aesthetically pleasing because shimmery black water, but it's completely nonsensical visually. Incidentally, water in the remaster often has reflections where they are completely missing in the remaster. IIRC, in the original, water doesn't reflect when you're on foot. Now it does.wtf happened to the water
That is a single graphical element of the game misbehaving under specific lighting conditions. It's largely a byproduct of the heavily improved lighting system. Hopefully they will tune the cutscene lighting to better match the original. Modern Ubisoft have a good track record for post-release support. The fact a game can dramatically improve lighting, improve shader work, improve geometry, improve texture work, and improve gameplay, but the only thing people care about is character faces under certain lighting conditions is kinda depressing overall. If a remaster has a single flaw, particularly if it involves character faces, that will become the focus at the expense of everything else. And even outright visual improvements to area across the game will become contentious because "Oh, I liked the way it looked before, it had more soul, bla, bla." And you'll have eye-rolling assertions like, "Why would you even play this remaster when the original looks so much better with my pet reshade settings?"
It gives me Shadow of the Colossus flashbacks where people only cared that Wander's face looked weird sometimes. At least unlike SotC, AC3R is likely to be extensively tuned post-release to address complaints like this. Heck, just this week you had Ubisoft patching Far Cry New Dawn so that Hurk's tattoo matches the one in Far Cry 5. (And also improving the graphical effects of the final boss.) They are surprisingly flexible when it comes to addressing even somewhat anal complaints like, "This character's tattoo doesn't match the previous game. This game is ruined."
I played the game for 5 hours last night and the faces looked messed up in pretty much every cutscene. It's not an isolated thing.
yeah saying "It's a single element' is really downplaying both how important faces are to our ability to believe these are human beings, and to how prevalent that 'single element' is.
It's staring you right in the face EVERY cutscene.
It's staring you right in the face EVERY cutscene.
You said 'this game' in a thread about the original version :P
Last edited:
those were free enhancements for anyone that owns the original, and I know at l;east divinity you get BOTH versions when you buy it, for example.
The difference is that you still get the originals when you buy the remastered versions of Bioshock, which is how it should be done.
And it's a good thing too, considering that lighting, audio effects, and water effects are missing from the "remastered" version, along with some ugly (but higher poly/resolution!) art changes. I've also seen a lot of people complaining about the remasters crashing all the time.
Very few of these "remastered" releases are actually an improvement over the original version of a game if you're playing them on PC.
At best, they may be more convenient because they fix some of the issues of running older games on newer systems instead of having to check a site like PC Gaming Wiki.
They're only an 'upgrade' if you were playing on console where things like resolution and frame rate are out of your control.
I don't recall there being performance issues with Assassin's Creed III on PC, except maybe if you have all of the GameWorks features turned on (things like TXAA which is very demanding). MFAA has also been reported to significantly affect performance - though it's not a feature that I use.
But I also got the game free on Uplay and played very little of it, so it's possible I just didn't get to wherever people were having issues. Ubisoft aren't exactly known for having well-optimized open-world games.
Speaking of which, I wonder if the GameWorks features are still there, or have equivalents in the remaster. Those are the sort of thing that are often left out (like the enhanced water effects in Bioshock) though I don't think there was much in AC3 compared to later games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-idCtsd8No
Water is dark because the ocean is deep
The black line is a landmass if you care to look at its outline
The sails and ship are dark because that's what happens when you put something against a light source
Water doesn't look like that with the sun directly overhead. The water in the original is essentially unlit. It may as well as be night-time.
The landmass shouldn't be that dark in broad daylight, is what I mean. The entire horizon is unlit. It is in the middle of the day with the sun shining overhead, yet the horizon is black. Why would it be black? The horizon doesn't look like that, either. There should be a blue-ish tinge where the water meets the horizon.
This is what a ship looks like in broad daylight with the sun shining directly overhead with no cloud cover.
Now compare that to the original version of AC3 (excuse the muddy YT compression). You have sails that are white-ish on white side, completely unlit on the other. The landmass that isn't very far away is black despite the sun shining directly onto it. The ship appears to be in deep shadow despite the sun shining directly onto it. The water is black despite the sun shining directly onto it. This isn't some clever artistic design. A console game in 2012 didn't have the performance grunt to properly light a ship and its sails. Instead you get this wildly inconsistent ship where direct sunlight has no effect on white cloth, with water that doesn't respond to light properly.
Even if the newer boat section is more technically correct it looks worse from an artistic standpoint.
"Relatively Bugless"
Within 1 play-through I found 2 or 3 nearly game-breaking bugs.
1: Some kind of bug involving the papers you have to find. I think picking one up as Haythem made it permanently unable to be picked up as Connor and it won't count making 100% completion impossible.
2. The piece of paper icon was stuck on my map and wouldn't go away.
3. A bug where if your wagon was sieged, it would stay sieged forever and couldn't be destroyed, making your shipping slot or whatever permanently unusable.
Within 1 play-through I found 2 or 3 nearly game-breaking bugs.
1: Some kind of bug involving the papers you have to find. I think picking one up as Haythem made it permanently unable to be picked up as Connor and it won't count making 100% completion impossible.
2. The piece of paper icon was stuck on my map and wouldn't go away.
3. A bug where if your wagon was sieged, it would stay sieged forever and couldn't be destroyed, making your shipping slot or whatever permanently unusable.
I really hate it when they delist original versions...
At least 2K got it right; they didn't delist the original Bioshocks when after releasing the remaster.
At least 2K got it right; they didn't delist the original Bioshocks when after releasing the remaster.
One is objective. The other is subjective. "I don't like the art style" has always been a contentious and sore point of discussion. Consider ray tracing. Ray tracing accurately captures how light should look. Some people don't like how real light looks. They prefer the inaccurate shadows and inaccurate lighting of traditional raster techniques. But that doesn't make ray traced Metro Exodus any less "true", and the old version any less "untrue" so to speak.
It goes without saying that real humans don't have skin that looks like unbaked clay. That's an example of how in order to fix AC3R they need to make the game closer to reality. ACLR doesn't seem to have this problem, so there's definitely hope there. Some people's idea of fixing AC3R is simply to give the game the exaggerated shadows and bizarre highlights of the original version. Go back to unrealistic and familiar waters. Their issue isn't that the new faces sometimes barely resemble humans, but rather that they don't look like the old faces.
The entire point of replacing a game's lighting engine so you can have PBR material pipelines is to make a game look closer to reality. Reality is the be-all and end-all in these cases. Why give surfaces parallax mapping? So they resemble how real surfaces look when light falls on them. And resemble them consistently. Because the moment materials start behaving inconsistently is when the illusion starts falling apart, which in context is a good example of why the faces misbehaving in cutscenes is such a huge problem. Human skin should look like human skin all the time. Not some of the time. Human hair should react convincingly to light all of the time. Not randomly.
Where is this messed up? It looks different because of the lighting and that's it.
If the new lighting engine makes the game look horrible then the new lighting engine isn't an upgrade. The characters look terrible and the sailing section looks blown out. When I got to that part in my game I was pretty shocked at how terrible it looked. You can talk all you want about more realistic but there's more to a look than realism. The ship looks like it just has fullbright on.
The models aren't messed up at all, but the PBR destroyed the look of the characters faces for sure.