Assassin's Creed Syndicate Polished Up with PS4 Pro Patch

I don't think I can take any more of the Assassin's Creed franchise, played so much of it in the past. Basically every AC game Ubi has pumped out since AC2 has been AC2 under a different guise.

After reading the updated Neogaf thread linked to in the article? No thanks.

It's too bad there's no 60 fps support, 4k is useless to me since I only have 1080p tv.

Dang.. performance was why I passed on this one to begin with. Oh well, I hear I'm not missing out on much.

@NathanUC Syndicate ran well for me plus story was pretty good and two protagonists gave it some variety. Much better than unity in my view.

@aric201812 Yeah, there was no way I was going to pay actual money for Unity haha. Syndicate still looked like it was chugging pretty hard compared to Black Flag

@NintendoFan4Lyf The reason is simple: After a title launches, the original development team is repurposed with a few possibly remaining behind to fix critical bugs that pop up (sometimes thats outsourced to a 3rd party or a task given to interns). There is little to no talent on the titles at that point, and after the 6 month profit window, little to no incentive to put much effort in it at all since it would cost you more to add it, than you would get back. Its not 1% that these developers are putting towards the task, is likely not even a quarter of that.

Unfortunately it makes no sense for them to patch existing games. I appreciate when they do, but until we have a good sampling of games that were developed with the Pro in mind from the start, we will have terrible patches.

@NathanUC I don't know where you hear that, Syndicate is the best AC since ACII. Performance is great, visuals are fantastic, the new features in the series are a welcome addition. Syndicate is a great game. I am sad to hear that the Pro patch is terrible, I saw the article title and was excited to play though again, in 4k.

Wow, Ubisoft continues to earn thier bad rep (one screw up after another).

But the lack of retro Pro patches doesn't really surprise me, greedy companies want to sell full blown $60 remasters on Scorpio and PS5 in 2018.

Doing a bunch of Greatest Hits Pro patches now, would rob them of all thier sweet Remaster money later.

@NathanUC mmm... the only issue I had was carriage driving in the ripper dlc that destroyed the fps and made those sections virtually unplayable... otherwise had very few issues in the base game and I think only 2 or 3 crashes. if you are a fan of the franchise I would encourage you to give it a go as it can be had pretty cheap now ($15 on psn I think)

@GamerDad66 Thats not why there are few retro Pro patches. See my reply to @NintendoFan4Lyf above.

In addition:
Imagine you performed a task for people and they paid you for it (its your Job after all). And then a year or two later some new thing comes out that would make the task you originally did, better [the original job is still just as good as it always was]. Would it make sense for you to go your customers and retro actively spend time, money, and resources making the original job you did, better. All while eating the cost? What happens if another thing comes out that would make it even better? How long are you on the hook for giving out free work to customers that paid you for a job years ago?

Is it great when it happens? Absolutely! Is this going to happen often? No, it makes no sense.

@thedevilsjester I thought that the utter lack of any sort of challenge and awful combat ruined the whole game.

I actually prefer Unity at least it was challenging playing through all the content solo. The graphics were also a lot better in Unity furthermore the combat was far superior.

you know i STILL haven't picked up this game as i'm saving room on my PS4 HDD but i did just get a XBOX ONE s so i guess i could get it on that

still on topic it sounds like a bit of a bad upscale to me of course it could be a case of that's the best they could do but knowing Ubisoft it was probably just a lazy patch

I'm starting to think there are only going to be a few games that run 4K without problems. Just bump games up to a improved 1080p at 60 FPS and call it a day.

No doubt that this will be more bad press for the Pro. Sony need to get on top of this, as a Pro owner it is all getting a bit annoying now.

@NintendoFan4Lyf a point needs clarification: What The PS4 Pro does is very similar to SLI/CrossFire where there are two identical GPUs that work in tandem. If a developer does not explicitly turn on the second GPU, it stays in single GPU mode.

Now for the problem at hand: It would have been a very, very bad move for Sony to enable that by default. Console developers have been able to use different tricks to squeeze the most out of a console because its a static target with a single hardware profile. These games have been tested exclusively on a specific profile for a specific hardware. Changing this profile is dangerous. This isn't the PC world where every (modern) game is designed to scale because there is no known hardware profile to target, this is a console and until the PS4 Pro consoles were always the same hardware for the life of the system.

If this was enabled by default, it has the potential to negatively impact existing titles. Sony doesn't have the resources to extensively test the ~700 titles to make sure what they are doing is not going to break anything, and they can't require that all existing developers go back and retest their games. They can add memory without worry, since games from day one have to be designed to be flexible with memory, but dramatically changing the performance profile (the Xbox One S has just a minor performance update so its pretty safe) could cause more harm than good.

That being said, I do wish they had a (default off) toggle to let you enable the second GPU as a "use at your discretion" option.

@GBMatthew I think Syndicate has the best combat by far. Its more enjoyable, interactive, and visceral. Unity wasn't that bad of an AC (I enjoyed it quite a bit), but it offered no challenge at all either. Soloing the challenges in Unity was pretty trivial and it was a very easy platinum. If you are looking for a challenge, AC is not your game. None of them offer more than a relaxing scavenger hunt with some side games and an amazingly well done city, and Syndicate delivers on that more than any other.

@thedevilsjester I must be thinking of the Xbone version on performance (although a quick youtube search doesn't make it look particularly good on either platform). A buddy of mine who is a big fan of the series didn't recommend it though.

@NathanUC I don't know what to tell you other than I am a huge fan of the series, completed them all (platinumed most of them) and I think Syndicate is the best one yet as far as the visuals, game mechanics, combat, etc... Not just a little better than all of the previous games, but a lot better. Now story-wise its pretty good (doesn't top Ezio, not even close) but better than Unity and Black-Flag by a mile.

@thedevilsjester Then why bring a patch just leave it then...

@Flaming_Kaiser I couldnt agree more. Maybe they thought it would turn out better and and thought that the goodwill they get from supporting an older title would transfer into more sales for future titles. The problem here is that only works if the support you provide for the older title is actually good.

I expected nothing less from an AC title. There games are poorly optimized at launch anyway.