Assassin's Creed Unity characters should have their faces back, frame rate fixes in the works

Assassin's Creed Unity's plethora of peasants and royalty should have their faces back, Ubisoft tech folks say, and performance issues are now a main focus of the Live team.

The "no face bug"  is caused by an issue on the computer version of the game that was fixed with the first patch, Ubisoft officials say, and it was only occurring with certain graphics cards.

"In order to find how players are encountering this issue we tested it rigorously and have discovered that this only occurs on PCs with one of two specific graphics cards, and in both cases the issue is resolved with the application of the Day 1 patch (as well as all future patches)," according to the update on the Unity Live page. "This should not be affecting any players who are allowing their game to be automatically patched as recommended with updates as they are released. If you believe you are seeing this issue under any other circumstance, contact our support team and let us know!"

Meanwhile, the team says they've received a lot of feedback on the performance of Unity since the game's release and that they are taking the issue very seriously. After a bit of post-launch investigation, the team came up with some "promising findings."

"We can tell you that we have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment," according to the post. "In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance. We have several fixes we are exploring right now and will continue to update you with our progress of what is working and how quickly we can implement these fixes in the game in the weeks ahead."

In terms of improving framerate, the team is looking to streamline and smooth certain behaviors during free-running, including fixing a number of objects that were improperly tagged. The team is also tuning the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores and are optimizing the game's reach high points during the camera swooping sequences.

One thing that wasn't a problem, apparently, was the game's crowd size.

"Though crowd size was something we looked at extensively pre-launch, it is something we continue to keep a close eye on," the team wrote. "We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are."

The hope is that these changes will roll out for patch three, but they're still being tested. No timing for the patch was given, but the team did say to expect another update before the end of the week.

We have, once again, reached out to Ubisoft for comment on how the game went live with this many problems and will update the story if they respond.