10 Ambitious Gameplay Ideas That Broke Everything
8. Rebuilding The Series' Engine - Assassin's Creed Unity
The release of 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity marked some major under-the-hood changes for the franchise, with Ubisoft pulling off the plaster and giving their AnvilNext engine a major overhaul.
Unity's 2.0 version of the engine allowed the developers greater flexibility to generate realistic physics and lighting effects, among many other things, which in theory would've made Unity the most visually stunning Assassin's Creed game up to that point.
The problem? Ubisoft rushed Unity out the door before the team had become fully acquainted with the new engine, resulting in the game launching rife with graphical issues and bugs.
Within days social media was flooded with memes mocking the infamous texture problems, where characters' facial textures wouldn't fully load in, leaving a pair of eyes and mouth of teeth floating in the air without a face.
Post-release, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot himself admitted that the wonky launch was due to the engine's revamp, and in a 2018 interview, series creative director Jean Guesdon elaborated that the engine overhaul resulted in a rushed development:
"We fell again into this trap of working a lot on the tech, and not allowing enough [time for] the teams to create the content to create something new... In the end, that's the way I see it. We created the perfect conditions for the perfect storm. We had a game that was wonderful in terms of art, but that was not renewing enough of the experience."
And Guesdon isn't wrong - years removed from Unity's release, it remains one of the most visually stunning games of the last decade. But for anyone hoping for a butter-smooth product on release, they were sorely out of luck.
In the very least, Unity's horrendous launch prompted Ubisoft to spend an extra year developing the far better-received Assassin's Creed Origins.