Face-Off: Assassin's Creed Syndicate

[Administrator]

Assassin's Creed Syndicate sees Ubisoft redeem its flagship series after the catastrophic launch of last year's Unity. Our initial impressions painted a promising picture: performance is substantially improved, while the gameplay experience is also more stable with little in the way of bugs and glitches. Some crucial changes are made to the engine and there's the sense that Ubisoft has rebalanced the AnvilNext tech for the new game. In effect, this piece isn't just a comparison between Xbox One and PS4 versions of the title - more fascinating are the compromises and improvements made to the core technology in the wake of the Unity debacle.
Tackling the state of the conversion work first, core image quality is left untouched with both consoles handing in a 900p presentation backed up by a post-process anti-aliasing solution that gives the game a soft, but smoothed over appearance - no real change from Unity here. The lack of per-pixel sharpness blurs over some of the more intricate texture and normal map details, although this also helps to reduce the appearance of upscale artefacts as the image is resized to full HD. Image quality could be better, but Ubisoft's solution works as an acceptable compromise given the level of detail and accomplished effects work on offer.
Digging deeper into the game, we're looking at an identical looking set of assets and effects on both versions of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, with fairly low levels of AF (our guess would be 4x) utilised across ground surfaces, matching shadows and lighting, and the same textures and normal maps deployed across characters and environments. Rare variances crop up between platforms, but these seem to take the form of incidental, minor bugs. For example, we noticed some lower resolution textures on PS4 in two areas of the game, but replaying the same section several hours later, we saw complete parity between the assets. In another scene, large lightning bolts appear permanently absent on PS4, though the use of alpha effects is identical elsewhere in the game on both systems.
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