Assassin's Creed Unity's creepy "no face" bug fixed
NPC cull not needed to fix performance issues.
Ubisoft has discovered the origins of Assassin's Creed Unity's creepy "no face" bug, images of which were circulated online upon the game's launch last week.
The issue was PC-specific and limited to just two graphics cards, Ubisoft explained in a new post on Unity's live updates blog.
"In both cases the issue is resolved with the application of the Day 1 patch (as well as all future patches).
"This should not be affecting any players who are allowing their game to be automatically patched as recommended with updates as they are released."
Meanwhile, Ubisoft is continuing to probe the performance problems affecting the game on all platforms.
The developer has said that these issues were not present to the same degree before the game launched - but that it has now pinpointed a possible cause.
"We can tell you that we have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment," Ubisoft wrote in another post.
"In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance."
Many users have blamed the amount of on-screen NPCs for the issues, which include choppy frame-rates and overall slowdown. But Ubisoft has now said that crowd sizes are not the cause and will not need to be changed.
"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."
Instead, the developer will work on improving the game's computing prioritisation - in other words, which bits get loaded first.
Fixes that will streamline Unity's navigation detection system to smooth pakour, and improve performance when viewing large portions of the city from high points are also being looked at.
Ubisoft has released two major patches for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One over the past seven days.
A third patch - set to be the biggest yet - is currently being worked on and will hopefully include some of the above fixes.