Leisure
In the last few weeks, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity has become a cautionary tale of how treating a franchise as a perfunctory once-a-year update machine while simultaneously stoking player expectations can catastrophically backfire. Once it realized how unhappy its player base was, Ubisoft snapped into action, stepped up to the plate, and courageously blamed everybody else for its own wretched game. Now that it's clear that this strategy has failed, Ubisoft is instead handing out genuine apologies, a promise to do better in the future, and free DLC. Yannis Mallat, the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal,...
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Update: Ubisoft has amended the original forum post to include and acknowledge problems on Nvidia hardware as well. We're glad the company has explicitly adjusted the post and will update readers if any major performance patches push out. Life is hard when you're a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin's Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could've hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game's disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics -- suddenly, all of this is AMD's fault. An official...
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A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound, he [Pontbriand] said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. "We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating,...
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The U.S. government is somewhat like that older family member you have that understands the importance of social media but is rather baffled at how to actually use it effectively. Particularly, the Secret Service is trying to find a tool that analyzes social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and it includes a rather long list of sought-after capabilities. The most amusing in the long list is “Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives”. (Hey look, Secret Service, if you figure that one out please let everyone know.) The full list is as follows: Real-time stream analysis; Customizable,...
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Following Maryland’s lead in protecting job applicants, Reps. Eliot Engel (D - New York) and Jan Schakowsky (D - Illinois) introduced legislation to the U.S. House of Representatives called the Social Networking Online Protection Act (SNOPA). SNOPA actually covers a lot more ground than just protecting job seekers from having to divulge their Faceook login credentials to potential employers, also covering applicants to school and universities as well as those already employed or enrolled. “Social media sites have become a widespread communications tool – both personally and professionally...
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Remember the Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet? If only Facebook, digital cameras, and the Internet as we know it today had been around in the 1960s, William Shatner, who played the part of a nervous salesman on his first airplane flight since having a nervous breakdown, could have posted proof that there was a gremlin on the wing trying to tear the engine apart. We're not saying that gremlins remain a problem for domestic flights (they've all but been eradicated since the 1980s), but just in case, we're stoked to learn that Gogo Inflight Internet is running a promotion with seven...
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So Apple has already sold over 600,000 iPads in less than a month, and a spate of other tablets will soon begin flooding the marketplace. All of these threaten to shake things up in the ebook reader market, but don't go counting Amazon's Kindle out of the game. Further blurring the line between standalone ebook readers and multifunctional Internet devices, Amazon's upcoming 2.5 software update will introduce a handful of new features, including Facebook and Twitter integration. Kindle owners will be able to post book passages with friends on Facebook directly from their ebook reader, which will...
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