Ubisoft is no stranger to community blow-ups, and they are quite the bedfellows with downgrades and disappointment. Well, the bedside of controversy was kept rather warm in recent times, as Assassin’s Creed 3: Remastered was the latest game to partake in the midnight tryst of trepidation after videos began popping up highlighting the game’s downgrades compared to the original 2012 release.

YouTuber Game Intros & Finales posted up a raw comparison video without any special tweaks, which resulted in the game not looking any better in the most recently released version compared to the 2012 original.

The near three minute video starts off well, with certain scenes looking far better than the 2012 outing; improved dynamic shadows, fog effects, higher resolution textures, and more detailed environments are some of the things you see right off the bat.

However, later into the video you see things like the lack of proper world reflections in the water, lack of fog density in the naval segments, and a complete lack of shadow casting and LOD for the character meshes, haphazardly turning Haytham into what looks like an Asian man in some sequences.

This is a far-cry from the very carefully curated and sponsored video that YouTuber Candyland put up a week before on March 28th, 2019, where they showcased very specific segments of the Assassin’s Creed 3: Remastered that highlighted the volumetric fog, enhanced draw distance, and reflections.

You can check out the full four and a half minute video below.

But hilariously enough, even in a video specifically designed to highlight how much better the remastered version of Assassin’s Creed 3 was over the original, there are some things that still belie what Ubisoft intended to convey in the re-release.

For instance, the screen space reflections – while showcasing that some of the object entities showcased reflections in the water, such as the boats – the water itself lacked a lot of the same details as the original game, and also didn’t contain the same kind of wave or water effects as the 2012 outing.

Things like higher shadow resolutions and physically based rendering will only take your game so far, though.

Once again, even though Candyland attempted to make the new game look better than the old one, even they had to point out that ambient occlusion for the vegetation in the remastered version was lacking. They chalked it up to a “bug”.

What’s also funny is that the foliage doesn’t even look that great in the remastered version. It looks like there’s some kind of shader bug projecting shadows from the trees across the foliage without the foliage itself casting occlusion on the ground. Typical Ubisoft.

The character comparisons is where things really showcase how far off the beaten path of improvement Ubisoft has drifted. Wayward and backward.

You can see that there’s a lot of quality loss in the color tones and the details in the faces. The self-shadowing actually works against the highlights of the character faces, masking them in darkness instead of accentuating their unique physiological characteristics.

It’s also funny how the frame-rates in the remaster drop significantly by around 25 frames. So not only is so much of the game not actually improved, but the performance is worse, too.

The funny thing about it is that this isn’t even the first time that Ubisoft has been caught downgrading remastered editions of a game. Previously they were caught downgrading Assassin’s Creed 2’s remastered editions, which had a similar spat of issues that seemed to have cropped up in their most recent outing.

Anyway, Assassin’s Creed 3 is available right now for home consoles and PC, and the downgraded Assassin’s Creed 3: Remastered is also available, too.

(Thanks for the news tip Latino Heat)