In the latest patch for Assassin’s Creed IV, Ubisoft and Nvidia for whatever reason, decided to incorporate an entirely new feature which, to say the least, shakes up game play quite a bit: Endless amounts of opaque smoke. The smoke comes as a result of the added implementation of PhysX particle effects.
The smoke, while definitely cool, realistic and relative to the game’s graphics, is plane confusing. It’s impossible to tell what’s going on through the thick hazes of smoke that cloud up a significant portion of the screen. While this certainly makes gameplay more challenging, it gets equally annoying once the smoke-related deaths begin to pile up.
Odds are we’ll see a future patch that downplays the prevalence of the smoke in game play. It’s certainly cool, but at the end of the day, it’s a huge and frustrating distraction. It’s fun to think about how in older generations of console gaming this effect would have been an assumed element of the game, and actually would have added a, however unintended, unique dimension to its game play mechanic. The ability to patch such “glitches” though have ended that era of gaming.