No App Needed To Play Assassin's Creed Unity Anymore

The pitchforks came out for Assassin's Creed Unity's bugs and performance problems, but I can't say I ran into many of the former and the latter was never bad enough to make it unplayable. (It was worse on console, as I understand it). For me, the problem was that whatever soul the game might have had was obfuscated by its ostentatious partitioning into external systems. Sign up for this nebulous player-tracking service, install this tellingbone app, grind/play/grind, hunger hunger hunger for more. Whatever you do, don't just play the game.

Belatedly, the situation is improving. Ubisoft are removing the need to have Unity companion app thingamywotist if you want to open certain chests (containing various loot and even an Altair skin) scattered around Paris.

While the app was free, there was a whole lot of rote grinding required to unlock the chests. The trouble was that the chests appeared in the main Unity game whether you had the app or not, and in a game that's built around cleaning all the icons off the map, it was simply frustrating to have all this stuff you either couldn't access or which required you to waste a whole lot of time you'd perhaps rather spend playing Unity itself faffing about on your iPhone.

Also put out to pasture is the Initiates service, which is a sort of pan-Asscreed achievement system that unlocked yet more chests if you put enough time into various other games in the series. The system proved to be all kinds of haywire in practice, so its chests too are open to anyone playing Unity.

Says Ubisoft, "We will be unlocking all content exclusive to Initiates and the Companion App, including both blue and gold chests. Players can still progress on the Companion App, they just will no longer be required to complete content to unlock in-game chests." This will happen as part of a patch due later this week, which also contains a few more bug fixes.

This is good news in that at least we don't need to prat about with other stuff if we want to get our icon hoovers out again, but bad news in that, because all this stuff was there in the first place, the icon hoovering side of things still very much overwhelms Unity.

Let's just hope the lesson learned for the next Assassin's Creed is "focus on the game itself" and not "all we have to do is the same thing again, but more stable."

Me, I want an Assassin's Creed game without any map whatsoever. That would be amazing.