It is a shame as Assassins Creed Black Flag on the PS4 was probably the best game in the series to date. It had a locked frame rate, great visuals (for a last gen game originally) and played really well. This just looks like a rush job.

It's all well and good shouting from the rooftops that you can have literally 1000's of NPC's all in one place but when it looks this tragic in motion no one is going to care. And even so, whats the point in having that many people in one place? It doesn't add anything. Black Flag probably had no more than a 100 or so at any one time and that didn't do that game any harm. Ubi could have upped it to a few more hundred or so and it would have still portrayed the message it wanted, albeit not making a system crawl in the meantime.

Just beacuse the basic architecture is familiar doesn't mean that all the ins and outs of the systems are already known. Hell the demo scene is still working out new ways of using systems from the 80s. There will always be new ways of doing things and knowledge gained about how to design games around the systems. As for time and money the game started development mid 2010, involved 9 studios and is by far the most expensive Assassin's Creed game ever made. From reports the PC version runs fine if you have a sufficiently beefy CPU. The game and engine's design was just too ambitious for the current consoles. In fact that extra development time is most likely part of the problem as the design of the game and engine had to have been done before they had console specs.

I was expecting this to be the best AC, for the setting and for being next gen and enabling new opportunities in gameplay and atmosphere. I will wait for the reviews, and the patch to fix this, if there will be one. At least Dragon Age doesn't seem to be a disapointement and GTA V will come out at the same time, so at least we, PS4 users, got that going for us, which is nice.

It seems to me they wanted to put thousands of NPCs on screen at any cost. 900p at 20fps...

There are some of us who have enjoyed every single AC game. I regretted Watch_Dogs, but never any Assassin's Creed game. Even if the framerate is crap, I'm sure I'll still enjoy it. Just so long as it ends up better than the Stick of Truth, which I had to give up on it was just so stuttery (and not hugely fun)

Looks like another Watchdogs, so glad I learned my lesson after that game.
Staying far away from ubi and their parity crap.

Exactly.This is the real problem. Not the power of consoles.

For comprasion. Old gen, 2012. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EkiAdskhKk8#t=17

If you look at the crowd, 2/3s just have exactly the same animations

Why am I not surprised? Since the early Rayman days; I have yet to play a Ubi title that didn't have framerate issues, this goes double for the AC series. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually ran pretty well, come to think of it, it seems that Ubi just aren't able to produce an open world setting without getting major stutters and tear, which is downright comical when you view it in context with the ridiculous system req's on PC for AC: Unity.

Ubisoft realy screwed up with Unity it seens. Good thing Im more than tired with AC games already and didnt go anywhere near Unity.