I've been playing the game for 10h+ now and I haven't seen any of this. In fact, this might be the most polished AC game of all time. The time they took with it really shows.

The only problem is the comparably high CPU usage, though with all the stuff going on it might be justified.

I'm on PS4 and really enjoying it so far bar a few bugs.

The one thing that annoys me is the showing of other players photo's on the map, I really like they have cut down the number of icons, but I just want to turn this feature off (so distracting), anyone know how to do it?

Seems to lend to that rumor going around of that irksome DRM possibly getting in the way.

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rumour-denuvo-causes-30-40-additional-cpu-usage-assassins-creed-origins/

Either way I'm not playing it since it, like other Ubisoft games, requires Uplay to be installed, and I refuse to use that client. 

Yeah I played unity this summer on my ps4 pro. Glorious experience with no bugs or tech issues.  

I also really enjoy uplay.  I'm a high level on their system as I've completed so many Ubisoft games this gen.

One question to the AC Origins players... does Egypt also has these big crowd sizes like Paris in AC Unity?

In the videos I saw so far, the streets and places in Alexandria looked much emptier than in older AC games.

Now that I've finished Odyssey and started playing this, let me say that this game is a breath of fresh air for the series. The new combat mechanics, the leveling system, the rpg elements, and the new egypt setting freshens up the Assassins creed series, which was getting quite stale before. This has already become my second favourite AC game, only behind Black Flag (and still has the pontential to surpass that, too)

Now the question is, will the series adapt to this new two cycle, or go back to its traditional yearly cycle? I hope its the former, since you can tell Origins has benefitted a lot from this additional development time.

Nope, game looks pretty bland to me.

Do you have to play syndicate first? Only one in the main series I've missed.

I tried it, and thought that it wasn't stellar, but pretty solid. Combat was improved, a lot, it looks cool and the game is really polished. I'm not a fan of the franchise, so the time I've tried it hasn't sold me on the game. But I think it's what fans wanted. And you can tell that they took some time to make this game and made a solid product.

Gonna have to wait until I know I can run it without stutters on PC(meet the recommended specs but I also did with Watchdogs 2 but the driving part is really annoying with those stutters), if not gonna have to get it on PS4 next year.