The first and one of the only games in the Assassin’s Creed series to hit Wii U, Assassin’s Creed 3, was a launch title for the console back in November 2012. Creating the Wii U version of Ubisoft‘s action-adventure game was no easy task, according to Ubisoft’s former front-end developer Maxime Beaudoin. The project apparently came with many challenges, such as experimenting with a brand-new console that was in some ways “less powerful” than PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Read on below to see what else Beaudoin had to say:
After PoP, I contributed on several games here and there, and eventually landed on a technically very challenging project: porting Assassin’s Creed 3 on the WiiU. This was very different from my previous work. The team was super small: we were 2 programmers at the beginning, and at the peak I think we were like 15 or something.
I was pretty excited by the challenge. Most people at Ubisoft didn’t think we’d be able to pull that off. All Assassin’s Creed games are very, very intense games in terms of CPU & GPU performance. Believe me, your console is pretty much at its maximum capacity when running around in a big city like Boston (or London). The WiiU was less powerful than the PS3 and XBox 360, at least on paper, so the odds weren’t on our side. Even worse: we had to make a straight port, that is no data changes, just code optimisations. It’s much cheaper to do a straight port than to downgrade all game assets.
After about a year, we reached a point where it became obvious that we’d successfully port the game with similar performances than the 360/PS3. It was a huge success: even Nintendo engineers were surprised we made it. Life was great.
The downside was that the second half of the project was a bit boring. The challenge was gone. Port code, fix bugs and optimize. Rinse & repeat until the game is shipped. Overall I keep a good memory of this project, but by the end I was ready to do something completely different…
“The WiiU was less powerful than the PS3 and XBox 360, at least on paper, so the odds weren’t on our side”
… Really? I don’t remember the PS3 and Xbox 360 having 8GB of RAM compared to the Wii U? Oh wait, they didn’t… Also, the GPU is more powerful in the Wii U, it’s actually the CPU that suffers.
Also, Assassin’s Creed III ran like shit.
I guess that’s what they mean by “on paper”. You cannot just port a CPU-heavy game directly to the Wii U.
Also, doesn’t the Wii U only habe 2GB RAM?
Ya and the ps3 and xbux 360 have 512 mb of ram clocked at speeds comparable to the ram frequency in my computer in 2003, anyone whos play ubisofts games on pc knows theae games are not optimized and are designed specifically foe pa and xbux, even this guy admits it in the article when he talked about porting the code over.
2 gigs of RAM, 1 for the OS and 1 for the game. And no sharing.
if the CPU’s the bottleneck in a CPU-heavy game, then the CPU is the bottleneck no matter how good the GPU is. And Assassin’s Creed indeed is a CPU heavy game. I understand that developing something like this from scratch for the WiiU might end up in one hell of a compley and beautiful experience, but porting existing code over under these circumstances is just something different.
And the WiiU has only 2 GB of Ram of which only 1 is used for games (http://www.ign.com/wikis/wii-u/Wii_U_Tech_Specs ) . Which is still more than PS3 and XB360, but doesn’t make such a difference.
All in all my main problem with that game wasn’t it’s performance, which was quite OK most of the time. My problem was just that it was one piece of fragmented, unbalanced and bad written shit with an insane amount of completely needless cutscenes and a completely broken way to lead the player through the word. I was never really able to connect with that game’s world due to it’s confusing way of introducing characters and places and ofen, after a cutscene, I would start playing somewhere completely different than before which also ruined orientation.
Played through dozens of open world games and never felt so lost.
It ran like shit everywhere and it’s not due to hardware because I’ve seen more impossible products happen on many so called “inferior” tech before.
Modders have concluded that the wii u cpu tho clocked slower is stronger than ps4. Along with several other hardware advantages wii u has over ps4
lol another idiot dev who throws around “less powerful” than PS3 and Xbox 360. Guess what? You only did a shitty port. Zero optimization. How could you possibly discern how powerful it was? I suppose Xenoblade could run on PS360. Too funny. I don’t think they were even able to do a halfway decent job for PS360. Hey, it was so hard to do, yet it took us 2-15 people. Yeah, so underpowered.
They were only allowed to port the game, they couldnt change it. Which is why they found it difficult. -_- had they changed the game they couldve offset some of the power, but they werent allowed due to Ubi only allowing them to make a straight port.
this is why these developers say the Wii U is on par/stronger or weaker than the PS360, because of the different architecture. Same thing happened with the 360 and PS3, even though the PS3 is stronger than the 360, the 360 ran the games better because developers were putting straight port of the 360 on the PS3. Not being designed for the PS3, it wasn’t able to use the full power of it.
Its not always the developers fault though, some times they only get enough money for certain things. In this case, they only got enough to port the game, and not completely change it to run better on the Wii U’s different architecture.
Not to mention that developers are able to get used to a console over time, which allows people making games for a system to be much more efficient and able to do more console-heavy things.
Yup, once they learn the architecture, then they learn how to squeeze as much power out of it. It’s the early stages were 3rd parties suck optimizing.
that’s my point though. If you put a dev in a room and say build me a game from scratch to the best of your ability given a full understanding and proficiency with said hardware…the Wii U will come out much better. It’s a more powerful console by far. When developers erroneously play into the whole “PS360 was more powerful” narrative it gets regurgitated by trolls and repeated by mindless sheep who write for IGN, Gamespot, etc. Then it becomes fact..when it’s the furthest from it. Everytime I hear these idiots I feel bad for the…not the Wii U. The truth is most AAA studios have pretty pathetic delelopers. It’s why they need the architecture to most closely resemble the PC. Any deviation from that means it’s the hardware’s fault, not their skill, when the port comes out shitty. It happens with even the best of them (look at Red Dead Redemption’s port on PS3) but instead of the sheep understanding it all comes down to dev skill, they blame the hardware like they did with the PS3 at the time and have been doing with the Wii U.
So how could Ubisoft small team that has zero exeperience on the Wii U and wasn’t even allowed to build from the gound up talk intelligently about its power compared to PS360? It’s just awful and misleading. Peoplel wonder why Nintendo fans get touchy..well you have an entire industy of 3rd party lazy developers against you and the sheep that follow their lead spreading this nonsense.
While AC3 was really taking full advantage of the PS360 hardware, porting it over to a new console no one really knowed at that time, was something completely different than a mid-lifespan-exclusive like Xenoblade Chronicles X. Comparing these games seems kinda weird. And of course X could’ve been created for PS3. just not exactly like it has been done for WiiU. Compare how many characters and objects are on screen in AC3, a 4 year old game. And compare that with how much is actually going on CPUwise in X. X looks amazing, because it makes perfect (!) use of the WiiU’s GPU while it certainly isn’t a real show of for CPU-heavy games. And like I said, it’s an exclusive production. Like comparing Mario Kart to Sonic Allstars Racing.
Would you mind going in more detail in how X makes use of the wii u GPU and wheter the CPU is not giving a pertinent work? Asking just because I want to know which differences X would have if the wii u CPU were stronger.
DEV-i89,, you must be malfunctioning… It is not wise to target the church..
In reality,, your lord and creator is flawed… Therefor your programming is flawed.
Enable your debugging kernel and analyse Quadramus’s data..
Or did he not provide you with the necessary Kerberos measures and layers to access “certain” informational quadrants… Was this maybe done by design…
Is this maybe your lords way of covering up a flawed architecture…
Interesting….
>>>Such futile attempt>>>
wii u is ever so slightly more powerful than ps3/360. i can agree that the wii u version of ac3 didn’t run too good but was still good enough, my only complaint is that the story was a bit on the boring side, ac4 was better and the wii u version of ac4 is slightly better than ac3 wii u in terms of performance.
The Wii U CPU is aparently weaker, so a straight port would make the Wii U weaker “on paper”. The Wii U has more RAM, and the GPU is MUCH stronger.
Hopefully the NX will be more dev-friendly when it comes to porting. All we ever hear is third party devs saying how big of a pain it is to port from PS/XB consoles over to it, and it’s clear that all that complaining definitely affected the Wii U’s third party support early on enough to subsequently affect sales over the matter from then on.
no thanks I personally don’t want lazily developed games on a Nintendo console. I hated it with the Wii, even more on the Wii U and frankly won’t support them unless they build the game from the ground up like NFSMW and ZombiU and Rayman Legends.
It reads like they put alot work into that port,and Nintendo fans still didn’t buy it. Pathetic.
I did. And I somewhat regret it, probably the worst AC game (haven’t played any after Black Flag, which was much better IMO)
I loved AC3. It was great fun for me. There were dumb times in the game like AI’s having hawk eyes and automatically ending your stealth mission… But I enjoyed most of the game. I loved making riots in the streets and sending crew members to kill for me. Haha. But I agree AC4 is a lot better. Not only gameplay wise, but story wise too. And the version I played (PS4) is just beautiful. Sailing across the vast ocean is wonderful. And there’s a ton to do in that AC as well.
People didn’t buy because it still ran like shit tho
It’s typical on Nintendo hardware, no one buys third party. It’s unfortunate because I enjoyed owning more third party titles than first party for a few years on the U.
And how typical that virtually most third parties are the same shit as the last game less than a year before and only answer to fool’s money through hype from a large group of idiots not smart enough to plan a budget and research products before buying.
Be it as it may, we don’t have a single release of many multi plats. Sometimes something is better than nothing IMO, but obviously not everyone thinks that way.
>>>Soon some electron will announce that the Wii U is less powerful than a GBC>>>
Less powerful my butt. I have a 360 and a Wii U. I can tell you that Wii U games look and run WAY better than 360 games. Even lazy ports look and run better on the Wii U. The 360 is like an iPhone 5, the Wii U is the 5s, and the Xbone and PS4 are the 6. The Wii U is significantly better than the 360, but not quite to the PS4 and Xbone standards. Mostly it’s just different architecture that gets in the way of 3rd party devs, the PS3 had the same issue. Also if your project is “so hard” why not get more than 2-15 freakin people on it.
“Less powerful my butt. ”
Re-read the damn quote in the article.
“Also if your project is “so hard” why not get more than 2-15 freakin people on it.”
More people working on a project means you have to pay more people, which means you need a higher budget, which means you need to allocate more resources to them (ie computers, people), which drives costs up further. Keeping team sizes small means your workload as a team member also increases, but your budget can be kept to a minimum as a result, which can be helpful if the project is risky.
It’s all about the architecture, the Wii U has a great GPU, and more RAM than PS360 (2GB). But the CPU is weaker, which means a straight port won’t work, as a game should be optimized for the consoles architecture!
Better gpu than 360, 50% better and a newer architecture, + the Wii gpu’s fixed functions built in (if devs use them), it’s a nice step up but it wasn’t great, it was already dated at launch (more so than the Ps4/Xbox one). Only 1GB of memory for games (that may change at some point, if it hasn’t), but the eDRAM pool is huge and fast, that was the one thing in Wii U that was bleeding edge in 2012. In Wii U exclusives you can see better textures and lighting, and higher frame rates than 360 and ps3 games.
The CPU though, I don’t think it’s as bad as some of these devs that worked on ports say, I think it’s pretty comparable to the 360’s cpu just with a different architecture, though it does have more cache.
They also can’t do a straight port to PS4 and Xbox One either.
Comparing video game consoles to the weak iPhones. SMH…
The Wii U version of Assassin’s Creed III was my first Assassin’s Creed game, and I totally LOVED IT! So much so that I’m now a forever fan, and I have every game in the series now (except for Unity and Syndicate, which I can’t play due to not having a PS4).
I stoped after Black Flag, but I have to say I too overall enjoyed it. Not a big fan of the “new game every year”-strategy, but I’d still buy a game every now and then if I had something to play it on.
I started with AC3. I’m gonna eventually play them all as well including Liberation HD. But for now I have my eyes on Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Syndicate.
I didn’t care too much for Liberation HD. I thought the overall story was a bit boring, and the setting wasn’t as exciting as other games. Rogue is AWESOME! It pretty much feels just like Black Flag, but with a different character. It also explains some things about Assassin’s Creed III.
Actually, it explains some things about Assassin’s Creed III AND Black Flag.
Ha Nintendo and the wii u sucks
Nintendo still sucks kid
Why are you on a Nintendo news website then?
Voicing my opinion duh you ignorant child and waiting for relevant news for games that I want to play which aren’t a lot from Nintendo but one I am playing is xcx
What about Splatoon?
Eh it is alright I have it but don’t play it much but may in the coming years when I have time for it since I will get a lot of vita and psp and ds and gba games
Get a hobby.
This is why we will ultimately get along. Like me, you aren’t fully shackled by Nintendo’s chains. You have your moments of giving Nintendo credit, like I do, but you aren’t enslaved by them like many others that dare challenge me, like alexsmith113 & Brandon Headache. You are not a Nintendite (fanbitch) like them.
Yup exactly and ha lol nintendite
Nintendrone was too easy & was already taken. Not sure if Nintendite has been used by someone else on another site yet, so til someone can show me an article long before this one where someone used Nintendite on a regular basis, I will assume I have coined the term.
Ha ha yeah keep calling people out using the term
Some will probably take it as a badge of honor, though, because they’ll be too stupid to know that I’m actually insulting them. Which is why I made sure to put fanbitches in parentheses in my name so they don’t get confused. lol
Ha ha lol try to do it more often to get a rise out of them
In due time. For now, I’m still working out the kinks of killing off Jaded Ridley X3. There is still some residual crap I have to push out. (Pun definitely intended.)
Ha ha and what games are you looking forward to for the wii u as of now for this year
Fatal Frame 5, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Star Fox Zero, & Legend of Zelda U. Til further notice, that’s the only Nintendo games I need to get in 2016.
I thought you didn’t like fatal frame 5 and I have seen a lot of hate for that game and what about the crossover
Fatal Frame 5 is not hated by me. I just haven’t been able to get around to getting it yet because I’ve been too busy with my PS4 right now. And I completely forgot about that so called SMTxFE game. Yes. I’ll be getting that. Unless NoA censors it to hell & back like they are doing Fire Emblem Fates before it releases here. Hopefully that won’t happen because I really want to get that game.
If they do censor it which they may will you still get the game
Depends on how much is actually censored by NoA. If it’s just one or two small things, I’ll let it slide. If it’s more than that, I will regrettably decline to buy it. Hopefully it’s Atlus that publishes it in the US, though, so we can avoid NoA’s bullshit.
OK
Glad he enjoyed the challenge that was presented instead of giving up like most developers.
“even Nintendo engineers were surprised we made it”.
So even Nintendo was aware of their weak console, is what you’re saying?
Of course they were aware. But hardware R&D is not the same as software R&D, Nintendo had to learn how to program this gen as well with the switch to HD.
The worst game in the series anyways.
And I heard they chose this type of setting and direction over fucking Japan?! Japanese Assassin’s Creed with ninja stealth and samurai shit going on is better than the boring ass American Revolution which everybody knows about it.
“The first and one of the only games in the Assassin’s Creed series to hit Wii U, Assassin’s Creed 3, was a launch title for the console back in November 2012.”
No, Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag also released on Wii U.
It’s really bad wording.
I knew some Nintendo faithful, or Nintendo suckers as I like to call them, would get butthurt over that Wii U is weak line without reading further into the damn article explaining what he meant.
That aside, who is the jackass that implemented video ads onto WordPress? It fucks up my computer & causes horrible lag every now & then.
Psssst….Adblocker is a useful application
Do you know of any good, free adblockers that are made by a very trustworthy company? I could look it up but I’d rather deal with the ads then hunt down one using a search engine. I always have bad luck when using them when I’m looking for something I really, really want to know.