People who spend 50% or even 100% more on a PC than on a console should expect more than some upper res and less framedrops (coming from higher framerate).
There is no (never was) strict, scientific correlation between money spent and the result on your screen performance/IQ wise. Some pieces of hardware are priced as high as the market is willing to pay, regardless of how they stack up against others or their inherent level of performance.
And then, at max settings it indeed looks like shit. This is a flawed argument.
The game has its flaws, LOD seems pretty bad, pop-in rears its ugly head even using maximum PC LOD but on the other hand lighting and character models are gorgeous. Textures (even at high) are detailed enough.
Perhaps you need to realize a game architectured around consoles will inevitably hit a wall in terms of how much you can render on screen. But who knows, perhaps the next AC will be a tremendous leap over Unity in both rendering tech and scale.
I would take stable 30fps (and even more stable 25fps) before 60fps with a lot of drops, any day.
Heavy framedrops are unplayable territory.
It's great to have standards but history has shown developpers are a bit casuals with framerate drops and don't forget that the main target for consoles are tech illiterate people who could not give a damn about resolution or framerate. Only a tiny core of tech enthusiasts care about that stuff on consoles. Therefore they see framerate as a necessary casualty, do you think your average joe will complain a drop to 15-20fps ? No, he most likely won't even notice. If you genuinely can't stand framerate drops there are dark days ahead for you.
Plenty of console games running at what I would call barely playable framerates sold very well, the market does not care for framerate or resolution.
It's pretty apparent that they overreached here, you can see by the images that they are very aggressive compromising with LOD and it is still a performance dog. They may have talented teams at Ubisoft but something went wrong here, whether they didn't have the time to get what they wanted out of it or they were just too optimistic early in development and started scaling back to late in the game.
I agree with that, completely. But it's not due to a lack of technical skill, the hardware underneath (consoles or any PC) has its limits and it's not hard to hit them.
You also have to factor in the inherent difficulties of multithreading are made even harder on PC.
On any platform that's unacceptable for any amount of time, consoles included. The developer straight up isn't doing their job at that point.
I would not go that far. I think the hardware just can't handle it and they should have scaled crowds back.