Shadows of Mordor showed with their 'nemesis' system how a mechanic can elevate a game into 'next-gen' territory despite some shortcomings. They clearly had a target audience and knew exactly what they wanted to achieve.
On the flip side, I'm reminded of that Star wars and CGI quote whenever I think of AC:U now. The one about 'density' of aliens and people on screen. The full parody is done by redletterboxmedia for information. On its own the adaptive mission mechanic (AMM) sounded really cool and would/will/remains to be seen if it can freshen up the 4/5 basic mission structures. There have also been improvements to the parkour to stop that annoying run up walls and random trees, and we now have a climb down option. Then we have combat improvements - nothing too complex but a step up from counter, counter, counter. Then finally we actually got a low-profile/crouch option! If they had stopped there and then produced something with the fidelity of Black Flag with the 125 or so NPC's they could generate, I'm guessing most would have happy. I mean there were no complaints about density in ACII.....
I find it hard to criticise devs too much when they are attempting to push the boat out a little more or create unique experiences but somewhere along the lines it's just as though some bad decisions were made, or more technical boast/egocentric ones. Making the city almost a of scale 1:1 makes everything bigger which requires more NPC's to make it feel more 'alive' and populated. It's going back to the same argument we were on the precipice of coming into this generation. Gamers don't necessarily want 'bigger', they want immersion and densely packed content. Ubisoft looks like they have tried to deliver both, as well as several improved and/or new mechanics above. For what it's worth the actual cityscapes look fairly decent from all the screenshots and videos, but the NPC's just seem like from a last gen open world game (thinking skyrim), they just stand out too much and the models look plain weird at times. I don't know what the engine is doing but the popup looks awful as well. I don't think we're going to get a consistent experience from this game and hence all the entrenched opinions that we're still seeing this late before release. We had problems with stutter and choppiness in Boston/NY/Frontier in ACIII that were never properly sorted, it also had NPC pop in and pop out when running - the answer is not to suddenly inflate everything to a huge scale and bank on new hardware handling it. Get everything running perfectly at one scale first then scale up......
Can this just be patched out by lowering the NPC generator count? Maybe change it for the whole game or provide menu options for low-medium-high?
