Ubisoft has announced a Thanksgiving Patch for Assassin's Creed III on its official forums, which looks to make minor tweaks to both the single player and multiplayer modes, along with select adjustments to the campaign's difficulty level.
While the game was well-received by critics, several sources cited the chase missions as overly-reliant on trial-and-error tactics. The developer has moved to tend to this criticism and will ratchet down the difficulty in multiple chase sequences throughout the game. Fans should expect an update by the end of next week.
Assassin's Creed III is set during the era of the American Revolution, spanning both pre-war and post-war time periods. The franchise will conclude Desmond's story and introduce a new protagonist, the half-European and half-Native American Assassin Connor Kenway.
The game's developers started fresh with a new engine called Anvil Next, which introduces all-new situational animations, increases the amount of non-playable characters (NPC's) that can inhabit the game space, and allows players to fluidly navigate the uneven surfaces and tree branches of the American frontier.
The Wii U version of the game will release when the Wii U lands on store shelves on November 18.
Reviews
"Not everything about the game gels together convincingly and the missions' unnecessary prescriptiveness sometimes undermines the sense of freedom that the rest of the game works so hard to create. But it achieves so much that you can't help but respect it; no other open-world game has ever given us a setting that's as impressive to observe or as full of things to do as this."
"Assassin's Creed III is a step up from last year's Assassin's Creed: Revelations, which saw Ezio's story overstay its welcome and made some major miscalculations with its new mechanics, but it's still not Assassin's Creed at its finest. It's successful at establishing a whole new world and cast of characters, and tailoring the gameplay to match that setting, which is no small feat, even if the puzzle pieces don't fit together as well as they could."
"Assassin's Creed III is a big game that gives you a lot to do, some of which is fleshed out relatively well, and some of which isn't. It is not, however, content to rest on the series' laurels. It takes chances with its opening, with its story, and with its characters. It expands the series' gameplay in enjoyable and sensible ways. As with many ambitious games, not every arrow fired hits the bull's-eye, yet this big, narratively rich sequel is easy to get invested in. Other games stimulate emotion with manipulative music and teary monologues; Assassin's Creed III rouses your mind and your heart by giving you a glimpse into its characters' souls and letting you judge them on their own merits."