Which would you rather avoid in the latest Assassin’s Creed game, animals twisted into human shapes, or humans with no faces? It’s a tough call.
The glitch that makes animals spawn in seemingly humanoid poses that their textures cannot handle, as demonstrated by Eurogamer’s Tom Phillips on Twitter, definitely has an evil air about it. I’m getting a little True Detective season one vibe here, with a tinge of some of the more creative horror films of the late ‘70s.
But some find these creatures’ twisted bodies endearing, in an “awww look, they think they’re people” sort of way. And if you think about it, many of the gods of Egypt are depicted as humans with animal heads. Perhaps these “glitches” are what inspired the pantheon?
BernieH on YouTube caught the animal posing glitch in action during an antelope hunt. It’s almost as if their twisted forms are some sort of really ineffective camouflage. “Do not shoot me, I am a furry desert tree! Oh shit, he’s not buying it. Run!”
Okay, now I am leaning towards “cute” for the animal glitches. Which brings us to the image that gave me actual nightmares over the weekend. This first one was posted on the Assassin’s Creed Reddit by one Squaredspekz. I wish I hadn’t seen it.
While Ubisoft hasn’t responded to our inquiry about the twisted animals, the faceless NPCs thing is a known issue in the PC version that’s being addressed in the next update. It happens to users on lower-end systems or higher-end systems with a lot of processes running in the background while the game plays. Some models just aren’t getting their textures loaded, resulting in un-skinned people wandering the sand-choked streets.
For my money, this is much creepier than humanoid animals. I’d say it even beats out the famous exploded faces of Assassin’s Creeds past. Not even the animals are safe.
Which do you like the least? Is it animals that stand like humans, or featureless humanoids that are probably staring straight at you but you can’t really tell?