I'd buy this, but the faces...

[Hamburghini 400 GT]

I looked at some comparisons, and what the actual ♥♥♥♥ were they thinking?
The environment looks a lot better, but the characters...

While the lighting overall is way better, the lighting on the characters is horrible, there is no self-shadowing on facial details, big or small. It looks like the specular mapping on skin is missing entirely. The face and clothing textures look blurrier for some reason.

Characters just look like uncanny, matte-textured cartoons in the almost realistic-looking world around them. It's like watching two mo-cap character from the Polar Express stand around in the real world holding a conversation.

Honestly I don't think its the faces themselves that are worse, the models looks just as good if not better, and the blur might just be an illusion from very-low contrast on them. I think its the complete lack of effects on faces (some bump-mapping, specular mapping, self-shadowing, maybe ambient occlusion?) that were in the original game.

I hoped that maybe it's a bug, but looking back the problem goes back to the very first footage they released months ago, so that means that there were actually dozens of real human beings at Ubisoft staring at these god-awful faces and putting together comparison trailers with the far better original faces, FOR MONTHS and yet somehow it never penetrated their dense troglodyte skulls how ♥♥♥♥ing terrible it looks.

I would say that it's just Ubisoft's laziness, but that can't even be the case. The original 2012 characters were and still are GREAT, maybe they're not Origins or Odyssey-level realistic but they're still perfectly acceptable, there are still new games being with faces like that. They could have left them completely alone and done LESS work. Ubisoft looked at the perfectly acceptable original faces, decided to pour time and money into "remastering" them with the rest of the graphics, somehow made them worse, and then, if they're to lazy to fix the new faces, they could have just reverted to the old faces that were already made. I'm convinced that the literally dozens of people in Ubisoft that saw the faces must have just been stupid enough to think "Wee ReMesteRd thaM, So thAy must Luk GUD, Oregeon-eL FaSez is oldr, So ThaY muSt luk BAD" despite the garbage before their eyes.

IF I were to tolerate the Jimmy Neutron-quality faces, I would buy it just to finally play AC3 on PC, because the original is so poorly optimized that it has garbage performance and runs worse than every single AC game that came both before and after it. A remaster work better on modern hardware than the original right? WRONG, according to reviews, the Remaster not only features more bloom, but also MORE LAG to go with it. So you're literally buying the all-new Playdough characters ("fun to play with not to eat!), and an environment made better only by increasing the view distance and slapping an ENB mod on for twice the price of the original, what an amazing "remaster!"

I was hoping that us PC players would someday get the PS4/XBOne remaster enhancements for Rogue, and maybe a remaster of 1, but now that I know we'll just get vomit-inducing faces and the same overdone post-FX that devs squirted all over their games in 2006 to make them "next-gen" (see Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion), I think the originals are just fine, please don't ever remaster a game again Ubisoft, for the love of God and the good of the human race, don't ♥♥♥♥ing do it again.

[OG VELI]

The ambient occlusion is ruined for the characters, that's about all there is to it.