Assassin's Creed Mirage players are modding the game to turn off its distracting chromatic aberration
Colour me surprised.
Assassin's Creed Mirage might take Ubisoft's historical stabathon series back to basics, but there's a newer visual effect which players want rid of.
The game's visual chromatic aberration effect is switched on by default and there's no way to turn it off - despite it being pronounced and sometimes quite distracting in certain areas.
One of the first things I did when starting to play Mirage was look for some kind of slider or toggle to tune the effect (or just disable it completely). Alas, one does not exist.
Numerous fans have raised the issue across the game's reddit and discord, enough that Ubisoft itself has apparently taken notice and acknowledged the volume of requests for a toggle option.
Eurogamer has contacted Ubisoft to see what it's official plans are.
On the one hand, the effect adds to the game's sun-drenched and heat-shimmered feel. But it frequently feels like it has been dialled up far too much, with the edges of buildings and other surfaces a mess of colours even in the centre of the screen.
"Every corner or line of every object is a blurry mess with like multi-colour fringes," wrote one fan on reddit, in a post with over 200 responses. "It's honestly hurting my eyes to play and I started feeling sick after a while."
"Dear Ubisoft Art Director, I am a VFX Supervisor working in the film industry and let me tell you that chromatic aberration is not only something that doesn't add to 'realism', but also something that we work hard to remove from every film and TV show," another fan wrote, in a separate thread with over 150 replies. "It is a lens defect/artefact that adds nothing to the user experience, only substracts."
Would the game look poorer without it? Certainly not if this 8K footage taken on PC with the effect removed is anything to go by:
For those on PC, you can pick up a mod from Nexusmods to do this for yourself. Alternatively, fans have suggested a way to edit the game's main .exe file and edit the option directly using a Hex Editor program.