News Assassin's Creed III: Remastered Patch 1.0.3 releasing today. Includes fixes for cutscene lighting.

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

The AC3 Remaster launched with a very noticeable visual problem. In cutscenes, the massively improved lighting model made characters look as though they were made from clay. The remaster also had heaps of bugs and some significant problems with its PC port.

• Adjusted lighting in cutscenes to improve how character faces, skins and hair look throughout the game.
• [PC] Improved support for ultra-wide resolutions
• [PC] Addressed a black screen issue when using fullscreen mode
• [PC] Addressed a problem with button mapping configurations when connecting an Xbox One controller through Bluetooth

[AC3 R] Assassin's Creed III Remastered - 1.0.3 Patch Notes | Forums

I gotta admit. I am... a mite concerned looking at this changelog. Fixing the character models in cutscenes is a very important improvement. But the remaster currently has a lot of bugs. And the massive patch makes no mention of fixing them. One hopes that they've simply neglected to mention the fixes. As someone who is rather fond of AC3, the sorry state the remaster released in has been quite depressing, especially since Ubi clearly put a lot of work into the remaster overall. Remasters shouldn't be buggier than the original version. Especially since you can't buy the original version (which was also full of crippling game breaking bugs, mind you), on Steam anymore.

 

[lashman]

well at least they're working on it ... that's something

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

Courtesy of u/jacksaints on Reddit.

Also grabbed these from YT:
PS4 Launch Version (Slightly cropped):

PS4? Patched Version. The weird bright forehead lighting is gone, and his hairline (wigline?) blends more smoothly, as does his beard.

Also, some footage of the Switch version has started appearing since people seem to have their hands on early copies.

What's particularly interesting about the Switch version is that if you look at the scene lighting design, it's clearly based on the original 7th gen version. (The lights in the theatre are white instead of golden), and there are fewer of them. But the post-processing and exterior lighting is clearly in line with the remaster since it no longer has the "pea soup" look the original did. The assets seem like a mix-n-match of the two versions.

 

[ISee]

Reminds me that the remaster came with my AC:Odyssey season pass.
I have not even installed it yet, how severe are the bugs OP? Are we talking about serious, game breaking bugs or weird animations 'n stuff?

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

I finally got round to booting up the game myself since I've been holding off on playing it until they fixed the lighting. One of the most glaring visual issues was literally the first cutscene, and they've fixed it. As you can see here, the launch version featured Desmond's father with glowing white hair, and the van interior looked like it was glowing. It didn't look metallic. ACR3 migrated to a PBR pipeline, and the results were really not good at launch whenever you had cinematic lighting involved. It looks far, far better now. This is how it should have looked at launch. Ubi should have delayed the release for a month or two. They keep messing up with these remasters. The Far Cry 3 remaster for PS4/XBO launched with a deadzone issue that was a patched, and an audio issue that wasn't patched. They've released two patches for AC3R so far, but there's no guarantee there are more patches to come.

Something I've noticed about AC3R is that many detractors didn't seem understand what was actually wrong the remaster visually. (Also, the Liberation Remaster was by another team, I believe, and that was sadly overlooked despite doing a lot of cool stuff like adding parallax mapping.) They conflated borked lighting and PBR work -- you can clearly see that a van interior shouldn't glow like that -- with very subjective criticisms of character design changes. For example, if Haytham's face is all weird and pink looking, that's a lighting mistake. They've fixed it in the patch. But his face isn't exactly the same as the original. It never will be. And that really strays into the problem many remasters face where purists are upset at change out of principle.

I have not even installed it yet, how severe are the bugs OP? Are we talking about serious, game breaking bugs or weird animations 'n stuff?

To put things in perspective, the old PC version of AC3 has a 100% reproducible game breaking bug if you use the mouse in the trading menu. The DLC had a game breaking bug if you installed all the episodes at once. AC3 was always a buggy game. The remaster largely has DIFFERENT bugs. As far as I know, they're not game breaking for the most part. It's largely non-game breaking stuff like the barrier wall in Desmond's sections rendering incorrectly, Connor not getting wet properly, Sync point music playing and not stopping, and just general inconvenient "They really should fix this," stuff. A few old version vanilla bugs crept back in, including, I think, a problem with the Charles Lee chase sequence running speed not being fast enough. Also, I believe people aiming for 100% completion found that there are some bugs that can make this troublesome. Some people on PS4 report crashing issues. No idea if that's been fixed. The PC version didn't support ultrawide and had a black screen bug if you ran it in fullscreen on some configurations, and also didn't work with wireless Xbox One controllers, but the new patch has fixed that.

In the grand scheme of things, though, those issues never gained the kind of traction that the cutscene lighting issues did. The remaster is buggier than it should be. But it is also a pretty big improvement over the original graphically, and it adds some nice gameplay improvements lifted from later games such as AC4. The crowd systems are better than the original AC3. It doesn't choke when you arrive in Boston. It doesn't have glaring game breaking bugs in the fast travel and trading system like the original did.

edit: I think the screenshots speak for themselves at times.