@vahndaar Right, it's just disgraceful at this point. The game is ridiculously badly optimized, riddled with gameplay bugs (of what I read, since I can't actually play the game at all due to the flickering of the smoke), and seems like it's in alpha state, not even beta, let alone release.

It seems that rather optimizing their game, they just upped the system requirements and left it as is. But even so, choppy framerates are all over the place, even on high performing machines. Nobody is spared [insert Ubisoft evil laughter here].

Good luck with the refund request, mate. I opened a ticket 4-5 days ago with no response from the support still. It's like they are non-existent. I've seen guys mentioning that they've been waiting for 2-3+ weeks and still got no response.

The game would have been slaughtered and absolutely demolished on the steam comment section. Ubisoft must have known fully well what unfinished product they release because they released it on the two platforms where there is no comment section at all - Uplay and EpicGames (and avoided all others carefully).

Oh, right, let me go ahead and post my system specs for troubleshooting purposes and to possibly allow their team to pinpoint and replicate the issue.

GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
CPU: i7-6700 3.4 GhZ
RAM: 16 GB
Nvidia Driver: 457.51
Windows 10 Pro of 2016

The flickering is exactly as shown on the photo of the post. It is multi-colored and affects smoke effects caused by the fire (that would be the candles and torches in the very first scene of the game). You see it in the very first room you start the game (if you look to the left or right). If you take a few steps forward and go through the door it gets even worse. It's panda-bear-flicker-madness at that point, so I have to turn off the game.

These flicker effects are so widespread that the game is completely unplayable. Personally, I couldn't take more than 20 seconds of that.

I do hope the Ubisoft team would take this problem seriously. I've tried altering the presets to the lowest setting but it did not help. I tried running the .exe file in all sorts of compatibility modes but it did not help.

It is the first time I see this effect happen on any game so my ideas of fixing it are not vast. Hopefully Ubisoft will release a patch to address the occurrence.

Experiencing the same thing here. Updating Windows 10 to a very specific version not an option due to work related constrictions.

I hope Ubisoft will fix it at some point. It's been a month since the occurrence was first reported (on launch) and the game is still unplayable.