Now Assassin’s Creed III Gets A Huge Day One Patch

Last week Medal Of Honor: Warfighter received a huge ‘Day One’ patch that fixed, well, pretty much everything. Rumours from Eurogamer suggested that publishers could get Sony and Microsoft to certify a game that would otherwise fail their quality checks if there was a day one patch.

“Microsoft & Sony will give you a waiver if you promise to have the Day 0 patch, ask nicely, are a big game, and pay a little,” said BioWare employee Manveer Heir on Twitter.

Hey, look, Assassin’s Creed III has a ginormous day one patch! What are the chances of that?

We will not list all of the patch notes because they contain spoilers, but here are a few choice fixes:

  • Mission “BRIDEWELL PRISON”, Player could remain stuck prison cells
  • Mission “SOMETHING TO REMEMBER”, fixed a bug where the screen could become all white or black for the remainder of the mission if the player set his brightness option to anything else than the default value
  •  Mission “FEATHERS AND TREES” – Mission would not continue if the player doesn’t follow the expected path
  • Fixed various occurrences of missing sounds
  • Camera could remain stuck after the player being respawned

Ubisoft highly recommend gamers download the patch ‘to optimise your player experience’.

The bad news is that the patch notes given by Ubisoft seem to indicate that all of the fixes are for the single player campaign. Anyone without an Internet connection is once again going to be paying out for a game with plenty of bugs.  Sorry, I mean a game that is not ‘optimised for your player experience’.

Source: Ubisoft Forums

26 Comments

  1. As I’m not buying the game I read the full patch notes… There’s many, many mission breaking glitches in there that could make progress through the single player difficult.

    Odd that it ‘optimises’ the player experience when some of them seem essential to the player experience.

    I think everyone expects there’s a bunch of stuff thrown up in final testing for multiplayer that requires a fix, because realities dictate the code has gone to the printing press by that time, but to see so many single player missions broken is disappointing. I hope Microsoft/Sony’s fee to wave on through quality issues is high enough that it doesn’t become the norm.
    Installs and large patches are a right ball ache when all you want to do is fire up your new purchase and get in there, it’s a very poor user experience.

    • Well it costs $40,000 to put up a patch for PS3/360, so I guess it would be even more for them to pass a game which doesn’t deserve it.

  2. OH FFS! Can we bloody stop with day one fecking patches! Games should not be released if they need a fecking day one patch! I’m starting to get fed up of them. All i want to do when i get a new game is shove into the PS3 and play it, not wait a few minutes to half an hour to a fecking hour on day one. Why don’t they just release the game in it’s beta form and then patch it as it seems every major developer would prefer to do that. :(

  3. Sony and Microsoft should not allow this crap. Back in the day certification used to mean something…

    • Unfortunately, it won’t stop. If SONY make a stand and don’t accept it then MICROSOFT will release it first, and that will cause uproar.
      SONY come out and say “We don’t want to release a broken game. We did this for your benefit”.

      UPROAR!!!!!

      Personally I wish this did happen. But the majority of gamers probably don’t. They want the game yesteryear.

      • In a way, thought, we are to blame. If we tolerate these bad habits then they’ll just keep doing them.

      • *though

      • Exactly… that goes for anything from online/season passes to IAP, DRM to bug fixing.

        Whatever a significant enough number of people tolerate… will happen.

      • Yip we are to blame but we on TSA don’t represent the average gamer. The average gamer doesn’t care (or even notice) a day one patch. They just want the game. They don’t read this stuff and these big companies know it.

  4. Optimize your player experience = Play the game.

  5. As long as that game is playable from day one, I don’t mind day one patches.

  6. I normally really like Ubisoft, so I hope we won’t see this happen with Far Cry 3 as well. It’s kinda weird they knowingly released their biggest game of the year in an unfinished state.

    • Given Far Cry 2’s game breaking barge mission that’s still unpatched I hope Ubi are more on the ball.

  7. Day 1 patches are ok if it’s just a few minor issues, but fixing multiple game-breaking bugs is taking the piss. I always wonder if it took them this long to notice the major bugs such as these, how many little bugs are there left in there. Oh well, I’ve just got to hope the PC version doesn’t have as many game-breaking bugs as the PS3/360 code.

  8. ” A Huge Day One Patch” is a bit of an exaggeration. I put the game in last night and was prompted to download 1.01 which was 31mb. 30 seconds later the game up and running. Now I’m not arguing that it’s not annoying or that it would be nice to have a game that worked on day 1 without a patch but I was hardly huge.

    • Perhaps not huge in size but the implications seem pretty huge for sp gamers without a connected ps3.

  9. In the toilet today I pulled my pants down – it optimised my defecating experience.

    • flushed with success were ye? ;)

  10. Glad i just picked mine up, the patch can download whilst i am doing the bed time routine, however, if i didnt have an internet connection/ps3 connected to net (like a lot of my old friends) i would be pissed at the game not working

    • “whilst i am doing the bed time routine”

      What an amazingly polite way to say “having sex”. ;)

      • lol, actually it is more stick the 5 year old in the bath, read the bed time story…

        Your way sounds loads better though :D

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