Ubisoft’s ‘Tetris’ on PS4 Has Problems

In the past eight months, games publisher and developer Ubisoft has been hit with several controversies that have depleted player faith and harmed the company’s reputation.

MMO racer The Crew was delayed for several weeks in order for the development team to work on improvements and despite promises from Ubisoft of a stable launch, the game did suffer from issues upon release. Ubisoft’s flagship title Assassin’s Creed Unity has also suffered game-breaking bugs and glitches (some more hilarious than others) and the company’s attempts to fix them have made things worse in some cases.

Unfortunately, as the company works to fix its broken line up, yet another of their games has shown issues at launch. This time it’s glitches in Tetris Ultimate that prevent players from slotting the iconic shapes into line properly.

The problem was noted in a video by IGN‘s Greg Miller. To demonstrate the problems Miller fired up the game from scratch on PS4 and the issues began before he’d even begun to play; even the Ubisoft logo stuttered and shuddered and that’s the very first screen of the game.

Then, the lag continued in Tetris Ultimate‘s menus, as attempts to select the gameplay mode proved difficult. And, when Miller finally got into the game, slotting Tetris Ultimate‘s blocks into place was nigh on impossible as the game registered controller inputs too late meaning that blocks often landed where he didn’t want them to.

Attempting to get to the root cause, Miller and video co-host Colin Moriarty explained that Miller had previously had problems with PlayStation zombie exclusive Dead Nation. The two suggested that it could be something to do with the 2000 friends that Miller has on PSN.

Following the publishing of the video, the team behind Tetris Ultimate reportedly visited them and did conclude that the problem was Miller’s friends list. However, as the duo also explained that they also witness the problem when they tested the game on a PS4 debug unit that wasn’t connected to the Internet (or Miller’s PSN account), it seems that the problem may be far more serious than just having too many friends.

Not only this but Miller and Moriarty note that these lag problems were present when the Ubisoft development team previewed Tetris Ultimate with them a month before release. In other words, the team behind the game was well aware of the issues and either did nothing about them or didn’t work hard enough to find a fix.

As few people seem to have reported the problem (at least not on the scale of AC Unity‘s issues) and it only appears to be present in Tetris Ultimate on PS4 (and not in the Xbox One version), it’s possible a fix was put on the back burner to deal with other more pressing issues. But either way it’s unacceptable as there are some Tetris Ultimate players – even if it’s only a small number – who are unable to play the game the way it was meant to be played.

Considering that Tetris has been released on just about every other platform at some point in time (and it works fine on all of those) you’d think that Ubisoft would have gotten it right on one of the most powerful consoles around. They do know about the problem (and have acknowledged the bug publicly, which means there’s no backing out now) so hopefully Tetris Ultimate will be the latest Ubisoft game to receive a patch.

Sources: IGN, RPS

Ubisoft’s ‘Tetris’ on PS4 Has Problems