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

‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ Patch 4 Coming Monday

It would be a massive understatement to say that Assassin’s Creed Unity under-performed last month, and has continued to be in the recovering phase of its post-launch process. Several patches and updates have been released by Ubisoft, which implemented fixes to improve overall performance and remove bugs, like the one that makes faces disappear. When the developer/publisher last discussed the upcoming update – the fourth patch, in fact – it said that most of the remaining fixes would be dealt with.

To those that bought the game at launch and were unable to fully enjoy the game, this can only be seen as good news. Or more good news since Unity players are also getting free games and DLC.

Fortunately, the wait for patch 4 won’t be a long one, as Ubisoft revealed on its Live Updates community page that the patch is set to release on December 15 for all platforms. Come Monday, players may finally be able to get back to spending time with Arno or their fellow co-op assassins.

“We expect that Patch 4 will be released next week on Monday, December 15 across all platforms. This patch will address issues with stability and performance as well as online matchmaking and connectivity (among other fixes and improvements).”

Down in the comments, Ubisoft partially reassured that the coming fixes will “help meet peoples expectations,” while neglecting to specify how. The specifics about the contents of the patch and what it aims to fix won’t be completely known until a detailed list is posted the day of the patch’s release.

A bit of a curious move, since last week a small list of ‘top priority issues’ revealed that the dev seeks to resolve game crashing, companion app problems, and Error CE-34878-0. That particular error has become quite the nuisance to PS4 player who have experienced game freezes and crashes after loading their save. Perhaps the company doesn’t want people to see what fixes are/aren’t coming, and suffer more backlash from unhappy gamers? Only time will tell.

Its been a little over a month since Unity debuted and introduced its problems to the world. After what will be four patches, it would be incredibly unfortunate if some people still ran into game breaking bugs. Hopefully, after the 15th, we can all move on to another game.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is out now for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Details regarding the free games will come at a later, currently unknown, date.

Source: Ubisoft

‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ Patch 4 Coming Monday

‘The Crew’ Launch Trailer Highlights Open World Racing

This year has featured many highly anticipated games, some of which came from Ubisoft. After a strong start to the year, Ubisoft caught a lot of heat for the problems that came with the Assassin’s Creed Unity launch last month. After a better showing with Far Cry 4’s launch, and numerous updates and fixes to Unity, it looks like Ubisoft may be back in the good graces of gamers. And just in time too, since The Crew gets its release this week.

In preparation for the launch of The Crew, Ubisoft has released a new trailer for the game that shows off some of the excitement and locations players can expect while playing.

The trailer opens with a Ford Mustang GT rising out of the desert and driving full-bore across the sand. A city rises up from the ground, encasing the Mustang GT in an urban cage. The artistic change from sand to asphalt signifies the game’s ability to provide almost any type of terrain possible to players in a seamless, open-world environment.

In The Crew, players will face off against each other as they race through city streets, back-country dirt roads, highways and open fields. Many of the major cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City have been recreated for gamers to enjoy and explore. Players will have access to dozens of vehicles, which they can upgrade and tune to their heart’s desire.

Over the last couple weeks, gamers have had the opportunity to participate in closed and open betas of The Crew. While players were fairly limited on what they could do in the betas, they were treated to a few different types of races, as well as the full open world. Many gamers took the opportunity to drive from one end of the map to the other to test the size of the world and were pleased with the 1900 square miles of drivable area.

After having been postponed not once but twice, gamers have high hopes for The Crew. Ubisoft has promised players that the game is ready to go and won’t be like the launch of Assassin’s Creed Unity. With the holiday buying season in full force, there’s no doubt the team at Ubisoft is working tirelessly to make sure they make good on that promise.

The Crew will be available on December 2, 2014 for PC, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

‘The Crew’ Launch Trailer Highlights Open World Racing

Ubisoft Details More ‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ Fixes

Although there was an initial burst of excitement for Assassin’s Creed Unity heading into its release last Tuesday, that enthusiasm sure dissipated quickly. Gamers were hit left and right with many problems, from significant performance issues to matchmaking problems to some things that are hard to even explain.

And while it took a while for Ubisoft to respond, the developer has since shown a concerted effort to improve their major fall release. They created a blog dedicated specifically to Assassin’s Creed Unity updates and have been actively providing AC Unity owners with new information both about upcoming patches and known issues with the game.

This weekend, Ubisoft revealed what’s in the pipeline for Assassin’s Creed Unity update #3, which looks to be one of the game’s most substantial yet. Whereas past updates and fixes were focused on ironing out the little things, this upcoming update addresses known issues with gameplay, AI, and matchmaking in co-op.

Ubisoft splits their update into five key categories and outlines some of the fixes that are coming players’ way, but those aren’t necessarily the only fixes on the way for the patch. Since the developer doesn’t yet have a release date for the update it’s possible that more could be added. Still, see the current list of fixes below:

• Gameplay: this includes bugs like Arno getting stuck on certain areas of the map (including a few more hay carts), problems with getting into/out of cover, character animation bugs, and general camera problems


• AI Crowd: in this category are problems with NPC animations, crowd events, and crowd stations, NPC navigation issues, as well as bugs related to NPCs detecting Arno’s activities in various situations


• Matchmaking Connectivity: this covers a number of issues related to co-op play, including bugs with joining games in-progress and problems that happen during host migration


• Menus HUD: fixes in this category will address missing details in certain menus, problems with some of the mission objective and co-op update pop-ups, localization inconsistencies, as well as some of the issues with menus and pop-ups overlapping each other


• General Stability: this includes fixes for a number of crash situations we’ve identified in both campaign and co-op modes.

What isn’t in update 3 are any fixes that address the game’s frame rate issues on next-gen consoles. Mileage seems to vary by user, but a large contingency of gamers has reported significant frame rate drops while playing Unity. In some cases, those drops occur during congested open world portions, but some have even reported problems with the game’s cutscenes. It also appears that the Xbox One version of the game runs better than the PS4 version, for whatever that’s worth.

All in all, there’s a good-not-great update on the way, one that is sure to alleviate some of gamers’ bigger issues with AC Unity. However, the fact that we are now looking at a third patch and Ubisoft is still talking about future updates speaks volumes about the kind of condition in which the game launched. Lucky for them two other major games also had release day problems.

It’s somewhat comforting that Ubisoft is trying to keep gamers aware of what they’re working on and letting them voice their frustrations, but with a little more development time maybe this all could have been avoided. We’ll keep you posted when Ubisoft reveals a date for this next patch.

What issues would you like to see addressed in this or a future update? Has the poor performance of the game convinced either not to purchase or to return AC Unity?

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Source: Ubisoft

Ubisoft Details More ‘Assassin’s Creed Unity’ Fixes