Assassin’s Creed Freezing – Ubisoft’s Response

The PlayStation 3 version of Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed has been plagued by freezing problems since it was released last week.

Not ideal for any game but especially not for for a ‘Marmite game' - one that you love or hate (not one you melt down and spread it on toast). SPOnG’s Adam quite liked it, as you can see from his review of the 360 version of the game, though it wasn’t the ground-breaking blockbuster that all the pre-launch hype had lead us to believe it would be.

Ubisoft is aware of the freezing problems and is currently working on a fix that is set to arrive with the upcoming PS3 firmware update 2.01. SPOnG has spoken with Ubisoft in the UK this morning and we will confirm the ETA on this as soon as we get the word from Ubisoft's techies later today.

In the meantime, annoyed gamers across the Internet seem to suggest that you do one or both of two things to ensure that the game doesn’t freeze up on you.

Firstly, keep the Information Board disabled on the Cross Media Bar and secondly, ensure that you are logged out of the PlayStation Network.

From the look of these utterly unofficial pieces of advice one could be lead to believe that the fault lies with the PlayStation 3's recent 2.0 upgrade. The upgrade has already caused uproar by not including an in-game Cross Media Bar (XMB).

However, there is no conclusive evidence - certainly not from Internet chatter - that this is the case.
Bear in mind that there are also three different PS3 hardware configurations out in the wild: the original, which contained the Emotion Engine (EE) and Graphics Synthesiser (GS) hardware; the second iteration, which saw the EE removed; the third iteration - whether this has complicated the QA processes within Ubisoft is a matter of conjecture.

It, however, would be a stunning failure of process for any console game to have passed both software developer games test and platform holder approval only to pop out of the end with a flaw that only appeared following a hardware upgrade in the form of a tweak.