Ubisoft unveils massive Assassin’s Creed III patch

In what might be the most bizarre celebration of Thanksgiving to date, Ubisoft has revealed the details of a huge upcoming patch for its newly-released adventure epic Assassin's Creed III.

Thematically speaking, there are legitimate ways to link Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed game with the Thanksgiving holiday. After all, Assassin’s Creed III (mostly) stars a half-Native American living in the colonies immediately prior to, during and following the Revolutionary War. Given that American schoolchildren are taught that Thanksgiving started when Native Americans generously aided the starving pilgrim population by offering food and supplies during the harsh winters seen in what is now the Northeastern United States, it sorta makes sense to link Assassin’s Creed III to the holiday, no?

Regardless of whether or not that makes any sense to you, that’s exactly what Ubisoft is doing. As of this morning, Assassin’s Creed III has received a gratis 9MB update, dubbed the “Assassin’s Creed III Thanksgiving Patch.” Full details have been uploaded to the official Ubisoft forums, and it should be mandatory reading for anyone still working their way through Connor’s adventure. Not that this patch adds much in the way of novel content to extend the game’s shelf-life, but given the number of glitches and major bugs seen in the game once it launched, there are pretty solid odds that this patch may either fix an issue you’re currently experiencing, or may prevent you from experiencing issues in the future.

That said, we’d still like to highlight a few key fixes, either because we’ve experienced these problems ourselves, or because they amend rather serious issues. Have a look:

Multiplayer

Multiplayer Modes
- ASSASSINATE – Instances where it was possible for players to kill players that were not their target in Assassinate have been corrected. 
- DEATHMATCH – In Fort Wolcott, fixed a bug where players would remained stuck on warmup screen. 
- MANHUNT – The cooldown boosts for loss streak bonus are not permanently active for all abilities during a manhunt round anymore.

Multiplayer Ladders
- Players are now granted Abstergo points normally even if one or several players get the idle state at the end of the session (The idle players do not get any Abstergo points)

Multiplayer Misc
- Changing the ability set three times during a game can no longer reset the ability’s cooldown. 
- It is no longer possible for players to get up and perform a kill under certain conditions while they’re vulnerable. 
- Transitions to join Multiplayer sessions after an invite now work correctly. 
- Warm up games are no longer interrupted when the host player leaves. 

Singleplayer

Platform: All
Location: Epilogue
- Animus Synching tutorial, forced subtitles on off-camera voice, so that the player doesn’t think the game is frozen

Location: Frontier
- Fixed a bug where players could respawn and desync immediately in a loop if he died in the Valley Forge region before unlocked. Also patches players which savegame are already stuck
- Fixed a bug where the player could respawn under the ground in a loop, in two different places
- Plugged a hole in the ground where players could fall through the map

Location: Global
- A text message is now visible on-screen at all times while a skippable cinematic is playing
- Added a failsafe to the animals navigation, to prevent them from getting stuck
- Disabled special attacks with heavy weapons on animals
- Fixed a bug where the player could not finish enemies on ground if they were thrown in deep snow

Location: Menus
- Added a wait message for some cases where the game could appear frozen if some servers are unresponsive
- Fixed a bug where the player’s friends’ Uplay wall would get spammed by previously completed missions and sequences when the player reloads his game

Platform: PS3
- Westpoint DLC – mission “A SPY AMONG US”, fixed a bug where required characters would disappear and not come back if the player went too far from them
- Westpoint DLC – fixed a bug where the player could fall through the map by going through the gate while in conflict

Platform: Xbox 360
Location: Menus
- Removed Benedict Arnold icon from the map legend

As you can see, even as a truncated list of its most important fixes this Thanksgiving Patch changes quite a bit about Assassin’s Creed III. While our review (and the majority of other reviews) were quite positive about Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed title, few would argue that the game lacked a certain amount of technical polish. An unfortunately large number of the problems listed in this Thanksgiving Patch would actually cause the game to completely lock up or would cause a set of circumstances within the game making it impossible to progress the plot or extricate your character from certain situations and areas. Thus, this patch should be seen as something of a mea culpa: Ubisoft is quite thankful that you’ve purchased their latest triple-A franchise title and would like to reward your loyalty by improving the quality of their game. It would have been preferable for Ubisoft to have fixed these problems prior to the release of Assassin’s Creed III, but that ship sailed a few weeks ago, so this patch seems a “better late than never” effort.

Luckily, free is a very good price for that sort of thing.