[Update: Ubisoft claims that the bug is fixed, stating “You can download the update now and be able to play the game without it freezing or needing to be unplugged from Xbox Live.”]
Day one adopters of Splinter Cell: Conviction are getting a nasty surprise, as widespread reports confirm that the game has a fatal bug in the second chapter. Players are reporting that there comes a point in the game where the title will continually freeze, requiring a hard reset.
As of right now the game is being placed squarely on a title update that was released alongside the game, as only players who have downloaded the patch and connected Conviction to Xbox Live have seen the issue. Thus, many are claiming the simplest way to avoid the issue is to play it offline until a permanent solution is found.
That’s all well and good for those who don’t want to play online, but what about the folks looking forward to the game’s co-op stages? Should their single-player experience be ruined (at least temporarily) just because they want to play the game with friends? Issues like these bring up one of the major problems with mandatory updates, sometimes their side-effects can ruin a game for folks who would otherwise be left totally unaffected.
Pictured: What Splinter Cell fans want to do to Ubisoft
For those determined to play through Conviction‘s campaign and play online, Ubisoft recommends clearing the Xbox’s memory cache, which works in some circumstances. For those who don’t know how that process works, here are the steps.
1. Load to the Xbox 360 dashboard
2. Choose “System Settings”
3. Choose “Memory”
4. Highlight your hard drive
5. Press “y” for device options
6. From here just choose to clear system cache
Ubisoft has admitted that this is only a temporary fix, and they are working on a more permanent solution.
One major shortcoming of online-enabled consoles is that many companies have been able to ship bug-riddled and sometimes outright broken games thanks to the beauty of the post-launch patch. But what happens when the patches themselves are faulty and cause games to fail? A similar situation arose when Activsion and Microsoft launched the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus map pack, as releasing the maps and then a title update in the wrong order caused the new content to be rendered unplayable for over 24 hours. It was bad enough that happened with a $15 add-on, it’s even worse that this is a $60 full retail title launching today, not to mention a tent pole in Microsoft’s Spring lineup.
While games will never be perfect (there are just too many bugs to find and squash before launch), the evidence is mounting that developers and publishers are either getting lazier in their work or becoming overly reliant on “down the line” fixes to repair their mistakes. Unfortunately, in the meantime it’s the consumers who suffer; left with games they can’t play and little recourse beyond waiting for the patch that will fix current problems only to likely cause new ones.
