Another major patch has hit the Playstation 4 version of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag overnight, focusing on the overall stability of the product.
The main single-player changes here are the infinite loading bug that users have suffered with when replaying missions through the progression tracker. Others include fixing UPlay reward unlocks, community challenge rewards and Player stats being properly submitted on game quit.
However, the main focus of this patch is the multiplayer and many aspects have been stabilised quite heavily, including the fixing of crashes and fixes, a bug on Wolfpack income, and the integration of Fort Saint-Mathieu and Plantation.
There were some concerns that multiplayer progress had been reset in the game and people are starting out at level one all over again. There were also some connectivity issues, but those have now been resolved by Ubisoft.
This same patch went live on 360 and PS3 platforms over the Christmas period. It has taken additional time to get it on Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
It’s a never-ending battle, isn’t it? How did we cope before…
Here’s the patch notes in full..
Grouping Issues
We highlight these fixes that were affecting many of you. The community called them grouping or matchmaking issues)
- Fixed a bug where one group remained stuck on character selection if the other group leader quitted with the group while in lobby
- Fixed the situation where sometime two groups couldn’t join each other
Artifact Assault Balancing
In addition to these fixes, we also gathered a lot of feedback about how Artifact Assault can feel unbalanced for now, in favor of Defense. With the TU3 release, we want to re-balance the mode.
The size of the capture zone has been increased to 6 meters (from 5 meters).
This change does not alter the way capture zones work. It doesn’t change the number of elements in it or the number of access to it.
However this slightly reduces the time for the attackers to get to the capture zone. It widens the zone a little bit for them.
Abilities balancing
Teleport
Fixed a bug that prevented players affected by Knife from teleporting.
Fixed a bug that sometimes made a player become invisible when he tried to teleport while holding the artifact.
The Casting Time of Teleport can know be crafted to 3.5 / 3.15 / 2.8 seconds (from 3.5 / 3.25 / 3.00).
Teleport was too hard to counter on AC3 once crafted to its maximum, but we agreed that the crafting of the Teleport was this time too small to really make a difference.
With the updates done on other abilities, we decided to slightly increase its crafting.
Time Phase
Players affected by Time Phase are not able to climb or jump anymore.
We originally wanted to give some natural counters to the Time Phase, but this gave too much advantage to pursuers in team modes.
With this change, we want to make the ability more reliable.
Unstoppable
A 1 second delay has been added before re-opening a door/lift with unstoppable equipped.
Countering a just-closed chasebreaker is a great feeling. Unfortunately, the ability unbalanced the game too much in Artifact Assault and ruined some level design opportunities: running on a straight line became the basic strategy for carriers.
We want to reward strategic and cunning escape techniques, and we think that a player should always have the advantage for using a Chasebreaker. The Unstoppable ability was breaking this promise.
But we didn’t want to remove the perk, as we like the opportunity it gives to the game: a closed chasebreaker will now take 1 second before being reopened.
What does that mean:
– A running pursuer will miss the reopening. He will climb the door or the wall behind the lift, or miss the just used corner helper.
– How to take advantage of the perk: by slightly slowing down your run or simply by doing some zigzags in the last meters before the chasebreaker (to give it some time to reopen).
Well used, Unstoppable still lets the pursuer to go on with the chase. But Chasebreakers will now always give an advantage to the targets, and the use of the perk now has to be planned.”
Other Fixes
- Fixed a bug on the Wolfpack income
- Fixed some rare crashes and freezes
- Fixed a situation where the sign out message was not displayed when a sign out from PSN occured
- Fixed the icon for the “Professional” abstergo grade
- Fixed the situation where Abstergo rank appeared as undefined for unranked friends in Abstergo Network menu
- Applied fixes on the ladders
- Fixes the situation where you could see the animus shield during respawn
- Fixes on Wolfpack extra-objectives
- Fixed a bug where the compass disappears after Minor Hack has been used on NPCs
- Fixed a bug where the same clan could be splitted in the lobby
- A clan group remained stuck in character selection screen after the second clan was returned to search session
- Fixed a bug where player’s decoy could be seen running in mid-air in a specific location in Prison
- Fixes on the rewards and unlocks
- Fixed a bug on favorite profile set sometimes replaced, once selected in game, by another one.
- XP earned when completing a Wolfpack session has been slightly reduced.
- Teleport: Casting Time can now be crafted to 3.5 / 3.15 / 2.8 seconds.
- Fixed the situation where the title remained stuck after unplugging the Ethernet Cable and having the Character Pack installed.