Still addicted to that Uncharted 3 Beta? I know I am, as well as a lot of our staff here, so maybe you’ll be excited to hear that new patch has rolled out to smooth out some of the hiccups seen so far.
Any beta for any game is going to have a few glitches here and there, which can cause some minor annoyances while getting your kill mode on. It is a testing phase after all, but Naughty Dog is on top of their game as usual. They’re rolling out patches to fix issues found before the end of the beta, so we can keep testing and pushing barriers to help them perfect their latest masterpiece. You might have noticed version 1.02 roll out late last night, but 1.03 is already here today to help out with some European connectivity issues. It’s currently live, and at only 30MB for the download it’s a quick update. Here’s the patch notes for version 1.03:
Technical
- Fixed an issue that prevented some SCEE (European) region players from finding a match
A pretty huge patch, right? Okay, so you were expecting more and I didn’t mean to fool you, really. There’s some big changes here from the 1.02 update, most notably the ability to stack medals while a kickback is ready has been removed, end game power plays have been removed, as well as increasing the time between each, and the hard reset crashes that often occur when quitting the game have been fixed. A lot of technical issues have been addressed as well, and full patch notes for 1.02 follow:
General
- Last place team in Three Team Deathmatch now gets placed into Observer Mode in Sudden Death
Gameplay
- Disabled the accumulation of medals to stack Medal Kickback activations. Now, if your Medal Kickback is waiting to be activated, you cannot earn more medals that count towards your Medal Kickback counter until you have activated your current Medal Kickback. Players will still be awarded medals
- Disabled the activation of a Power Play after 40 kills have been reached in Team Deathmatch
- Increase the minimum time between Power Plays activating from 30 seconds to 60 seconds
Technical
- Made updates to reduce the long Matchmaking wait times some players were experiencing
- Fixed an issue where some in-game objects would not be able to be picked up by players
- Fixed an issue where the idol in Plunder would not reset properly. The Plunder idol will now reset to one of the specified idol spawn points
- Fixed an issue in which the team with the least amount of kills could potentially win in Sudden Death even if they finished the game with less kills than the first place team
- Fixed issue with the game timer hitting 0:00 in Co-op Hunter and the match not ending properly
- Fixed instances where some players would take damage through the shield in Co-op matches
- Fixed issues which caused some players to experience trouble connecting to Multiplayer
- Fixed an issue where some PS3 consoles would hard reset under certain circumstances
- Added support for early generation HDTV sets that do not support 720p by enabling 1080i upscaling
User Interface
- Change “Found Player” notification to reflect the actual player ID in the Matchmaking screen after having completed a match
- Reduce the waiting time before the vote count down after a match from 30 seconds to 15 seconds
- Added an option in the Display menu for disabling Uncharted TV
- Sound from Uncharted TV now plays through TV output instead of the headset
- Enabled Facebook functionality that was temporarily disabled. Players can now use their PS3 linked Facebook accounts to view the online status of their Facebook friends, send invites, and join parties
- Invite notification now appears in the Multiplayer Lobby. Notification will appear as a red asterix in the Invites tab.
- Added an icon in the upper right corner of the screen to indicate that your buddy wants to High Five. Only appears when you and your buddy have created a “buddy kill” situation and the blue “buddy kill” icon appears on your screen.
- New font for in-game text and menus
Server
- Added additional data tracking to aid analysis of matches, player behavior, and other technical information by Naughty Dog
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been on Naughty Dog’s forums reporting many of these issues like crazy, so it’s great to see that their really paying attention and making improvements to what’s already a fantastic game. Of course, nothing is perfect, so there’s plenty of time to get back in there and continue testing, and practicing your Uncharted skills. Also, you’ll find upon logging in that the Free For All mode has been removed, and replaced with the ever popular Plunder mode. You may have been missing Plunder in the beginning of the beta, which was originally scheduled to be available then, but saw major issues and was promptly removed for fine tuning. Now it’s time to go find out if the fan favorite has returned with its former glory intact. If there are more changes you’d like to see by the time Uncharted releases in November, let us know below, and of course let Naughty Dog know too!
