Launch PS3 no longer viable?

#1 Edited by Dudders (11 posts) -

Hi folks,

I'm a pc gamer who occasionally dips into consoles for the exclusives. I've had a ps3 and xbox since launch and only ever boot them up when there's something I can't get on pc.

I finally got around to playing Uncharted 3 this week, and it straight up doesn't work. Levels don't stream in, leaving Drake floating through space.

I'm completely bemused by this. I'm more than used to having games run poorly on my pc, and tweaking graphics and upgrading and all that jazz. Did I miss some announcement stating launch Ps3s were now bunk and I need to buy a slim to play the latest games? I own a ps3, I should be able to play ps3 games right?

#2 Posted by SpaceRunaway (808 posts) -

I don't know what the issue is, but it's not an across the board thing. At least, I don't have any big issues with my 60 gig PS3.

#3 Edited by jkz (3925 posts) -

'S all I have and everything works perfectly on that's weird. Sounds like a system specific issue

#4 Edited by YukoAsho (1935 posts) -

I've had my launch PS3 repaired twice, but I still play the latest games. That's another reason to stick with Sony. By the time they end repair support for the PS3, there'll be viable emulators out there for people with suitably beastly machines.

#5 Edited by Reisz (1306 posts) -

Yep, my 60gb water heater runs everything seamlessly, I think your console may be on the way out, I've heard they have had some issues with hardware failure.

#6 Edited by Dudders (11 posts) -

Thanks guys, hadn't considered that the damn thing my just be broken. I guess I'm the only person looking to but a ps3 slim with all this ps4 hype going on. Hopefully I can pick up a second hand slim on the cheep, as it sounds like I need to play The Last Of Us too.

#7 Edited by MetalGearSunny (6981 posts) -

I still have my refurbished launch PS3 and I haven't had problems with UC3.

#8 Edited by Shivoa (592 posts) -

@dudders: I think Uncharted 3 has some bugs and they never really got it down. The devs asked on their forums for people with this sort of problem to mail in their devices because they couldn't replicate it after a few months of claiming this was only an issue for people using after-market HDDs (and technically they didn't need to support users who were using non-stock PS3 and couldn't have tested for those edge cases).

My PS3 Slim 320GB (stock) was only 2 months old when I played the game and has not had any issues since. Here is how it broke for me and was the same symptoms I read over and over online as I looked into it:

The sounds stop. The music, the effects, it all goes quiet but you're still playing the game. A while later the AI breaks down or the level chunks stop loading. The first time I got to this repeatable failure the actual 'crash' was when I hit a level-load for a cutscene and rather than load into the cutscene the game went to black and sat there (10 mins later, still nothing, optical drive had spun down). It was a good 15 seconds earlier that the audio broke. I could reload my checkpoint over and over (after resetting the console to get into the game again) and see this crash. The XMB could be brought up and even the prompt to skip cutscene (pressing the button didn't actually skip anything) so it wasn't hard-crashing the system but you could never progress. I tried restarting the entire level and perfectly on cue the audio dropped out. I stopped moving, walked around in silence, died and went back to the last checkpoint. Repeatedly I could poke at this and work out where there was presumably a trigger for a data load that failed and took out the audio subsystem with it. Whenever I got to the point where that failed load was needed to transition to the cutscene then black screen.

I deleted the 1.15 patch data and played that level with the 1.0 launch patch (which also takes out the better weapon handling from Uncharted 2 that got patched in - I am amazed the devs got in fans to tell them how to go back to U2 handling because it doesn't exactly seem hard to pin down exactly what they changed to make it worse with the 1.0 handling, if you play them back to back and even without any access to the source code) and didn't get the audio fail and then crash that time but maybe I was just unlucky a few times and lucky after reverting the patch (deleting the data file for the patch). I repatched afterwards to get access to the better analogue stick curves/deadzones.

Later I saw the 'assets fail to load' stuff that wasn't flat out crashing the game. If you've ever wanted to look at the level in a console game but can't due to not having access to the mapping tools them Uncharted 3 gives you a few spots (at least for me) where the load system breaks, audio dies for a bit, and you can see large chunks of the surface of a level not load and so see the stuff as if you had fallen out of the level. Only you're in the level still, you just haven't got the chunks between you and the distant stuff that should be obscured.

So try deleting the patch file and play the 1.0 edition for a bit if you're getting something that sounds like what I (and forum chatter says quite a lot of others) have experienced. It might not solve your problem but that's how I finished the disc version of the game (European PS+ just got the digital single player version and I'm tempted to give it a go and see if the same bug is in whatever release is current one day).

#9 Posted by Dudders (11 posts) -

@shivoa: This all sounds pretty spot on. I doubt I'm looking back at U2 with rose tinted specs but I remember that game being at least well polished. The AI in 3 seems terrible, and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how that could be a hardware issue.

I'll definitely try reverting to 1.0. Thanks very much!

#10 Edited by None_Braver (79 posts) -

I have the motorstorm PS3. Once I noticed something was wrong, it wouldn't let me backup or restore so now it's just a brick. Lasting from launch until now was a pretty good run I think.

#11 Posted by Dudders (11 posts) -

Seem to be having a tad more luck with 1.0.

But if that was the famous sinking ship scene... meh.

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