BioWare testing Dragon Age PS3 patch

By Tom Bramwell Published 6 May, 2010

Game should "play nicer" with 3.3 firmware.

BioWare believes it has come up with a way to make Dragon Age "play nicer" with the latest PlayStation 3 firmware.

After the 3.3 firmware started causing the game to crash for some players, BioWare "pulled additional programmers from the main game teams to help on this and have been running several parallel investigations non-stop to find potential solutions from our end, as well as continuing to work with Sony for both dev support and other options," according to developer Fernando Melo, writing on the official forum.

"Thanks to the great feedback on here and from those folks we've been in contact with directly, the team now thinks we've been able to find a code-side workaround from our end to patch DA to play nicer with firmware 3.3, which was one of our investigation threads.

"At this time I still don't have a date estimate for a DA patch with this fix however, and unfortunately we do not believe there is a manual workaround for this (one of the other threads we're investigating).

"We are currently testing this proposed code change as I write this, and if successful the next step will be for it to go into EA's publisher side certification testing. They are aware of the importance of this and will give this priority in the queue of titles/patches across EA. And once that clears, it will go into Sony cert testing."

Dragon Age: Origins is available on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

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About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (11) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • M_of_the_sys #1 2 years ago

    When everyone was complaining about this crash after the FW update, I wasn't getting. Only started getting crashes about a week after the FW update. Bought GOW3 and FFXIII to keep me occupied until a patch is released. It's a shame because I was really getting into DA.

  • Dragul #2 2 years ago

    Great... Still weeks/months away... I'm so fucked! The game crashs every 10 or 20 minutes. :(

    I already have near 40 hours on the PS3, I'm not changing to the 360 or the PC on this...

  • GamesConnoisseur #3 2 years ago

    What is the exact problem that firmware caused? And is it ONLY DA that affected? Why I ask is if there is a potential for complications with some PS3 games released some times ago and/or future FW patches would causes issues?

    I don't want to bung in say Haze or Lair in my phat PS3 to realise it's not going to be smooth!

    /Used these two games as would likely not have been spotted as quickly as MGS4

  • Goodfella #4 2 years ago

    I don't understand, my PS3 (latest firmware) version plays flawlessly so why does it crash for a lot of others since the 3.3 fw update?

  • M_of_the_sys #5 2 years ago

    @Goodfella

    It was right after I made a comment like that, that it started happening to me. Admittedly I haven't looked into other people's problems much. Whether they're on a certain PS3 model or anything like that. I just moved onto another game until it's resolved.

  • Nazo #6 2 years ago

    Apart from the issues caused by the patch is the game generally stable? I'm quite tempted by it but don't want another Fallout 3 situation where an otherwise brilliant game is ruined by bugs and glitches.
    At least Bioware seem to making an effort to fix it though which is already an improvement.

  • Goodfella #7 2 years ago

    @Nazo

    Stable? I would say so, BUT, I wasn't happy with the framerate at all. It's weird though, it's not a case of it slowing down a lot but there is this constant stutter/jerkiness when moving, and I mean constant, especially noticeable when panning the camera left or right. It's horrible, to me, to be honest.

  • danathjo #8 2 years ago

    I still wish I had the time to play this :(

  • Dragul #9 2 years ago

    The problem is when you finish a hard battle and the game stop responding before you can save... :(

  • CptSupermarket #10 2 years ago

    I didn't have any crashes at first either after the fw update. The more hours i log on DA tho, the more frequent the crashes get, tho i can still play for about 1 1/2 to 2 hrs per crash currently.

  • dnimkrad #11 2 years ago

    mine has just started crashing but its been twice in just over an hour. i thought i had wholly avoided the problem as mine was a new save as i only just got the game, and one of the workarounds they had suggested was a new save, but here we are 15 hours in to my new save file and alistair has been running in to a door for the past 5 minutes. hoping the patch is quick to materialise