Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Now Works on PS5

Ubisoft finally did a good thing for once!

PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

Last year I wrote a sort of extended lament about a major hole in the otherwise excellent PS5 backwards compatibility system. Nearly every PS4 and PS4 Pro game will boot and run exceptionally well on the PS5, barring a tiny list of obscure games that they won’t let you play at all.

However, there are a couple of games that will launch just fine but display a little warning box in the corner that some small things might not work correctly. Many times, the problem in these games is some kind of small visual glitch or irritation that doesn’t get in the way of actually playing the title. For one major game in one major franchise, the problems were so comical and noticeable that I couldn’t believe Sony and Ubisoft actually let players try running it on their new consoles.

I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, 2015’s last hurrah for the “classic” gameplay style of the franchise before it turned into a slow death march of Witcher 3 clones. Up until a few days ago, running this game on a PS5 was a literal nightmare. The slick indoor opening sequence might lure you into a false sense of security, but all of the outdoor moments were horrifically broken.

Any time the normally awesome outdoor global illumination was displayed on the screen, it would flicker and strobe with the intensity of that old Pokémon cartoon episode that gave people seizures. It was impossible to look at or enjoy, and since the game mostly takes place outside, about eighty percent of the game was unplayable. It was also bizarre, since a more involved and performance-heavy version of this same lighting system appears in Assassin’s Creed Unity, which has run flawlessly on PS5 from day one.

Syndicate doesn’t have ray tracing or other modern tech niceties, but it still frequently looks excellent. PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

I wrote my frustrated article last October because I thought for sure it would have been fixed by then. Around that time, the game launched as part of a featured collection of Ubisoft catalog games on Sony’s PlayStation Plus service. Ubisoft had two years since the launch of the PS5 to get it sorted out. They spent time crafting full next gen updates for…