I Wish I Could Replay Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

But it’s still broken on PS5

These bits of sunlight look fine in a still, but in motion on a PS5 they flicker on and off constantly. Screenshot taken by the author.

The PS5 has a fairly robust backwards compatibility system for PS4 games. The vast majority of games run just as well or better than they did on the PS4 Pro, and several higher-budget games have had new patches that unlock their framerates or add other PS5-exclusive bonus features like improved haptic support.

A tiny list of games doesn’t launch at all on the new hardware, and a slightly larger list of games will launch with noticeable problems. These latter games show a little notification on boot in the upper right corner of the screen, letting you know that you might run into some issues. The most typical issue is visual flickering — and the highest- profile game to suffer from this (and the most likely one you’ll run into given its popularity and availability) is Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.

Syndicate on PS5 is plagued with pretty bad flickering on all of its outdoor lighting. Any time you’re outside, or near a window, or near any place where sunlight might hit and bounce around, the shadows and the lighting freak out and start flickering on and off. It’s weird, because Syndicate isn’t all that technologically dissimilar from many other PS4 games in the franchise that all work fine on Sony’s current platform, and it’s also weird because Ubisoft has made no apparent attempt to fix it in spite of repeated fan outcry and speculation.

I’m honestly shocked they’ll even let people boot the game in this state.

UPDATE: Months after I wrote this — Ubisoft actually fixed the game! Original article continues below.

Here I caught what it looks like flickered to the “off” state, where all the sun lighting is gone entirely. The issue is constant and pervasive. PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

This isn’t a smaller budget game, but it is a game that probably doesn’t sell that many copies any more. Sony recently inked a deal with Ubisoft to bring a bunch of their older games to the PlayStation Plus subscription service, and fans were once again hopeful when Syndicate was absent from the initial batch. It finally appeared on the service about a week ago — but alas, that delay wasn’t so they could craft a patch. It’s still as flickery and broken as ever.