Assassin's Creed Shadows' first hotfix addresses stability issues and a photo mode crash

The launch of the new Assassin's Creed has gone pretty well, but there are always things to do.

The first Assassin’s Creed Shadows hotfix is live, and in what I have to imagine is seen as good news by developers, the list of fixes is remarkably small.

Update 1.0.1, as it’s known, does the following:

Stabilization – Fixed some global issues
[PS5] Fixed a Photo mode issue that could cause a crash when fetching photos to display on the world map.
[PC] Fixed a Photo mode issue that could cause a crash when taking a photo.

Admittedly, the relatively small list of fixes is probably down at least in part to the fact that “some global issues” isn’t the most detailed breakdown of all time: One thing I’ve learned in life is that “some” can mean a little or a lot, depending on the circumstances of the moment and how far things have spiralled out of hand.

On the other hand, Shadows has been out for nearly a week now and there really have been no crises at all, which is something of a notable accomplishment in its own right given how often games seem to set sail and immediately take a hard left onto the rocks these days. No news really is good news, sometimes.

Despite the small number of fixes, it’s a fairly beefy update in terms of bytes, clocking in at just a hair over 7 GB on PC. PS5 owners somehow get away with a relatively trim 1.4 GB download, while Xbox Series X/S and Mac owners will be hit to the tune of 9 GB.

Ubisoft recently said Shadows is the second-biggest launch in Assassin’s Creed history, a ranking it qualified further by noting the number-one game on the list, Valhalla, was released amidst the “perfect storm” of the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was home and bored and thus playing a whole lot more videogames than they used to. Take away those externalities, in other words, and maybe Shadows is the real big dog—or at least, maybe it could be.

Maybe yes, maybe no, and really, it doesn’t matter—I’m not going to quibble about the moment-to-moment vagaries of the cold, hard reality in which we live, or read too much into the fact that Ubisoft has thus far talked up big numbers of players but not said much about sales. I am, however, going to be paying very close attention to Ubisoft’s next financial call, which will happen in May: That’s when we should get a closer look at the Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ numbers that really matter, and what sort of impact they might have on Ubisoft’s future fortunes.