Resident Evil 6: Capcom responds to PS3 crashes, offers short-term workaround (UPDATED)

***UPDATE*** Sony has now issued a follow-up statement via Twitter to say that the patch has now been fixed. Affected gamers should delete their downloaded copy, then redownload it and all should be fine.***UPDATE ENDS***

Some PS3 owners have been suffering a crash bug at the start of Resident Evil 6, rendering the game unplayable. The bug appears to be affecting those who bought the game as a digital download as soon as it became available, and also those who pre-ordered and pre-loaded the game. Capcom has a solution, however, and has issued a statement to IGN:

"Essentially it is recognized that some consumers who downloaded the game from the PSN store pre-loaded (pre-order) or within the early hours of launch may be experiencing problems booting up the game. In short, early purchasers who tried to download the game from PSN store may have seen an error message, after they downloaded the day 1 patch. The patch has created an issue and prevents people booting the game. The temporary fix to ensure people can enjoy RE6 today as intended is to ask those people to un-install the game (only if they originally saw an error message) and re-install the game. This time they won’t be prompted to download the patch and the game will load."

Above: We could joke about how they're running better than the game, but we won't

But the fix doesn't quite make it all better. The statement continues:

"Please note however, these people won’t be able to play against disc owners on a temporary basis. We are working with SCEE (Sony) to fix this issue and a patch is imminent to fix the issue. Please note that those people who downloaded the game from the PSN store originally won’t be able to access RE.net at this time, but this will be fixed by the imminent patch. We will keep people updated as soon as we know more and thank them for their patience."

The release of Resident Evil 6 has been far from a smooth ride, with wildly varying review scores from the low 90s down to mid-40s across the gaming media. For the definitive verdict, you'll be wanting to read GamesRadar's Resident Evil 6 review, of course.

Justin Towell

Justin was a GamesRadar staffer for 10 years but is now a freelancer, musician and videographer. He's big on retro, Sega and racing games (especially retro Sega racing games) and currently also writes for Play Magazine, Traxion.gg, PC Gamer and TopTenReviews, as well as running his own YouTube channel. Having learned to love all platforms equally after Sega left the hardware industry (sniff), his favourite games include Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, Zelda BotW, Sea of Thieves, Sega Rally Championship and Treasure Island Dizzy.