Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced might have delivered one of the biggest launches in series history, but it sadly hasn’t fixed age-old issues with Ubisoft’s PC ports. Over the weekend, the DRM and social-related layer of the game, Ubisoft Connect, suffered an outage, knocking the game offline on PC.
Like all modern games from the French publisher, Resynced relies on Ubisoft Connect to function. This is true on all platforms, but the interface has more power on PC, in that it acts as a DRM layer on top of its existing functions.
Upon purchasing a Ubisoft game, a one-time internet connection is required to authenticate the copy, which is done through Connect. This should, in theory, let you play offline until the game is reinstalled.
Unfortunately, the Ubisoft Connect offline mode is known to be spotty, and that was demonstrated again over the weekend when its servers went offline. The outage appears to have lasted about an hour, but the problem is that it took the offline capability along with it, which obviously isn’t how an offline mode should work.
Upon realising they were unable to play Black Flag Resynced offline, players rushed to the Steam Forums and Reddit, where a thread about the issue has amassed over 15,000 upvotes since – a lot. Many in the comments also recalled having a similar experience with other games using Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft itself has not addressed the issue on its social channels, nor responded to the Steam and Reddit threads.
This is not the first time Resynced has run into controversy. The game set sail with a bundle of cosmetic microtransactions that, together, cost more than the price of the full game. Players were unhappy despite this approach being a Ubisoft mainstay. The game’s reviews tanked on Steam because of it, but it has since recovered.
Aside from a few remaining bugs and technical issues, which the developer is aware of, Black Flag Resynced appears to be a stable release across all platforms. In the Eurogamer review of Black Flag Resynced, Dom Peppiatt was surprised how much of the original the remake improves on, all while unnecessarily creating its own problems.
