Ubisoft's DRM problem is back in the spotlight. Over the weekend, an outage of Ubisoft Connect on PC left players unable to launch Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, according to reports from Kotaku and Eurogamer, even though the game advertises an offline mode.
What happened
Starting early on Saturday, July 11, players took to the game's Steam discussions to say they could no longer start it. The outage appears to have lasted roughly an hour, and it also affected other Ubisoft titles that rely on Connect. A Reddit thread about the problem picked up more than 15,000 upvotes, and many commenters said they had run into the same wall with other games using the launcher.
The frustration comes down to a broken promise. As Kotaku notes, the game's own FAQ answers the question of whether you can play offline with a plain "Yes," explaining that a one-time internet connection is needed to download the game, after which "the full main campaign of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is fully playable offline." Only live features tied to the Animus Hub, such as the store and anomalies, are supposed to require a connection. Instead, when Connect went down, the whole game went down with it.
Eurogamer explains the mechanics: on PC, Connect acts as a DRM layer on top of its social features. A copy is authenticated once through Connect, which should then let you play offline until you reinstall. That offline mode has long been known to be unreliable, and the weekend outage demonstrated the flaw again by taking the offline capability along with the servers.
Pirates could keep playing
The detail that stung most: as posters were quick to point out, players who had pirated the game and patched out the Connect requirement could keep playing right through the outage. Only paying customers were locked out. Kotaku's John Walker notes he was reporting the same basic story back in 2012 with the launch of Far Cry 3, when the launcher was still called UPlay, so this has been a recurring Ubisoft headache for well over a decade.
Ubisoft has not addressed the outage on its social channels or in the Steam and Reddit threads. Kotaku says it reached out to ask why the game was inaccessible despite the FAQ's claims and will update if the company responds.
The outage is only the latest bump for a launch that has already drawn criticism. Resynced shipped with a bundle of cosmetic microtransactions that together cost more than the game itself, tanking its early Steam reviews before they recovered. Separately, PC Gamer reports that modders have already gone to work on the release, with a Reshade preset called ACBlackFlag Natural Colors that strips out the game's heavy yellow "piss filter" and tones down oversaturated colors, alongside fixes to uncap the cutscene framerate and skip startup videos.
What this means for players
If you play Ubisoft games on PC, the takeaway is blunt: an "offline mode" that depends on the publisher's servers staying up is not truly offline. Anyone eyeing Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, or any future Ubisoft launch, should expect the Connect requirement to remain the norm, with all the risk that carries when servers stumble now or get retired later.
