Haven’t touched an Ubisoft game except for DRM-free ones on gog in about 15 years.
I’m not condoning it but this is another instance of where pirates have better results:
Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic [pcgame-Multi5] [Tntvillage]
You’ll be able to install it, I’d imagine. You probably will not be able to buy or download or install DLC directly from inside the game itself, which is a thing that apparently a lot of UBI games do. (Or maybe they’re going full idiot UBI. Who knows?)
I was assuming the DLC phones home to see if you’re licensed and they’re turning off those servers too. Notice that the console versions are generally not listed as having the DLC go away.
> Additionally, the installation and access to DLC will be unavailable.
I don’t know, that sounds like because they’re turning off the DRM validation servers, you won’t be able to install it period. This had extremely onerous DRM people hated when released, so it may still have that wicked Starforce or whatever it was they saddled it with.
I’m with triggercut: Based on the phrasing for the rest of the chart, I interpret that sentence as “installation and access to [aka ‘using’] DLC will be unavailable”.
Seems like that would be something they would clear up ASAP.
I’m most disturbed I guess by ‘breaking’ Anno 2070 though. I’m curious if the ARRC mod adds enough that the loss of the online garbage doesn’t hamper the game. And yes, I know it is silly to worry about a game I’m not actively playing and can’t even remember the fine details about.
Ubi has kept Ghost Recon Wildlands alive, and moved almost all DLC items into the crates you earn by doing daily challenges. If you get duplicate items from the crates, you get cash shop credits instead. Play long enough and you can get 99% of the crate/shop items they ever added without spending any extra money.
But a couple of months ago, the system went down completely for a few days. When it came back up, all player stats had been wiped, and it now takes anywhere from a few seconds to an hour or more to establish a server connection.
No server connection means no shop, no co-op, no daily challenges, no PvP (which was so dead they made the character skin you can earn via PvP free to everyone about April 2022). Single player still works without a connection, but you can’t earn the coolest toys.
Official response on the stat wipe was, “Sorry about that, they will never be restored.” Semi-official comment on the server connection problem is “Keep trying, it works, so we’re not doing anything more about it.”
This makes perfect sense if you are Ubisoft. The game generates very little revenue despite thousands still playing every day. The dev team has been broken up literally for years. I’m not sure they even can fix it.
I finished the game shortly after all this happened (by finished, I mean completed the campaign & played to max level in normal and perms-death mode). So I have all the cool toys & avoided most of this problem. Lucky me.
But they put it on sale again during the current Steam sale! Now that seems nearly fraudulent. Ubi is squeezing the last drops of cash from Wildlands’ dessicated corpse, while knowing that many of the major features are not available to new players.
Tl;dr: Fuck Ubisoft & any single-player game that requires an always-on Internet connection.
Decommissioning of Ubisoft (September 2023)
I think they remastered that too…but the remaster isn’t on Steam.
Yes, there’s an Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD and an Assassin’s Creed Liberation Remastered. The former is older and is basically the straight port of the Vita build. The Remastered version has higher-res textures and some control changes.
The HD version is being de-listed and apparently will not work after the authentication server goes down even if you’d previously purchased it.
I’d love to see the decision-making tree on how this came to be for Ubi. Like, what are they getting or saving in operational costs and efficiency versus what they’re losing in just getting pounded in the media and social media spaces for this set of decisions?
It’s probably not nearly as interesting as you’re thinking. This looks like a fairly standard sunset notice:
“Hey, we need to sunset these games/services.”
“Okay, this won’t be popular. Do we have messaging?”
“We have this chart and are finalizing an additional reactive statement.”
“Got it. Let’s provide that update in the next weekly call. Hopefully we have the reactive approved in time but at least all the other stakeholders can align on rolling out the sunset notice.”
You forgot the step where marketing shows their budgetary costs and operational expenses for rolling out “Assassin’s Creed 15th Anniversary” campaigns throughout the 2022 fiscal year that are going to get absolutely derailed by the sunset announcement.
At the places I’ve worked at, the Product or Brand Manager of the franchise was usually the one that is bringing up the sunset notice of the older games in the first place. The scenario you have above has only really come up if someone just became the new Brand/Product Manager without experience in this stuff.
Why do they need to disable this game now?
Sure. But in this case for the Product or Brand manager for AC, the question I have is whether the cost savings in operations for sunsetting and disabling game services is worth the cost of the raft of seriously terrible publicity that UBI is taking as a company right now over this set of decisions. And if I were at the director level above that product or brand manager, that’s certainly the cost/benefit analysis that I’d like to have on my desk ASAP.
Time to find a noDVD perhaps?
Shame that successfully combating piracy with the rise of digital downloads has mostly eliminated the need for sites like GameCopyWorld who have almost faded away from digital rot. They did/do serve a valuable purpose now.