Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced players on PC encountered significant issues over the weekend, finding themselves unable to play the game due to an outage affecting Ubisoft Connect. This incident highlighted persistent problems with Ubisoft's PC game infrastructure, even for titles with offline capabilities.
Like many modern Ubisoft titles, Black Flag Resynced requires Ubisoft Connect to function. On PC, this service acts as a digital rights management (DRM) layer in addition to its social and connectivity features. While a one-time internet connection is typically necessary for initial authentication, the expectation is that games can be played offline thereafter until reinstallation. However, the recent Ubisoft Connect server issues demonstrated that its offline mode is unreliable.
The outage, which lasted approximately one hour, rendered the game unplayable for many, including those attempting to access its offline mode. Reports of this problem quickly surfaced on platforms like Steam Forums and Reddit, with one thread amassing over 15,000 upvotes and numerous comments from players sharing similar experiences with other Ubisoft titles. Ubisoft has not yet issued a public statement regarding the incident.
This is not the first point of contention for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. The game previously faced player backlash due to its cosmetic microtransactions, the cumulative cost of which exceeded the base game's price. This led to a dip in its Steam reviews, though the score has since recovered. Despite these controversies and some lingering technical issues that the developer acknowledges, the game is generally considered a stable release across platforms. A review noted that while the remake improves upon many aspects of the original, it also introduces its own set of unnecessary complications.