Ubisoft’s remake of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag has hit new heights on Steam, but there’s still a big problem when it comes to the offline mode.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced appears to have gone down well with players and critics alike, but its launch hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing.
Some players have bemoaned the amount of day one microtransactions not present in the deluxe edition, but an ongoing problem with Ubisoft PC ports also struck over the weekend.
Like other Ubisoft titles, Black Flag Resynced requires a one-time connection to Ubisoft’s ecosystem, Ubisoft Connect, in order to work. However, on PC, the connection to Ubisoft Connect doubles as a DRM (digital rights management) check, in order to prevent piracy.
Ubisoft claims the Black Flag Resynced campaign is ‘fully playable offline’ on all platforms once this initial connection is completed, unless you’re trying to access live content related to the Animus Hub.
However, as reported by players, this offline functionality didn’t work on PC when the Ubisoft Connect servers went down over the weekend – stopping people from playing the game entirely.
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The service went down briefly on Saturday night (July 11) and players on Steam shared their woes on Reddit about the broken offline mode. One thread about the problem received over 15,400,000 upvotes, with many commenters posting about their past Ubisoft Connect issues with other Ubisoft titles on PC, so it’s clearly a widespread issue.
Ubisoft has not responded to this problem, but it has promised to address other issues regarding localisation and voiceover bugs on PC in a post on X.
In the same post, Ubisoft confirmed Black Flag Resynced sold two million copies on launch day. This appears to be a bigger launch than Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which hit over one million players in its first 24 hours.
Black Flag Resynced has also set a new record for the Assassin’s Creed franchise in terms of player counts on Steam. As noted on SteamDB, the remake hit an all-time concurrent peak of 104,756 players following its launch last week.
This is the first Assassin’s Creed game on Steam to break 100,000 concurrent players, with the second highest being Assassin’s Creed Shadows with 64,825. In other words, you can probably expect more Assassin’s Creed remakes from Ubisoft in the future. A new pirate themed game wouldn’t be a surprise either.
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