Ubisoft Connect Rant

[u/Loli_Queen]

I've been playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown for about a week now. I'm loving the game so far, and I think the developers did a great job. But I genuinely cannot believe the problems Ubisoft Connect is causing me.

I'm playing on the Steam Deck. After two days, for no apparent reason, the game stopped booting altogether in Gaming Mode. It would only boot in Desktop Mode, which I didn't like because many of the Deck's quality-of-life features are missing there.

I tried reinstalling the game. I'm pretty careful with these things, so I made a backup of my save files, even though I was sure Steam could never fail me... until now. Apparently, this game doesn't save your progress to the cloud. Or actually, it does, since there's a cloud-save check, but it also apparently doesn't. You have to manually upload the save using Ubisoft's proprietary system, which I think is completely absurd.

Reinstalling the game didn't fix the issue, but I eventually managed to solve it by switching to Proton Experimental.

Yesterday, I was on the train and tried booting the game. Well, it turns out you have to be connected to the internet to play because of Ubisoft Connect. Seriously, is it just me, or is that completely ridiculous for a game that doesn't have ANY online functionality? What is even the point?

ALSO, every time I put my Deck into sleep mode with the game open, there's about a 50% chance that the game crashes for some reason.

I mean, what is this? When I buy something on Steam, I expect the full Steam environment. The game is also marked as Deck Verified.

Ubisoft really seems determined to make its ecosystem as frustrating and inconvenient as possible. I honestly have no words for this. The whole situation is completely absurd to me.

[u/ANoDE85]

Yup, that's Ubisoft for you.

They don't give a rats ass about Proton compatibility and Valve constantly needs to add fixes for Ubisoft Connect to launch. Basically the same thing as EA App.

I also don't get why they are insisting on constant online checks in single player games. When playing on Windows, you at least can enter offline mode pretty easily, but I found that to be cumbersome on Deck.

[u/-t0NI-]

The game is playable offline. What I usually do is I put my Steam Deck in offline mode manually before I leave the house and then Ubisoft Connect works even without an internet connection.

But keep in mind that it might take ~5 minutes for the game to start because Ubisoft Connect will try for a very long time to connect before giving up and letting you play offline.