Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced locked players out during Ubisoft Connect outage — despite offline promises

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Ubisoft's freshly released remaster, left PC players unable to launch the game on Saturday, July 11, when Ubisoft Connect went down. The outage lasted roughly an hour and hit early in the morning, but the backlash was loud enough to push a Reddit thread about it past 15,000 upvotes.

The timing is particularly embarrassing for Ubisoft because the game's own FAQ explicitly states that offline play is supported after a one-time download. The FAQ reads: "Once downloaded, the full main campaign of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is fully playable offline." That promise fell apart the moment Connect's servers went dark. Making things worse, players who had pirated the game — and therefore had the Connect requirement stripped out — could play without interruption throughout the entire outage. Paying customers were locked out; pirates were not.

This is not a new problem for Ubisoft. The company has required its own launcher — first called UPlay, now Ubisoft Connect — for PC games bought through Steam for well over a decade, and server outages blocking legitimate players go back at least as far as the Far Cry 3 launch in 2012. The frustration is compounded by Ubisoft's current financial instability: the company has faced layoffs, delays, and cancellations recently, raising genuine long-term questions about what happens to players' libraries if Connect is ever shut down permanently.

Kotaku reached out to Ubisoft asking why the game was inaccessible despite the FAQ's offline claims, and had not received a response at time of publication. The community reaction makes clear that even a short, early-morning outage is enough to reignite the broader debate around always-online DRM — and Ubisoft, more than most publishers, keeps handing critics fresh ammunition.