Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's offline mode failed when Ubisoft Connect went down

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launched to strong sales numbers, but a Ubisoft Connect outage over the weekend exposed a long-standing problem with Ubisoft's PC DRM: when the servers go down, so does the offline mode.

The outage lasted roughly an hour, but that was enough to lock PC players out of the game entirely. Ubisoft's setup requires a one-time internet authentication through Connect when you first buy a game — after that, offline play is supposed to work indefinitely until you reinstall. In practice, the offline mode appears to depend on the servers staying up, which defeats the purpose. Players vented on Steam Forums and Reddit, where a thread about the incident has pulled over 15,000 upvotes. Ubisoft has not responded on social media or in either thread.

This isn't the first rough patch for Resynced since launch. The game shipped with a cosmetic microtransaction bundle that collectively cost more than the base game, triggering a Steam review bomb that temporarily tanked its score — though reviews have since recovered. Ubisoft's reliance on Connect as a DRM layer on PC is a recurring complaint across its catalogue, and this outage is just the latest reminder that the system's offline fallback isn't reliable. Eurogamer's review praised how much the remake improves on the 2013 original, while also noting it introduces unnecessary problems of its own.

Ubisoft has acknowledged some remaining bugs and technical issues on the official Assassin's Creed account but hasn't specifically addressed the Connect outage. Until the studio either fixes the offline mode or comments publicly, PC players are essentially at the mercy of Ubisoft's server uptime — even when they're supposed to be playing offline.