I’m frustrated. Exceedingly so.
You see, I had a busy day today. Had a major go-live today that soaked up most of my waking hours from 6 AM to 4 PM.
I was looking forward to playing Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. I even made sure to download it early this morning so it’d be ready when I was off work and relaxed.
First sign of trouble: The download had apparently stalled at around 75% percent.
Ok, well, whatever. I’ll kill it and restart it, after trying with great futility to get it to resume.
That ended up launching into incorrect error diagnostics with Ubisoft, reinstalling Ubisoft connect, rebooting multiple times, restarting my router, and then FINALLY I managed to get it downloaded and installed.
I load into the game, adjust a few display settings, and deal with the forced restart to apply the new settings.
You know, I absolutely adore all the disclaimers, intros, branding videos and more that I just can’t skip. I really do.
I then get back in, and hit benchmark; I get that classic interactive loading screen where you can run around, so I do. It’s smooth, and looks decent enough. I don’t expect a big engine improvement over Valhalla; I figure that part has gone pretty much untouched.
Anyway, after a few seconds of running, the loading screen fades. It’s time to see what FPS I get..
..And straight to the desktop it goes!
I figure.. Ok, must be a fluke. I try again: No luck. Same CTD, same place.
I update GPU drivers. Reboot. Try again.
CTD.
Verify game files. Try again.
CTD.
I am almost – ALMOST – to the point of requesting a refund and saying “fuck it”.
I understand the difficulty in QA; I’ve worked in code for more than half of my life now, doing web, app, game, and software dev at various points in my life.
However, this is Ubisoft we’re talking about. I launched this website on Ubisoft titles. I know them.
Their PC releases tend to be pretty rough at launch, and frequently stay rough after launch in one way or another, requiring users to figure out little quirks to bypass problems (AC Origins & GR Wildlands required changing CPU priority on the exe to ensure there weren’t any 10 second random freezes and LOD fails on my older machine, which also was no slouch).
I’ll try again tomorrow.. I mean, after all, the next patch might be the one that let’s me play, right?