Watch Dogs 2’s “seamless multiplayer” mode won’t be available at launch, Ubisoft said in a statement yesterday. As it turns out, it’s broken.
We’ve been playing Watch Dogs 2 for the past few days, and one thing we noticed was that this multiplayer feature — which allowed players to cross into other players’ games — was very unstable, leading to framerate drops and crashes. Over the weekend, Ubisoft removed multiplayer from review copies of the game until they could fix it. Turns out that won’t be until after launch.
Here’s Ubisoft:
Watch Dogs 2 Seamless Multiplayer Statement
During the pre-launch phase of Watch Dogs 2, we were disappointed to discover an issue tied to the seamless multiplayer feature that caused the game to lag and crash periodically. In order to eliminate that issue at launch and for players to enjoy a smooth game play experience, we have decided to wait to launch the seamless multiplayer feature so it would not impact the core gameplay experience.
To be clear, players can fully enjoy the entire single-player experience without any concerns. Additionally, co-op is still fully functional by inviting friends through the game menu. However, the Bounty-Hunter mode and other activities that would occur with other outside players who enter your game will be unavailable until the issue is resolved. We truly appreciate the patience of our player community.
It will likely shock you — shock you! — to hear that an AAA video game is not working properly on launch day.
Comments
9 responses to “Watch Dogs 2 Multiplayer Is Broken, Won’t Be Fully Live At Launch”
Oof. One of the novel aspects of the original was the ‘seamless multiplayer’ so its quite disappointing to see its not working. Will be welcome news to some as I remember quite a few people going offline just to avoid it 😉
I was one of those people, I got sick of the invasions when I was just trying to do things at my leisure. Didn’t have to go offline, though, there was an option in the settings to turn it off.
A game about a connected world fails to be a connected game.
Now the uplay servers just need to be hacked on launch day and the meta is complete.
You would have thought that after the debacle with Watch Dogs 1 and the 1st new-gen Assassins Creed (the French one- they make so many I don’t know their names) that Ubisoft would FINALLY have learnt not to release unfinished shit.
Just a few weeks ago they were saying “Oh, we’re surprised at how poorly Watch Dogs 2 is pre-ordering”…. Well no shit! It’s almost like nobody trusts you not to f*ck up because you do 70% of the time! They certainly never overdo it on the polish, they just try to put the bare minimum effort in to get it out the door before Christmas.
They’ll be scratching their heads in a 6 months’ time trying to work out why Watch Dogs hasn’t become some massive franchise.
Are Ubisoft the kings of the shoddy AAA development cycle? I’d say maybe Bethesda because their games are glitch and some of the problems (PS3 Skyrim) are straight up unacceptable.
Polyphony get a gold star for ineptitude too for not getting GT games out on time or in scope since the early PS2 era.
Yeah, nah. They have screwed themselves over with bad launches and repetitive games. Sick of Ubisoft.
I am shocked that a Ubisoft game is having multiplayer problems on launch, SHOCKED!
Ubisoft.
Oh Ubisoft
Well played, Ubisoft – get everyone mad at this, and hope they don’t notice all the usual launch bugs of yours.