It's tough to play Watch Dogs on PC right now and Ubisoft is stubborn

Jun 2, 2014 06:21 GMT  ·  By

Last week was all about the release of Watch Dogs, the new open world action adventure experience from Ubisoft's Montreal team, which came out on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. A Wii U edition is also in the works, but Nintendo owners will have to wait until this fall to eventually get it.

This is a good title, as its open world is pretty fun and complex, although many single-player missions are repetitive. Fortunately, the online modes are quite fun and save it from going into mediocre territory.

Unfortunately, a lot of PC owners haven't even been able to start the game, let alone play it due to a series of faults from Ubisoft.

First up, there still is a big number of errors and crashes affecting the game on PC.

From the infamous disrupt_b64.dll error and crash to issues with DirectX, driver updates, and many other things, trying to play Watch Dogs on PC is a problematic experience that mostly entails scouring the Internet for workarounds and solutions to issues that Ubisoft apparently didn't foresee in its testing process.

While this is certainly one of the most annoying parts of PC gaming, Ubisoft upped the ante by being woefully unprepared for the influx of people who wanted to play Watch Dogs on this platform.

As a result, its uPlay online service crashed, the servers became unresponsive, and players were forced to use the offline mode in order to try and access the game they paid good money for.

Those who did manage to log in and authenticate into their accounts were met with erratic downloads, as the transfer of the game was prone to full stops or restarts. Thankfully, Watch Dogs needs around 13GB, which is a far cry from other contemporary video games like Wolfenstein: The New Order, which clocked in at around 40GB.

As I said in a previous Gamer Diary: it's 2014, so Ubisoft has no excuse to not be prepared for the online launch of a game. Rent or buy servers for a limited time for the release week and triple-check that they can handle the load of a few hundred thousand users. The fact that the game was bundled with select Nvidia cards means that even more hardcore gamers were going to want to download the game on launch day.

Even after a few days, Uplay is still experiencing issues with the log in and authentication. As such, if you haven't managed to download Watch Dogs just yet, you still can't play it in offline mode.

Ubisoft has pledged that a patch will appear to fix some of the problems reported by PC users and that it's trying to maintain the Uplay servers up at all times. As of right now, Watch Dogs on PC is still a bad experience, especially if you have AMD graphics cards, as the title is optimized more for Nvidia hardware, thanks to a special deal between Ubisoft and the graphics card maker.

Moving forward, Ubisoft has two choices: either remove the requirement of Uplay and move onto a service that's proven its reliability (Steam) or make massive improvements to Uplay and offer great advantages for users, like how EA is doing with the Origin On The House program.