Assassins Creed: Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5, two games on the list for which Ubisoft is discontinuing online support, briefly appeared to be rendered completely unplayable by the action, defying Ubisoft’s initial explanation of which features of each game would be removed. Ubisoft now claims that the language in the notices on the game shop pages was incorrect.
Background: Last week, Ubisoft revealed a list of the features it would be removed from some games launched between 2009 and 2019, including 11 for PC, and said that it would be ending online support for those titles.
All of the games would stop supporting multiplayer and account linking, and any applicable games would also stop allowing players to access DLC. Only one of the listed games, the 2019 multiplayer-only VR shooter Space Junkies, would be fully inaccessible as a result of the change.
Since the announcement, Silent Hunter 5 and Assassins Creed: Liberation HD have been taken from the market “at the publisher’s request,” and they also have new notifications on their Steam pages that state
“Please note that this title will not be accessible following September 1st, 2022.” This same notice appears on the doomed Space Junkies store page as well, while Splinter Cell Blacklist and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, two other games from the list, remain available for purchase with a notice that “The deluxe edition and DLC for this title will not be accessible following September 1st, 2022.”
This made it seem as though Assassins Creed: Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5 would become completely unplayable, but Ubisoft has since stated that current owners of those games “will still be able to access, play, or re-download them,” suggesting that the Steam alerts were incorrect. The business provided IGN with the following statement:
“As stated in our support article(opens in new tab), only DLCs and online features will be affected by the upcoming decommissioning. Current owners of those games will still be able to access, play or redownload them. Our teams are working with our partners to update this information across all storefronts and are also assessing all available options for players who will be impacted when these games’ online services are decommissioned on September 1st, 2022. It has always been our intention to do everything in our power to allow those legacy titles to remain available in the best possible conditions for players, and this is what we are working towards.”
This issue has increased existing concerns about the mutability of our digital purchases, combined with the PlayStation Store removing purchased movies from user libraries in Germany and Austria. Owners of Silent Hunter 5 and Liberation HD appear to still be able to access their purchases, but the removal of online functionality and DLC access is unlucky.
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