To update: Ubisoft has announced that it will delay its plan to take some of its older titles offline until October 1st. The company also announced that Anno 2070 will no longer be taken offline.
The company initially said that 15 titles were affected by the removal of online services, meaning online features, DLC and multiplayer modes would no longer be accessible.
According to Ubisoft, the single-player DLC of several games on PC – Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed 3 (release 2012), Far Cry 3 and Splinter Cell Blacklist – will be available to download and keep before October 1st if you have these games on the Own a PC, activate your DLC before decommissioning to continue playing it. There will be no impact to the same single player DLC on consoles, and you can download and play them even after October 1st.
In addition to Anno, an active game team is still working on Anno at Ubisoft Mainz, and a working group was dedicated to providing an update for Anno 2070 that will update the game and replace its old online services. In this way you can continue to use the online functions in the future.
Space Junkies will proceed with its scheduled shutdown on September 1st.
Original story follows.
You may remember an article from Ubisoft from a few months ago, which indicated that online services for several games would be shutting down as of September 1st.
Well, that time has come, and there’s still a day until these 15 Ubisoft titles go offline forever. In the big world of video games, we are aware that nothing lasts forever; although we should be discussing video game preservation more often.
Today is the last day online multiplayer will be available in any of the fifteen titles, but also the last day you can play any DLC you own – multiplayer or not. An example pointed out by a Reddit user is that those who bought the expansion packs for the 2012 release of Assassin’s Creed 3 can no longer access the DLC without buying the game’s remaster and those with Splinter Cell Blacklist cosmetics will not be able to use them.
However, Ubisoft issued a statement to IGN stating, “Only DLCs and online features will be affected by the upcoming shutdown. Current owners of these games can still access, play, or re-download them. Our teams are working with our partners to update this information across all storefronts and are also reviewing all available options for players who will be impacted when these games go offline on September 1, 2022. It has always been our intention to do everything in our power to allow these legacies to remain available to players under the best possible conditions and we are working towards that.”
Many of the affected games are less than a decade old, and those that have been around longer aren’t much older either. The games whose online services and DLC have been decommissioned are as follows!
- Ann 2070
- Assassin’s Creed II
- Assassin’s Creed 3 (2012) – The remastered version of the game is unaffected.
- Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
- Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD
- Assassin’s Creed Revelations
- Driver San Francisco
- Far Cry 3 (2012) – The remastered version of the game remains unaffected.
- Ghost Recon soldier of the future
- Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands
- Rayman Legends
- Silent Hunter 5
- space junkies
- Splinter Cell: Blacklist
- ZombieU
Space Junkies is the newest of all games and was only released in 2019. The catch with this particular title is that it’s a multiplayer game, meaning the game will essentially be unplayable after tomorrow.
It’s certainly weird to see decades-old games getting this kind of treatment, and it sucks for those who have an affinity for the games on this list, have paid for DLC, or simply spent hours earning items they love now can no longer use . There are lessons to be learned from Ubisoft’s shutdown of online services for these games; primarily that nothing lasts forever, but also that there must be something to protect games from these consequences. Not only for the players but also for the developers who worked tirelessly on these games.