How problematic is the Ubisoft launcher?

Stewartiee@lemmy.world to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 15 points –

I’m looking to pick up South Park for my Deck.

How problematic is the Ubisoft launcher? I’m sure I read before that it can lock you out of games, more so when there are updates.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Were there workarounds?

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I don't have Steam Deck but I have experience with UConnect, and it's easily the worst 3rd party launcher out of the others. Constantly saying that I have no internet connection despite it working very well, I can't even launch games because of it.

Ubi connect will not work offline, even if you login online once and then immediately take the deck into offline mode. Connect fails to launch the game.

Experienced this while traveling last weekend.

If you get all the way into the game then go offline I believe it still works. I’ll have to test again but I do recall being able to play without internet after resuming from sleep

I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.

A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.

How often does that happen? Might be a bit of a deal breaker for me.

I played through stick of truth without freezes. Had no issues at all.

I only had one or two freezes between the two games

Thanks for the reply! Doesn’t sound too bad - will pick it up.

Awesome, I definitely recommend them if you like South Park. Lots of references and callbacks to bits of episodes.

I have Ubisoft Connect installed for the Division 2 and it works fine.

I get that people don't like it, but at least try installing it before freaking out about how unreliable it allegedly is!

I’m playing through the Ezio trilogy right now and I ended up using cracks to bypass the launcher. It’s a much better experience

For me it depends on which one. I installed a game yesterday which used the old launcher (uPlay). Whatever I did, no matter which version of Proton, the launcher would not connect to the internet. It offered me offline mode, but because it hadn't yet connected once, that's useless.

The solution is a bit strange. I went into the prefix of this game and overwrote the ubi launcher folder with one from a prefix on a different game -- crucially this one is a later version (Ubisoft Connect), even though the launcher folders have the same name. I let it overwrite any files with the same name.

Started the trouble game again, and Ubisoft Connect (the new version) came up. No issues connecting to the internet. Was able to play without issue.

I have more problems with it than any other launcher. Most of the time the it works - but even then it takes some time to connect to the Ubisoft servers. However, you can never be sure that Ubisoft games work when you need them. Sometimes there are crashes and connection problems when starting a game. Sometimes an update breaks the launcher for several days. I also had performance problems & crashes due to the launcher overlay (had to deactivate them in Desktop mode).

It is a hassle. So much that I deleted most Ubisoft games from my wishlist.

Works fine for Trackmania. Just takes forever to launch.