What A Shock: Watch_Dogs Hampered By Uplay Troubles

This is not a new story, but rather another chapter in one that's gone on for far, far too many volumes. Rumor has it that George R.R. Martin decided to give up on finishing the Game of Thrones series after bearing witness to The Uplay Saga. The formula is woefully unchanging each and every time: big new release comes out, everyone is excited, Uplay takes a massive tumble and leaves a lot of people snarling at the gates. Watch_Dogs, somewhat predictably, is having early troubles of a similar sort.

After widespread complaints ranging from inability to log-in or download the game to something called an "unrecoverable error," Ubisoft acknowledged the ongoing troubles on Twitter:

"We are experiencing issues with the authentication services. Players may experience long delays when trying to login in-game. More to come."

As per usual, expect problems to clear up with time - both as Ubisoft irons out various kinks and demand dies down. Still though, it's kind of incredible that Ubisoft's proprietary service (that doesn't really offer many benefits beyond letting us launch Ubisoft games) still can't handle a big launch. It's also somewhat comical that a game all about tech and hacking and cyber city robo-gentrification collapses under the nightmarish weight of basic online functionality.

Please, Ubisoft (and other game-makers to whom this happens; this isn't a Ubi-only thing), get this in order. This whole Internet thing has been around for a little while now. I doubt Aiden Pearce has to deal with day-one start up issues. And I hate Aiden Pearce, so that doesn't sit right with me at all.