Assassin’s Creed – Part 1-1

Now that we’ve spent so much time solving murders, we get to start causing them. That’s right. It’s time to go back to the first game, released in 2007, in one of Ubisoft’s longest running franchises: Assassin’s Creed.

While setting up to stream Assassin’s Creed, I was actually surprised at how difficult it was to access it. Somehow, it holds the distinction of being the only game in the franchise that was never ported to, released on, or remastered for modern day consoles like the PS4 or PS5. That meant that if I wanted to play on console, using my capture card (which would be ideal for me), then I would have to dust off my PS3, unhook the old PS VR setup on it, and hook up my capture card. Not impossible, but more trouble than I wanted to go through.

That’s when I remembered that I had, at some point through an Twitch Prime giveaway or some other such deal, acquired a copy of the game through GOG. I remembered the horror stories of Ubisoft games from back in that era, and the performance issues resulting in the horrendous DRM attached to them. Since GOG is renowned for being a DRM-free platform, I figured this would be my best shot at avoiding those and similar issues.

Unfortunately, I was incorrect. Even though I was running a game from 2007 on my modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 3080 inside of it, I was experiencing unbearable freezing. It only took a few minutes of playing the game to make itself known. Thus, I had to do a bit of independent research to uncover what might be causing it.

Lo and behold, the solution was fortunately fairly easy to find since it’s a common issue with the PC port. Even the “DRM free” GOG version calls out to a server that has, in the years since, been taking offline. Several users recommended disabling my internet connection while playing, a fix that is not viable when my intent is to stream the game on Twitch. Thankfully, after still more digging, I found a solution on YouTube, which recommended making a change to configurations on my computer.

With my issues resolved, and a renewed disdain for Ubisoft and its business practices in my heart, I was finally ready to stream Assassin’s Creed. So here we are!