Assassin's Creed 2 PC fixes and solutions for errors/freezes/crashes
I bought Assassin's Creed 2 (PC) last week and experienced a lot of freezes and crashes. No errors though. I have set all my graphics settings to low to play the game since i have a really poor-performing graphics card (8400 GS). I haven't experienced the effects of the Ubisoft servers being down, etc. It just works smoothly. So I'm going to bother about the anti-DRM stuff. Being a programmer, I know it's one way of ensuring that piracy of your software stops. I support it, unless Ubisoft has good servers to keep the gaming experience of it's paying customers smooth. Besides their FAQs state that when they plan to shutdown or stop maintaining the game servers, they'll release a patch to ensure that the users can play the game without the servers :) That's sweet enough.
#1 Game doesn't start/launch after logging in and syncing with online servers
It happens when the Ubisoft launcher is corrupted due to an update or when the saved games are corrupted. Try the below solutions in the same order.
Corrupted launcher: I found this solution on the Ubisoft forums. A few people claimed that it worked for them. Open version.txt in the UbiSoft Game Launcher dir and check the version number. If it's 0115 lower it down to 0109 and then start the game. The launcher should begin updating again and start the game. If it doesn't it means that the saved games are corrupt.
Corrupted saves: Accidentally found this solution after I got fed up waiting for a business day for Ubisoft Support to reply (come one I need my weekend gaming session). Beware of this trick - you'll have to start playing from scratch. In the Ubisoft Game Launcher dir find a dir called storage and with in that find a dir that has an awkward name like yjdsfjksdf (ya some rubbish). And within that you should be able to find another dir that's labeled by a number. This dir contains the saved games. (1.save, 2.save etc). Just delete those saved game files and it should work the next time you start. This is where saving onine comes in handy :) If you aren't saving online like me, just make sure you are constantly backing up the save files so that when it gets corrupted so that you can play it again from one of your recent checkpoints where you backed up instead of starting from scratch.
A little geeky tip... I use Git to backup my saved games. There's a version for Windows called msysgit. Somehow I found a non-code purpose reason to use Git. Haha :)
#2 Freeze during conversation with Uberto and Giovanni (after delivering the first mail)
It happens because the frame rate gets really low and your graphics card isn't able to take the load. I found a solution to this by mere accident (yes... again). Constantly press alt+tab and ctrl+esc until you get to the desktop (note that you are not closing the game, just minimizing it). When this is done it takes some load off your GPU. Get back to the game again. Rinse and repeat this trick whenever you encounter a freeze during the conversation. It happened around 3 times for me. Also make sure you don't delay minimizing the window :) else you'll end up crashing the game and restarting from the previous checkpoint :)
#3 Freeze after receiving hidden blade from Leonardo
It's not a freeze, press 'Q' first instead of '2'. You should hear the royal sound of your hidden blade :)
P.S: There's one crash which I'm not able to figure out how to fix. The scene when Lucy tests Desmond for Ezio's abilities crashes. It's happened around 30 times now. Stupid!
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