Well, this is embarassing…

I was hoping to have at least the first impressions of Watch_Dogs up by now but I am still waiting for the damn thing to download! I did the preorder via Green Man Gaming which gave me a key that I could redeem via uPlay for a direct download. I had a good experience with digital downloading of games with Steam so I thought that uPlay would be the same and I could rely on the game actually come down without me having to nurse the download every step of the way. Boy was I wrong!

uPlay is buggy, unreliable and the downtime it experienced when it was forced to handle half of the traffic that Steam handles on an hourly basis turned a simple overnight download into a 3-day marathon download which will hopefully be finished today. Matters were not helped by the fact that the Australian government has cancelled the NBN meaning that I will be stuck with a top download speed of 256KB/s for quite possibly the rest of my life!

Lesson learnt: Stick to Steam for digital downloads and physical media for anything larger than 6GB!

Matters were not helped when GMG failed to meet their promised key release time – their FAQ states that when a preorder is done the download code will be released in time for the game’s release where the download is occurring. I purchased the game on the /au subdomain so they knew that I would be downloading it in Australia however despite the fact that the game was due for release here at 00:01 AEST I thought that I would have the download code by the time I woke up on release day and could start downloading the game right away. WRONG! I had to wait for over 15 hours after the game was released here to get a code to download the game! In this day and age I can understand a 1 hour delay. 2 hours is pushing it but is tolerable… 15 hours is just unacceptable!

Lesson learnt: NEVER PREORDER FROM GMG!