As we reported yesterday, a number of users are receiving their copy of Ubisoft’s hacking-themed sequel Watch Dogs 2 early, after selected global retailers reportedly broke the game’s street date.
However, with less than three days to go until the game official launches on Tuesday, it seems developer Ubisoft Montreal still has quite a bit of work to do to ensure a smooth release.
The original Watch Dogs, released in 2013, was praised for its seamless multiplayer experience, in which players could stealthily ‘invade’ the single-player campaigns of other users – but its sequel is struggling to get the feature working properly, and is rapidly running out of time.
A number of live streams have been popping up over the past 24 hours, and we have observed that when players attempt to join an online match, they are intermittently greeted with the following message from the game’s developer:
“There’s currently an issue with the seamless multiplayer feature causing the game to lag and crash periodically. To eliminate that issue, seamless multiplayer is offline until we’re able to fix it.
“You can play co-op by inviting friends through the game menu. The rest of the game should be working properly and we hope you enjoy your experience in the open world of Watch Dogs 2!”
It doesn’t appear as though the issue is platform-specific, so Ubisoft looks to have its work cut out to get this key component of the game fully functional before Watch Dogs 2’s release on Tuesday (November 15).