by schadenfreude » 07 Sep 2020 13:12
I recently experienced some Epic Games Store / Uplay account annoyances I thought I'd share.
I own quite a few Ubisoft games in my Epic Games account that I either got for free in Epic Sweeney promotions or bought with deep discounts using Sweeney coupons. One of these games is Wildlands, which I tried playing yesterday with CULT friends but couldn't get the Epic Games Launcher and Uplay to link successfully, which is required to launch the game. I did some googling of the error code and determined it had to do with the stores not having matching regions, though both are currently set to the US. I'm currently in Japan, however, so I figured that had something to do with it.
After many fruitless messages with Epic and Ubisoft customer support, Ubisoft sent me a useful reply, which said that not only must my accounts have matching regions, but I must also be physically present in that region at the time I link the games between the launchers. I took this to mean I had to either 1) Connect to a VPN and set my location to the US; or 2) Change the region of both accounts to Japan temporarily, link the games, then change the regions back. I proposed these options to customer support, who claimed that I might get the error again after hopping off the VPN or changing my region back. But I was pretty confident it should be permanent because I noticed that Watch Dogs had successfully populated in Uplay from Epic, and I recalled that when I got that game earlier this year, my Uplay region was mistakenly set to Japan.
Anyway, I got on a VPN, set my location to the US, went to launch Wildlands and link to Uplay, and bam, Wildlands and all my other missing EGS-bought Ubisoft titles suddenly appeared in Uplay. But then I encountered my second annoyance: launching the installed game from Epic Games Launcher immediately launches Uplay, which then wants to download and install the game a second time in the Ubisoft launcher directory! I googled it and this seems to be expected behavior. Perhaps you could provide it the same directory as where you installed the game with Epic, but I didn't bother trying. Instead, I removed the EGL installation, installed it through Uplay, and that's where I plan to play it. This has the added benefit of not double-counting hours in Epic and Uplay when you play the game, which is an annoyance when you buy Ubisoft games through Steam and launch them there. At least with Steam I can tolerate it because then you get the hours to show up on your cool Steam profile, whereas with these accumulated Epic hours we're what, a decade or more away from Epic having user profiles to display them?
Speaking of playtime, Exophase should take these overlapping launcher hours into consideration regarding overall playtime. For example, my current Far Cry 5 time in Steam is 10.1 hours, whereas in Uplay it's about 7 hours. Perhaps Uplay doesn't count time spent in the menus, but I doubt that alone could count for the 3-hour discrepancy. Regardless, I don't have 17 total hours in the game.
Anyway, the tl;dr of my experience is to make sure you have consistent regions and "location" (perhaps through VPN) when you go to link your EGS-bought Ubisoft games with Uplay. And don't bother downloading or installing the game through the Epic Launcher; just think of the Epic Store as another means of acquiring Ubisoft games that you'll ultimately end up playing through Uplay. But I agree with icycalm's comment in his article that, for a Ubisoft game exclusive to these two stores, you should still pick the Epic version because it will give you access to the game in both launchers. Always pick the cheaper option of course, but if the price is the same, join Team Sweeney.