Ghost Recon Wildlands and Bad Software Practices

Well this might be a rant but let´s see what is wrong with this game from the point of development. I will not whine about bugs in games. Today games are very complex and it is difficult to avoid the mistakes. But every software whether it is a game or business software produces data. The data, user data, are the most precious thing. You don´t have to take care of software or back it up. You can always download it or reinstall it. But user data is a different story.

Ubisoft is an experienced AAA game studio with fantastic games. Unfortunately their software is ruined with stupid functions and Uplay. You don´t have to ask game players to see that Uplay software is not welcomed on their PCs. Ubisoft just wanted to jump on the bandwagon and to have it´s own platform to sell games. They couldn´t do it worse.

Precious data from games are saved games. You have to realize that playing a game can take 15 hours, 30 hours or 150 hours or even more. It´s a lot of time and you should take care of saved games files really carefully. In fact it should be priority No 1. Or would you like to loose work that took you 100 hours? I guess not.

The standard on Windows is to place saved games to /Documents or at least under user files. Usually /Users/User. It´s a rule. If you save data generated by user somewhere else you are doing it wrong! You can do it only when user says so with his agreement.

For some reason Ubisoft saves data to C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\savegames. Yes, you read it right! And what more. Under /Documents/My Games there is a directory Ghost Recon Wildlands. So the user is under assumption that saved games go here. What a mistake.

Ubisoft developers make beginners mistake.
1) Drive C: is usually system drive. It is used for Windows installation. That´s it.

2) Program Files this directory is NOT supposed to hold user data! A developer saving data here is an asshole.

3) Who saves data to Game Launcher directory??

To me it is unbelievable how anybody experienced in software development can make such a stupid mistake. But OK we got Uplay that often annoys a user with notifications the game is saved. Let me put it straight. Uplay is a piece of garbage. It´s good for nothing. But if there was one thing that this software could do it was backing up user progress. If the user looses files for some reason - faulty drive, re-installation whatever... It would be easy to start where it was interrupted. But no. This software won´t help you. You got statistics and other really useful information there but not what you really need. Why Ubisoft even bothers with cloud if the user is not able just to click and restore the game from the cloud? This is where you can see how bad job Ubisoft developers do. Uplay doesn´t make any sense at all.

Uplay PC client completely handles the loading and saving of game progress, this includes synchronisation with the cloud on your Uplay profile.

Says Ubisoft support page. It´s a rule that whenever developers say that their software takes care of something by itself than it doesn´t. It syncronizes something but guess what. You cannot restore from the cloud.

4) Uplay is a cloud service that gives users nothing.

I´d like to know how many users lost their game files just because of this Ubisoft development malpractice. I did. I do not backup C: drive and I am not planning to do so. I like games from the point of development but if I imagine that these guys are not able to do basic things right how the games do look inside? It must be really ugly.