Hey all. I did a lot of research on this problem and couldn't find any answers, so I did some experiments and wanted to share the results with the community.
A cursory examination of Internet forums indicates that quite a large number of people have had problems with games from the Assassin’s Creed series not launching when they are installed to pools managed by Windows Storage Spaces, a feature that was introduced in Windows 8. The proposed solutions have always involved reinstalling the affected game on a non-Storage Spaces drive. These are untenable for a couple reasons, most notably that many people often have their OS installed on a small, fast SSD, which lacks the space for entire game installations (Assassin’s Creed Unity, for example, is over 50 GB), and have their large data drives transparently managed by Storage Spaces. After some trial and error,
I’ve determined that the cause of the problem is the games’ sound files; apparently, they really don’t like living on Storage Spaces. Fortunately, there’s a relatively simple workaround:
we can store the sound files on drives not managed by Windows Storage Spaces, then use junctions and/or symbolic links to point to those files. If everything is done correctly, the games will launch and there won’t be any issues, since as far as the game logic is concerned, all the file paths are correct.
I’ll be using Assassin’s Creed Director’s Cut and Assassin’s Creed Unity as examples of the procedure. All Assassin’s Creed games except for the original use the same procedure as Unity.
In
Assassin’s Creed Director’s Cut, there are a total of
six (6) files, totalling 1.03 GB, that need to be moved. They are
.FORGE files located in the
Assassin’s Creed\ directory, all of which contain
DataPC_StreamedSounds in their filenames. The .FORGE extension is also shared with map files and other game logic, so care must be taken to ensure that only the sound files are relocated.
In
Assassin’s Creed Unity, there are a total of
54 files, totalling 6.78 GB, that need to be moved. They are
.PCK files, all of which are located the
Assassin’s Creed Unity\sounddata\ directory (the entire directory can be moved). In addition, the
Dead Kings DLC requires moving
ten (10) files, totalling 374 MB. They are
.PCK files located in the directories
Assassin’s Creed Unity\dlc_10\ and
Assassin’s Creed Unity\dlc_11\. Unlike Assassin’s Creed Director’s Cut, no other file types appear to share the sound files’ extension, .PCK.
While all the necessary tasks can be performed with cmd or PowerShell, I highly recommend the use of the
Link Shell Extension, a program which integrates symbolic link creation into File Explorer, which can greatly reduce the time and complexity involved for users who aren’t overly familiar with the command line. The download website covers all of the operations needed to perform this fix.
TL;DR: use junctions to link to entire folders, and use symbolic links to link to individual files.
For additional space savings, you can remove all language files (eg: eng, bra, ger, fre, ita, spa) except for your preferred language. This will save around 3 GB on Unity, for example.
So the basic procedure is:
1. Copy the sound files over to a drive that isn’t managed by Storage Spaces
2. Drop links to the sound files in the game installation folder
There you have it. I can’t think of a logical reason as to why the games should fail to launch while their sound files are contained on Windows Storage Space drives, so
this is definitely something Ubisoft needs to look into, but the solution is pretty straightforward. Thankfully, all of the sound files are clearly labeled as such, so there’s no guesswork involved.
Hope this helps, as I've noticed several mentions of this problem with no solutions.