I bought my first dedicated gaming PC in 2014 and replaced it after numerous upgrades in late 2023. I intentionally kept it around so that the boys could use it for light gaming as its GeForce RTX 2070 is still capable at 1080p even in modern games. The boys were generally iPad gamers, but occasionally used the PC – playing Teardown and Marvel Rivals from the couch while it was plugged into their TV. While I do share my Steam library with them, they haven’t explored many of the games in it and we don’t play multiplayer outside of the occasional Minecraft experience.

I’m primarily a PC gamer and tend to play games during the winter when there’s less to do. I picked up Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the latest entry in the franchise, for a discount over Christmas. I’ve got a long history with the series, and the boys, particularly Adam, have enjoyed watching me play it over the years on my PC. As they’ve gown up, they’ve become less interested in just watching and more interested in actually playing. While playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla a few years ago, what started out as a brief grab of the mouse to look around and slash a weapon evolved into “can I play this section while you make your coffee” and later “can I play this for a couple more minutes?”. By the time I put that game down, the boys would occasionally play short sequences and had a feel for the controls.

Budding PC Gamers

With Shadows, this relationship evolved again – they didn’t just want to play for a bit, they wanted to play for hours. They wanted to choose missions, navigate the map, and upgrade their characters, all skills they’ve honed from years of grinding in Roblox and iPad games. I’m not a very serious gamer and Assassin’s Creed games are so large that I was happy to give them turns playing it. I don’t care that much about the story, it was early in the game, and I needed help grinding through XP anyway. There also wasn’t any way to “mess up” my progress and I wasn’t concerned about how they used the RPG elements to level up the characters.

Everything worked out until borrowing my PC became so frequent that I couldn’t sit at my desk and do other things when I needed to. If I wanted to write a post using my mechanical keyboard, fiddle with files on my external drives, or perform general administration I had to consider whether they wanted to use my PC or not. I loved that they were enjoying themselves, but it got to the point where I felt like I had to ask permission to use my own desk. It was time to get creative.

Sharing is Caring

The games on the boys PC are shared through my Steam Family Library, allowing them to play any game I have without repurchasing it and keeping their own game progress. The plan was to setup Shadows on their PC so they could play it upstairs. They’d have to start fresh with their own characters but they could play as often and as long as they wanted and I’d get my desk back. They would play so often that they’d catch up to and surpass my progress in no time. It seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Unfortunately I didn’t buy Shadows from Steam, I bought it from the Ubisoft Store. It uses Ubisoft’s launcher, which doesn’t support game sharing at all. A game can be installed on multiple computers, but game progress is synced across systems and only one copy can be actively played at a time. Ubisoft favors a last-in approach where simply opening the Ubisoft Connect on another computer immediately quits any running games elsewhere. This took a bit of learning as we each unintentionally ended each other’s games. There was a lot of “hey, did you open Assassin’s Creed?” happening. We eventually started talking about what each of our plans were for the evening and would check with each other before launching Ubisoft Connect.

I was curious how sharing game saves across multiple computers would work out and it turned out to be fine. Each local save was mirrored to the cloud and could be easily loaded on the other PC. We probably could have maintained separate progress through multiple save files, but sharing ended up working out. Between the three of us we completed missions and leveled up the two characters in the game. Zach and I liked Samurai Yasuke for his power and Adam liked Shinobi Naoe for her stealth (which I later came to appreciate after he leveled her up). The boys invested large amounts of time grinding away at XP to level us up and unlock new weapons while I wandered the map doing side quests and main story missions that interested me. It was fun to load up a save game and see how many levels the characters had improved, which new weapons they had, and what new areas of the map had been unlocked.

Outside of having to synchronize our game playing schedules (and not being able to play other Ubisoft titles like Star Wars Outlaws while they were playing Shadows) the only minor challenge was speed. The boys have much more time than I do to play video games, and as a result, consumed the majority of the game before I could even get to it. They leveled me up but also completed most of the story without me. This is both positive and negative. It made it easier for me to play while at the same time making it difficult to experience. At the end of the day I’m ok with it – I’ve never fully completed an Assassin’s Creed game before, so it’s a bit of an accomplishment to do so as a team. I can always start over with New Game Plus anyway and take advantage of all of their grinding while I fill in the storylines I missed.

This is the Way

At this point we’ve finished the entire game as well as the Claws of Awaji DLC. Despite some minor annoyances with Ubisoft’s lack of family sharing, it has gone well. It’s been fun to talk about various elements of the game together, discuss strategies together, and to learn together. There’s a similar game called Black Myth: Wukong that’s available through Steam and supports Family Sharing, but I don’t know if I want that. I like sharing progress as a family. It’s also still a $60 game, so I’m waiting for a sale to try this next phase.