Proton: Assassin's Creed II (33230)

[tr37ion]

Starting the game shows a Steam dialog:

Failed to request product key from Steam, please try again in a few minutes.

[veikk0]

Possibly related: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/212

[jomarocas]

ok waiting for this issue for ac2

[ghost]

ok waiting for this issue for ac2

The bug exists since 2012, Valve doesn't seem to care about this issue.
I bought AC2 to play with Proton and it doesn't work... not because Proton can't handle it, but because a bug in Steam itself... I'm super thrilled about this.

[jomarocas]

ok for me, the game working if you make this before starting steam
sed -i 's/legacykeyregistrylocation/legacykeyregistrylocation2/g' ~/.steam/steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf you need to close steam if you have open and every time that you open steam

[Jpfonseca]

The bug still exists in version 4-11-4 of Proton and running the beta version of Steam Client of 15th of September.

[mikeant42]

bumping thread, has anyone come up with a solution? I've tried @jomarocas solution but it doesn't seem to fix it for me. Running elementary os. Odd thing is AC Odyssey, another uplay game works for me, but AC 2 doesn't.

[shoober420]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Assassin's Creed II
• Steam AppID of the game: https://steamdb.info/app/33230/

System Information

• GPU: GTX 760
• Driver/LLVM version: NVIDIA 440.64
• Kernel version: 5.5.7-zen
• https://gist.github.com/shoober420/1215c40214cf70e1fabb760b5bd2a341
• Proton version: 5.0-3

Symptoms

Without using the "sed -i 's/legacykeyregistrylocation/legacykeyregistrylocation2/g' ~/.steam/steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf" command in terminal before launching Steam, you will get this error message.

Failed to request product key from Steam, please try again in a few minutes.

VANILLA:
steam-33230cdkey.log

Using the "sed -i 's/legacykeyregistrylocation/legacykeyregistrylocation2/g' ~/.steam/steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf" command in terminal before launching Steam will spawn UPlay, which installs, you then create an account and/or log in. Then UPlay launches without recognizing Assassin's Creed II.

TERMINAL COMMAND FIRST:
steam-33230first.log

After exiting UPlay and opening up Assassin's Creed II a second time, UPlay will ask you to link your Steam account. I personally don't feel comfortable doing this, so I chose not to do this. You are then greeted by a screen to enter your CD key.

This would be where you would enter the CD key that should display when launching the game, but its bypassed when using that terminal command at launch.

When starting up certain games on Steam, another window will open up showing your CD key. Assassin's Creed II seems to be the only game that has issues with this, and requires a command to be executed in terminal before launching Steam, which doesn't show the CD key screen at all, and just launches the game.

TERMINAL COMMAND SECOND:
steam-33230second.log

[Gaming4LifeDE]

@shoober420 Doesn't work for me. Same thing displays with or without the command

[shoober420]

@Gaming4LifeDE

Do you have Steam set to run at startup? If so, make sure all Steam processes are killed, then execute the command in the terminal, and execute Steam from that same terminal.

[marco-gattei]

Distro: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia
Kernel: 5.3.0-42-generic
GPU Driver: 3.0 Mesa 20.0.2 - kisak-mesa PPA
GPU: Intel UHD 620 (WHL GT2)
CPU:Intel Core i7-8565U @ 1.80GHz
PROTON: 5.0-5

Using the "sed -i 's/legacykeyregistrylocation/legacykeyregistrylocation2/g' ~/.steam/steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf" command in terminal before launching Steam was working till 15/03/2020 ( i had 84 hours of play ).

After that the sed trick isn't working anymore. Steam was not running when i launched the script.

[shoober420]

Confirming "sed -i 's/legacykeyregistrylocation/legacykeyregistrylocation2/g' ~/.steam/steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf" no longer works for me as well.

[stanlog]

So sad, I tested this game on Proton today, I confirm, the workaround above doesn't work. Any other solution ?

[jomarocas]

So sad, I tested this game on Proton today, I confirm, the workaround above doesn't work. Any other solution ?

only with the command sed before launch steam, will work, i tested in version before to proton 5.0.6 i suppose that this version no break nothing, i pass the game with version 4 you will try with this version

[stanlog]

I confirm that I'm pushing the command before launching Steam, same error, not immediately (Steam seems to looking for the key) then it fails.

My config:
Distro: Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid (64 bits)
Kernel: 5.5.0-2-amd64
GPU Driver: NVIDIA 440.82
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 @ 2.70GHz
PROTON: 5.0-6
Steam: steam-runtime_0.20200318.2

I pushed same report on ProtonDB.

[cverstege]

I've tried some more stuff, like changing the vailidoslist in appinfo.vdf to oslist, but it seems that steam always overwrites the file on launch or uses a freshly downloaded version if the immutable flag is set.

I've also tried adding the registry entries from a Windows install (including a valid key) to registry.vdf without success. See https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/212#issuecomment-725009666 for further details.

Sadly none of this had a positive effect.

[cverstege]

I think I found the cause of this Problem.

When installing Assassin's Creed 2 (https://steamdb.info/app/33230/) on Windows, it will only install the Windows CD Key DLC (https://steamdb.info/app/33361/), but not the Mac CD Key DLC (https://steamdb.info/app/33362/). It isn't even shown as an available DLC on the Windows Steam client.

In contrast, when installing the game on Linux, both CD Key DLCs are installed as well, but the Steam client can only fetch the Windows Key, but also wants to get the Mac key, as ShowCDKeyOnLaunch is set to true for both DLCs (see SteamDB links).

When launching the game on Windows, the Steam client will thus only try to get the Windows DLC Key, but the Linux client is trying to obtain the Windows and the Mac key on launch, which fails.

On Linux requesting the Windows Key with steam steam://cdkeys/33361 works just fine. Requestig the Mac key with steam steam://cdkeys/33362 will fail. Requesting the Mac Key on Windows will fail as well.
This is all expected behaviour I guess, as SteamPlay will only work with Windows titles.

So the problem here is that the steam Linux client wants to request all DLC keys when doing steam steam://cdkeys/33230 but would only need the Windows DLC keys, as SteamPlay/Proton does only support running Windows Titles.
This is probably a problem with the steam Play configuration, as the Linux client will install the Mac only DLC with the Mac Key but then fails to get the key on startup.

I've also posted this information on https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5649#issuecomment-727183485 and https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5649#issuecomment-727183485.
Hopefully all the research I've done helps the Valve devs in fixing this problem.