Watch Dogs Review
Ubisoft

In what appears to be a troublesome start for Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, a game breaking bug has now surfaced that locks gamers out of their saved games.

With every passing hour, more posts (of incredible length) are finding their way onto Ubisoft's Watch Dogs technical support forum. The posts indicate that players from all platforms who attempt to load their saves end up stuck in a never-ending loading screen.

Initial reports indicated that the bug was restricted to Sony's PSN. But as the posts kept coming in, it became obvious that players on other platforms were suffering from the glitch, something that Ubisoft is yet to address.

At the time of writing this report, there are 1072 pages on this thread, with players expressing their disappointment in each and every one of them.

"All right, at this point I just want someone to tell us whether or not our saves will be salvageable. I don't want to get the patch and find out that our old saves are ****ed and that we could have just used the time to start a new game", said one gamer. - Halolma

And here's another post, one among a few thousand.

"Like I have said before, we need to get this problem, and this thread into the hands of as many online gaming websites as we can as quick as we can, especially if ubisoft is closing threads about it, deleting posts on facebook, and seemingly trying to keep this as quiet as possible. If we all email some hot gaming sites about this, they can't ignore it forever. They can ignore a few emails to a few sites, but they can't ignore thousands of emails and blog posts about it from dozens of sites. Get the word out to every gaming site you can think of and let them know what's going on. This is a MAJOR ISSUE and ubisoft needs to get off it's thumbs and fix this it's been nearly a week....." - TruePastorX

Fix for the Game Breaking Load Screen Bug

According to a report by GearNuke, a few gamers claim that the following fix gets the game up and running again. However, a majority of gamers on forums and social media have dismissed this fix as fake. Do try it out at your own risk.

1. Back up your Watch_Dogs save data by using the steps listed on Sony's support page for uploading the data to the Online Storage. If you do not have a PlayStation Plus subscription, follow the steps to copy the save data to a USB storage device:

https://support.us.playstation.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5228/~/manage-ps4-save-game-data

2. Once the data has been moved to the Online Storage or a USB storage device, please uninstall the game from the hard drive. For instructions on how to do that, see below:

On the PlayStation dashboard, hover over the Watch_Dogs tile and press the "Options" button on your controller.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you should have the option for "Delete"

Select this, on the next screen select "OK" to delete the game content from the console.

Once the content is deleted, move to step 3

3. Re-install the game to the hard drive and download all patches for the game

4. Once the game has fully been installed, use the steps listed on Sony's support page to download your backed up save data back onto your console's hard drive

5. Launch the game after the save data has been returned and select "Continue" from the main menu to go back into your game

Hopefully, Ubisoft will release a patch to fix this issue on all other platforms soon.