The Real Reason Reviews For These Ubisoft Games Are Tanking

Two new Ubisoft games, Watch Dogs: Legion and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, are having major save issues that are negatively affecting reviews. While players and critics initially gave the recently-released games mostly positive feedback, save file corruption is holding both titles back from their full potential.

Game Rant reports that Watch Dogs: Legion players are complaining of lost progress and corrupt save data on Ubisoft's official forums. One user described an issue with Watch Dogs: Legion on Xbox Series X where the game mostly played fine, but it did not autosave as it was supposed to, so missions had to be restarted every time the game was booted up.

Fellow posters confirmed that they have experienced similar instances of lost progress, but there doesn't seem to be a specific cause for the issue. Some users reported that the save corruption occurred when they switched to a new team member, while others believed that switching teams actually triggered the save process. Regardless, according to Game Rant, community managers have respond to the Ubisoft forum thread and assured that the developers are looking into the issue. In the meantime, the effects of these bugs can be seen in some of the negative user reviews being left on Metacritic.

In the case of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, the game does allow manual saves along with autosaves. However, players reported in a Reddit thread that one or more saves displayed an error that read, "data corrupt!" The only option available was to delete the save altogether. This glitch appeared to affect all manual saves. Now players are having to rely on Assassin's Creed Valhalla's autosaves to keep the game's files intact.

Watch Dogs: Legion was released in late October, followed by Assassin's Creed: Valhalla last week, and both games have already seen a few bugs. According to Windows Report, Watch Dogs: Legion players have also reported audio issues, game crashes, attacks from invisible enemies, and glitchy underwater environments. Meanwhile, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla had a bug that prevented the Seer's Solace quest from being triggered.

Although most complaints for both games appear to be coming from Xbox Series X players, it is unclear if the save corruptions are only happening on current-generation consoles. Engadget has theorized that all these save issues could be linked to Ubisoft's cloud save system, but this has yet to be confirmed. Until Ubisoft provides a fix, players will have to maintain hope that the developers are diligently working on this major save problem.