How to fix Watch Dogs Legion corrupted save file

It's been almost a week since the release of Watch Dogs: Legion.

And while players are genuinely enjoying UbiSoft's latest title, unfortunately, a game-breaking bug is making some players' experience with the game quite miserable.

The issue in question is about the game's save system.

(Picture: Ubisoft) 

Watch Dogs: Legion features no manual save system, which is quite strange for an open-world game, given how much freedom players have and how much uncertainty that freedom brings.

On top of that, the autosave system acts really weird; it's slow and unpredictable, and players often can not rely on it.

But the biggest offender is the fact that the game doesn't create multiple save files, but instead, it simply overwrites one file throughout the whole game.

For a game that packs around ~27 hours of content, your whole playthrough to rely on just one file is simply unacceptable.

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As if things aren't already bad enough, the game has been released with a game-breaking bug that's corrupting save files and rendering them useless, and therefore practically erasing the whole players' progress.

This infuriating issue is mostly bothering players on PC, but there have been reports of console players running into it as well.

Ubisoft says that a fix for corrupted save files is in the works and that they hope to release it on Monday, 9th November.

Until then, here are some things you should consider doing in order to minimize the damage caused by the problem.

(Picture: Ubisoft) 

Backup Watch Dogs Legion save file

As we've mentioned earlier, the game uses only one save file, and you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket.

It sounds like a chore to constantly alt-tab your game in order to make copies of your "healthy" files, but some times that's the best and safest thing to do.

Better that than to lose all your progress.

The location of the save file should be this(on a drive where the game is installed):

\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\savegames\MYID\3353\1.save

Make sure to have multiple backup copies and do it as often as possible!

Do not interpret the game while it's saving

Watch Dogs Legion is notorious for its slow saving process so you need to be patient, let it do the work!

Some corrupted files are a result of people thinking the game is freezing while saving, and then are trying to do other things to unfreeze it, while in fact, it's just slow due to bad coding (which will hopefully be fixed soon).

So just leave it be, wait for some time even if it looks oddly long.

(Picture: Ubisoft)

Turn off cloud saving

While it sounds counter-productive, the cloud save file actually is just a copy of the same save file you have on your local drive, and some users are experiencing faster saving time with it being turned off, which reduces the chances of something bad happening to the save file.

You can turn off cloud saving in the Uplay app:

• Open Uplay
• Make sure you are signed in.
• Click on the Menu icon(upper left corner).
• Click on Settings.
• Uncheck Enable Cloud Save Synchronization for supported games 
• Restart Uplay in order for changes to take effect

Always check if the game is up to date and wait for the patch that will fix the issue

Unfortunately, the safest option is to wait for Ubisoft to fix the issue since there is no guarantee that something bad won't happen to the save file.

The save system currently simply doesn't work properly and it has been proven to be badly coded, and the risk that the file will get corrupted is always in the air.

So the best strategy is to simply leave the game for the time being and wait for the Monday update that will spare you the trouble. At least we hope so.