Watch Dogs problems remain a problem

Business

June 4, 2014

A week on from its 27 May 2014 launch, and Ubisoft has yet to solve a number of bugs in Watch Dogs.

From Ubisoft, gamers have had a few tweets, generic apologies, and promises of solutions in the pipeline, but nothing in the vein of a comprehensive communique acknowledging the problems or giving estimated time frames on fixes and patches. Meanwhile, Ubisoft has been pleased by the launch sales numbers (to retailers mind) – more than 4 million copies by their reckoning.

Since I last checked into the Ubisoft technical support forum it seems the list of acknowledged issues has grown a little bit. The various problems are affecting users across all launch platforms, but PC gamers seem particularly beset by technical woes. The situation is echoed over on the Steam support forum.

Ubisoft has previously promised a patch to address poor performance issues on the not particularly well-optimised PC version of the game – a frustrating outcome for PC gamers who were pleased by the news that PC was the lead development platform.

Reading through a plethora of complaints from players, one of the particularly annoying problems yet to make it onto Ubisoft’s list of issues being investigated is the complete loss of hours of game progress.

As Eurogamer reports, Ubisoft has also acknowledged a problem with the game not working after players redeem some of Watch Dog’s Uplay rewards.

A summary of the problems as acknowledged by Ubisoft’s technical support forum:

“Vista SP1 or higher required” error message when launching the game, even though the OS is Vista SP1 or higher.
- [Status] In order to fix this, set the game to run in compatibility mode for Vista SP1, SP2 or Windows 7.
Graphics driver crash on AMD video cards:
- [Status] You should make sure to install the Catalyst 14.4 drivers that fix this crash. Check AMD has released 14.4 on Vista, this may be an issue.
Not being able to download the game or being locked out of the loading screen.
Multiple Formats – continue game – loading stuck at 90%.
PS4 – game does not load past 90%.
PC – crash to desktop.
PC – Unsupported Text Language.
PC – Disrupt _b64.dll crash / error.
PC – Uplay verify files loop.
PC – Frame rate stutter on high end GPU.
PC – Crash to desktop when hacking signs.
PC – Crash when loading on SLI/Crossfire multi GPU systems.
PC – Dolby Digital 5.1 not working.
Multiple formats – missing weapons after dying in an online match.