As I said in my previous blog about my new console impressions, it's been a rocky start, and one of the major problems with this new generation is one of my games still isn't saving. That game is Watch Dogs: Legion. At the time of this writing, there is a support thread at Ubisoft that is 67 pages long with 669 (nice) replies of people who are reporting that their games aren't saving on the Xbox Series X. I've been following this thread just a couple of days after the launch of the XSX only to watch in frustration as our complaints go largely ignored. When a dev finally responded to us, they said they wouldn't have a patch for this until at least early December. Then, there was a major patch released recently that fixed all platforms' saving issues BUT the XSX. Talk about adding insult to injury.
So what exactly is the problem? The problem is that autosaving in Watch Dogs: Legion is tied to Ubisoft's persistent online service called Ubisoft Connect, but the problem is Ubisoft Connect is never connected. If it ever is online, it's not online for very long. I've lost about five hours of progress so far and that was all I needed to lose to not play the game until this gets fixed. I think I stopped playing it on the 11th, so I haven't played it for more than two weeks! Well, actually, I did play it once since then just to test out a theory that was being posted in that thread. It turns out you can play offline, but you have to remember to disconnect the Xbox before starting the game, then quick travel and quit to menu to force the game to save. But, you shouldn't need to do ANY of that, as the game is missing a critical key feature that should be a no-brainer staple of any game in 2020: a manual save.
That's right! In Watch Dogs: Legion for the XSX, you cannot manually save. You either need to be online for the autosave to work, or be offline and jump through hoops to get the system to save. You would think a manual save option would be as simple as including a Start option on the title menu, but apparently not. What makes this situation even more ridiculous is that in the last major patch, they added a manual save option to the PC version, but not the XSX version... which is really just a PC in a console box! Adding to THAT, this is the same company that published Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, a game that not only has a manual save option but also a quick save option which you can access via a scroll wheel so you don't even need to use the menu to save at all. I just don't get why Legion launched without a manual save...
I don't need to explain to you the importance of saving. I also shouldn't need to explain to you the importance of being able to save whenever you want. Yeah, quick resume and sleep modes are nice when you have to step away from your TV for work/school or emergencies, but sometimes you're just tired of the game and you want to play something else. This brings me to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.
As far as I know, there's no way to save the game during a mission. I've played Warriors games before, and I know these missions can sometimes be very long, but I also don't want to invest extra time out of my schedule to clear a mission in order to swap it out and play something else. I'm still doing my daily stuff in Animal Crossing before I go to work, which means when I start playing Calamity on my lunch break, I need to make it a point to return to it and finish the current mission I'm on when I come home so I can start up Animal Crossing the next morning. This may not seem like such a big deal, but honestly, it's bothersome when all I want to do is go back to Assassin's Creed: Valhalla or Spider-Man: Miles Morales when I come home. So, Age of Calamity isn't really being played right now.
You know what was a really fun game and incredibly accessible? Skyrim for the Switch. Why? Because I could save whenever I wanted, EVEN in the middle of a battle. Not only was this a great convenience for when I wanted to play something else, it also helped me get through tough spots in the game. It was great that I could save before a dungeon, check it out, get killed, reload and try again, beat an enemy, save again, die and reload, try again and beat another enemy, save and repeat. Yeah, yeah, I know it's called save scumming, but so what? I have very little time to redo sections of games over and over again, and being able to save whenever you want is a godsend. It makes gaming so much more fun, because it eliminates so much time-wasting inconvenience, and there should never be an argument against it.
So yeah. Watch Dogs: Legion should have had a manual save option since day one. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity should let you save whenever you want, especially since their missions can run long. The ninth generation of gaming is upon us now, and we're currently experiencing so much technical improvement with faster framerates, higher resolutions, nearly nonexistent load times and improved controllers. The ability to save whenever we want should be among those quality of life improvements.
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