In Watch Dogs: Legion you can enable permadeath mode, so some fans have wondered if they they can save-scum around painful losses. Well, do I have news for them! The short answer: nope. You can save and load progress from the game's start menu, but if you were hoping to manically generate manual saves to circumvent the Reaper's cold embrace then you'll need to make peace with your operators' mortality prior to enabling permadeath.
Watch Dogs: Legion will save constantly in the background.
A 'quick-save' or 'suspend' option that saves and quits (in addition to dynamically saving every few minutes/seconds to prevent progress loss in the case of shutdowns and crashes), then deletes the quick-save data after it has been reloaded (which helps prevent Save Scumming, though industrious players may still find a way to cheat the system). Watch Dogs: Legion has adopted a persistent save system, meaning the game will constantly save your progress in the background. It doesn't matter if you have permadeath on or off: there are no manual saves in Watch Dogs: Legion. You can't even pick a specific auto-save to load if you want to roll back to a moment prior to disaster. The achievements have to be unlocked all on one progress (my guess, can't be sure). Going back to an earlier save slot to unlock a glitched/missable achievement, then switching back to your later.
Watch Dogs: Legion has adopted a persistent save system, meaning the game will constantly save your progress in the background. It doesn't matter if you have permadeath on or off: there are no manual saves in Watch Dogs: Legion. You can't even pick a specific auto-save to load if you want to roll back to a moment prior to disaster. You're committed to your choices in near-future London.
Seeing as the game had a habit of crashing on me whenever I even mildly overclocked my CPU, I got to witness the aggressiveness of the auto-save feature first-hand. Legion was pretty damned good about creating a save right before each crash, so I'd often resume right where I left off (though not in the middle of a restricted area or mission; the game returns you to a location outside those events if you close out within them).
You do get three save slots, however, so you can have a regular playthrough, a permadeath run, and even a Hard-difficulty Ironman save on one account. These can be uploaded or downloaded from the cloud via Ubisoft Connect (you will need to sign into your Ubisoft account first), so you can at least backup your saves. I know, that's nowhere near the same as save-scumming, but at least you can play Watch Dogs: Legion with some peace of mind.
- This article was updated on:October 28th, 2020
GAME DEALSGet Twitch Prime For Free Right Now and get in-game items, rewards, and free gamesThe Saved Games service gives you a convenient way to saveyour players' game progression to Google's servers. Your game can retrieve thesaved game data to allow returning players to continue a game at their lastsave point from any device.
The Saved Games service makes it possible to synchronize a player's game dataacross multiple devices. For example, if you have a game thatruns on Android, you can use the Saved Games service toallow a player to start a game on their Android phone, and thencontinue playing on a tablet without losing any of their progress. This servicecan also be used to ensure that a player's game playcontinues from where it left off even if their device is lost, destroyed, ortraded in for a newer model.
Note: Before using the Saved Games service, you must firstenable it in theGoogle Play Console.To learn how to implement saved games for your platform, seeClient implementations.
Saved Games basics
A saved game consists of two parts:
- An unstructured binary blob - this data can represent whatever you choose,and your game is responsible for parsing and writing to it.
- Structured metadata - additional propertiesassociated with the binary data that allow Google Play games services to visuallypresent Saved Games in the default Saved Games list user interface (UI), and topresent useful information in theGoogle Play Games app (for example, last updated timestamp).
A game can write an arbitrary number of Saved Games for a single player,subject to user quota, so there is no hard requirement to restrictplayers to a single save file.
Cover images
The Saved Games service provides a visual user experience in addition topersistence features. You are strongly encouraged to associate representativeimages with corresponding save files. If you are using the default Saved Gameslist user interface (UI) provides by the Play Games SDK in your game, the UIwill display these cover images. The cover images may also appear in theGoogle Play Games app.
Descriptions
You can provide a short text description of the content of a particular savedgame. This description is directly displayed to players and should summarizethe state that the saved game represents; for example, 'Fighting the Goblinsin the Dark Woods'.
Quota
Developers are not charged for any saved game data that's stored in the cloud.Instead, this data is counted against the player's Google Drive quota - younever have to worry about it. The only quota that game developers need to careabout is their Google Drive API quota.
Read/Write isolation
All Saved Games are stored in your players' Google Drive Application DataFolder. This folder can only be read and written by your game - it cannot beviewed or modified by other developers' games, so there is additional protectionagainst data corruption. In addition, Saved Games are insulated from directtampering by players so they cannot modify individual Saved Games.
Offline support
Your game can still read and write to a saved game when the player's device isoffline, but will not be able to sync with Google Play games services untilnetwork connectivity is established. Once reconnected, Google Play games servicesasynchronously updates the saved game data on Google's servers.
Conflict resolution
Poker reina wallpapers. When using the Saved Games service, your game may encounter conflicts whenattempting to save data. These conflicts can occur when a user is running morethan one instance of your application on different devices or computers. Yourapplication must be able to resolve these conflicts in a way that provides thebest user experience.
Typically, data conflicts occur when an instance of your application is unableto reach the Saved Games service while attempting to load data or save it. Ingeneral, the best way to avoid data conflicts is to always load the latest datafrom the service when your application starts up or resumes, and save data tothe service with reasonable frequency. However, it is not always possible toavoid data conflicts. Your application should make every effort to handleconflicts such that your users' data is preserved and that they have a goodexperience.
Limits
Google Play games services currently enforce size limits on binary data and coverimage sizes of 3 MB and 800 KB respectively.
Saved game metadata
The structured metadata for a saved game contains these these properties:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| ID | A unique string generated by Google Play games services for this saved game. Use this ID to refer to the saved game in your game clients. |
| Name | A developer-supplied short name for the saved game, for example 'Save slot 1' or 'PlayerName_Save1'. This is not shown to players. |
| Description | A developer-supplied description of the saved game. |
| Last modified | Timestamp in milliseconds generated by Google Play games services for when the saved game was last updated. |
| Played time | A developer-supplied time (in milliseconds) to display on the saved game. This value should represent how long the player has played the corresponding save game. For example, a played time value of 3600000 will be displayed by Google Play games services as '1 hr'. |
| Cover image | This is an optional, developer-supplied property that contains information about the cover image. |
Save Slot Unlock Progress Card
Client implementations
Save Slot Unlock Progress Software
To learn how to implement Saved Games for your platform, see the following resources:
