Watch Dogs: Legion's multiplayer modes have been delayed until next year so that Ubisoft can try and fix some of the major bugs. Obviously this is a game that was already substantially delayed several times and had its multiplayer already set to be staggered, so it's clear that this thing came in hotter than a stick of PS5 RAM. I've seen reports of bugs causing massive loss in progress and other issues so this is not just minor graphical glitches or weird behavior. The game is still, apparently, quite broken for a lot of people. Meanwhile this is also one of the most heavily discounted recent releases during the Black Friday sales, with most places already offering it for half off, even though it hasn't been out for a full month yet and this is a relatively light holiday season in terms of major new multiplat releases.

Some of this may be attributable to COVID-19 and other issues, but the fact that companies continue to launch broken software is distressing. So is the recent trend of launching multiplayer after single player, especially when the promised multiplayer now can get pushed back significantly turning your new game purchase into a delayed pre-order after they already have your money. It's good that they're going to fix the game, but it's very bad that they're willing to take people's money and then not give them what they promised on time. This is very different from pushing back an unreleased game where generally people can get refunds if they no longer want it. Pushing back multiplayer can also be very bad if a game is tanking because the time it comes out people may have moved on.

This also ties into my previous post about data caps. If you have a game that requires constant patches and one where you add the multiplayer after the fact, guess what, that's going to eat a ton of people's data even if they buy physical.

While these business practices (shipping games full of bugs, pushing back promised components people have already paid for, eating up data with no concern for the user) are nothing new, they all suck, and are things that gaming consumers tolerate but no other form of entertainment seems to have.

Watch Dogs Legion should have been delayed further and if it actually is tanking (as indicated by the quick and savage price cuts) Ubisoft has nobody to blame but itself.

I agree 100%.

I paid full price for Rayman Legends, Child of Light, and possibly one other small-to-medium sized Ubisoft game during the last gen. Watch Dogs: Legion was the first big open-world game I bought from the publisher, and I paid full price, because:

1. I thought the recruitment system was novel,
2. I wanted to reward them taking risks with the core mechanic of a major franchise,
3. I wanted something meaty to tide me over until Cyberpunk 2077 comes out

I also expected the game to...you know...function, especially since it was already delayed from this spring.

I'm playing on Xbox Series X, and the game failed to save half my progress during my very first play session. This is a showstopper defect for an open-world game that relies on auto-saves; it should have been delayed. I cherish my free time too much to put up with lost progress, so I immediately shelved the game when it happened. Now I'm playing (and loving) A Wolf Among Us and Sea of Thieves.

I've read that a fix for the auto-save defect is planned for mid-December, by which point I'll (hopefully) be playing Cyberpunk 2077. I probably won't re-visit Watch Dogs: Legion until January. Who knows how deeply it'll be discounted by then? Like you suggested, I imagine the multiplayer will be dead on arrival due to players having moved on.

At the end of the day, I'm not upset, but I definitely won't be buying anymore games from Ubisoft on day 1. It's sad that their marketing for the game won them a new customer, who they subsequently lost thanks to poor product quality.

Obligatory "when are they patching in fun?"

Seriously, though, Watchdogs: Legion was a neat concept that got buried under the design inbreeding at Ubisoft. No matter how hard they try, they just can't seem get away from "climb tower, do checklist."

I also have to wonder whether multiplayer is even a thing people want? I remember it being kind of bad in the original Watchdogs because it was constantly interrupting the single-player stuff you were trying to do (invasion always seemed to happen just as you were about 10 feet from starting your next mission). I have to imagine that it would be more cooperative in Legion, but I have a hard time seeing the need for it.

@therealturk: Does Legion have towers? Watch_Dogs 1 did but 2 did not. I actively hated the first game (one of my least favorite games I've ever finished) but I thought the second was a substantial improvement. It still wasn't a huge amount of fun to play, but I thought it had a good version of San Francisco and the main cast was charming. It was pleasantly mediocre. I did have to turn off the multiplayer because it was even more intrusive than in the first game, just constantly spawning people into your world like you were playing Destiny or something.

I imagine the people who want to play Legions multiplayer are either people who are into griefing, people who have a crew of friends to play with, or just people who are looking for more to do in the game, since if it's structured like WD2 a lot of the content is multiplayer focused.

Regardless it's an on-box feature people paid for and some people might have friends they were hoping to play with during winter break. Whoops.

I do think most people want the game to save their progress, even if they don't want to play online, though.

My heart goes out to the folks running into the really bad issues. I have the hot take that hard saves should be part of the TRC/XR/Guidelines for releasing on any console. I'm so fucking sick of crossing my fingers and hoping that my progress was saved when I quit a game. Hard saves might alleviate, or at least give a firmer set of reproduction steps for, these progress loss bugs. As an added bonus, players can have multiple play throughs of a game on a single account. Imagine if once you started watching a movie you had to make a new fucking Netflix account to start it from the beginning?

Anyway, I don't care about multiplayer in this game at all. I was a big fan of Watch Dogs 2 and didn't touch any of the DLC because it all seemed focused on the multiplayer. As far as I'm concerned, it's a blessing that I can play this game without having to concern myself with their "invasion" mechanics.

@hatking: I think that both hard saves and multiple save slots should be if not required by console manufacturers at least standardized in all games. Avengers had an even worse issue where you couldn't actually replay the story missions with your original account at all. At least Watch_Dogs 2 let you play them from a menu. And the story was the best part of the Avengers game! Fortunately they fixed that with a patch, but I dunno WTF they were thinking with that decision (except maybe to force people to play the online and hopefully spend money.)

Limiting hard saves made sense on cartridge based systems where save slots cost actual money to implement, but haven't made any sense since the PS1/N64 era (N64 had cartridges but also memory cards) and make approximately 0 sense in 2020. It's not like you can't have autosaving too, many games do that and it was much more common in the 7th gen to allow both, but some developers seem to think that having only autosaves is better because it's more seamless and they are very very wrong. Even when it works you often have to figure out a way to trigger it, and in the real world people often have to save and quit in a hurry. I think all single player games should also allow mid-mission saving. Don't even get me started on games where you can't pause. Has nobody ever had to take a phone call or use the bathroom? Who are these developers and are they even humans?

I am 100% on board the "Watch_Dogs multiplayer is very bad" train but some people appear to like it and some people play everything co-op and those people should get the modes they were promised and paid for. For people who prefer single player you can at least turn multiplayer off (or at least could in WD2.)

I think that at least some of the WD2 DLC was single player, not that it really matters.

@bigsocrates: I’m with you. As a person who wants to analyze my favorite media, being prompted with the threat of “you’ll lose all progress” when I try to start a new game, really bums me the hell out. I’m also with you on the pause thing. I don’t play games that don’t let me pause.

I was kinda interested in what I was able to play of this but yeah I reached a point where the product would simply no longer function. Hard crash to desktop after about 30 seconds of driving down the street. Repeatable.

Not really on topic but also very on topic, but this game feels like "old" videogames of this generation, the 2013-2014 era where Giantbomb decreed "Stop shipping broke ass games". Honestly this might be worse than Assassins Creed Unity and the crap that went with it. I honestly thought that the video game induistry got past that shit but this year seems like we are slipping back into it.

@camitalo: I mean Unity was broken and fucked up in its own ways but I do remember being able to at least play the game.