My son was playing Watch_Dogs on our PS4 Tuesday, and had just completed a takedown of a Gang Hideout, and went to spend his freshly minted skill point only to discover that ALL of his skills, money, outfits, etc had just disappeared from his gamer profile. He still had actual access to some of his skills (blowing a steam main, but not focus), so his actual gameplay is now critically impacted. And he can’t use his new skill points to backfill some of those critical skills because primary skills like Profiling are blank (although this is another skill he can actually use), and not selectable.
I called and spoke to Ben at Ubisoft Tech Support (919-460-9778 9am – Midnight (EST), Monday-Friday | 12pm – 9pm (EST), Saturday-Sunday), and he didn’t have any potential work-arounds or solutions for us. He said he could only take a report and feed it to the Developer Team, and that they would in turn research this and call us back within 48 hours. Based on his attitude and knowledge of the issues at stake, I highly doubted this would go any further than his round file.
Well, I’ve since received two e-mails: one confirming my submission of a trouble ticket, and the second echoing the responses my son provided to his questions. The second one said that they considered the issue resolved, and that if I did nothing, they would close our ticket. Well, no one from the Developer Team has called us back, and the problem is still apparent for my son, so of course we consider the issue still open and valid, so I chose the relevant link to express my concerns.
Researching this further, I found that the same problem appears to be following Ubisoft on other titles like Assassin’s Creed and
There is also a thread more than a year old on the UBI.com forums that speaks to this issue. This is one of the more tame threads:
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/884733-Skills-reset?p=10965398#post10965398
Since Ubisoft is hesitant to admit that their programs have problems saving user progress securely, I’ll illustrate to users how to manually back up their save games on their PS4 through this quick “how-to” for those who don’t know.
Hit PlayStation button on your controller, navigate to [Settings] > [Application Saved Data Management] > [Saved Data in System Storage]. From there, you can either Upload to Online Storage if you have subscribed to PlayStation Plus, or you can “Copy to USB Storage Device”. Obviously this isn’t specific to Ubisoft games, so backup all of your games. Most will take only 35M per game, so a simple 1G thumbdrive can hold hundreds of different games.
My guess is that Ubisoft won’t want to spend any additional resources on fixing this issue, so taking the steps above to manually backup your files is probably your best bet at this time.