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.
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.
