Assassin’s Creed III DLC is erasing player data

Players picking up the new downloadable content for Assassin's Creed III should exercise caution, as Ubisoft has confirmed that a glitch in the process is causing players' save files to be erased.

Careful downloading Assassin’s Creed III downloadable expansions like The Hidden Secrets and The Tyranny of King Washington. Those add-ons to Ubisoft’s adventure game can cause no end of trouble if they’re downloaded at the wrong time. A number of players on Ubisoft’s official forum are reporting that the downloadable content is erasing their save files, forcing them to completely restart the game.

A thread opened on Ubisoft’s forum on Tuesday with one user reporting that downloading The Hidden Secrets caused their money to disappear as well as all story missions to reset but all side missions to be labeled as complete. While this user reported the problem on PlayStation 3, others playing on Xbox 360 followed up and reported the same problem.

Ubisoft representatives popped into the forum to confirm that the glitch is in fact real. “Just a quick heads up, we’re able to reproduce this issue at the studio and are working on a fix/workaround,” reads Ubisoft’s statement, “From what we can tell, this problem seems to be rare and should generally only affect a small number of players. That said, we’re taking the speedy and complete resolution of this very seriously.”

While an update isn’t ready as of this writing, Ubisoft did post a tip on how to avoid the problem with the following statement: “AVOIDING THIS BUG: Do not load your saved AC3 game while the DLC is downloading in the background. This appears to be the key trigger for this bug. You can do anything else you want to do, just don’t load up your saved game and play while the DLC is downloading.”

Assassin’s Creed III is just the latest of 2012’s most popular games to be afflicted by glitches that can potentially wipe out a player’s progress. Shortly after Borderlands 2 was released in September, players discovered that the game was suddenly deleting their “Bad Ass Rank” in the game, closing off a number of perks as well as side missions.

Ubisoft especially has been affected by consumer-unfriendly glitches. The company’s Uplay client—an app for purchasing Ubisoft games as well as playing them—was vulnerable to hacking due to a specific plug-in.

The age of digital distribution is great since developers can fix bugs in games following release, but digital distribution causes plenty of new headaches in the process.