How to Fix Watch Dogs: Legion Crashes, Black Screen, Performance, No Sound and Other Issues

Are you experiencing crashes, black screens or more issues in Watch Dogs: Legion? Here are some fixes you can try.

Watch Dogs: Legion is out right now on PC and consoles and, sadly, it is infested with game-breaking bugs, crashes, and performance issues. Ubisoft has already rolled out a day one patch to address some of the most annoying issues. However, it still isn’t enough. The company will release another patch today with more fixes. Until then, we’ve devised a list of issues you might face and what you can do to try and fix them.

Watch Dogs: Legion crashes at startup

Although random crashes are a result of deployment issues on part of Ubisoft, there could be problems with your security that causes Watch Dogs: Legion to crash. The first thing you might want to try is run the game as an administrator and whitelist it from your antivirus and firewall programs. If the crashes persist, try running the game in windowed mode.

In-game crash

This is a classic issue that is, most of the time, related to GPU performance. It could be that your graphics card cannot handle the pressure before or after a cutscene or load a new area.  You can try switching your most demanding graphics options like the resolution and max FPS and check if the crashes stop.

Also, try closing any unnecessary programs and browser windows to ensure that 100% CPU and RAM usage isn’t the issue here.

Make sure you have the correct DirectX version. Watch Dogs Legion runs with both DirectX11 and 12, with the latter being necessary for Ray Tracing to work.

It’s worth mentioning here that Ubisoft is aware of various crash reports and they are already working on patches. Another patch is expected next week so stay tuned for that. If you are playing the game on consoles, make sure that your game is up to date. This will fix your crash issues.

Low Performance – FPS

Yet another issue that could be related to high CPU and RAM usage, so this is the first place you need to look by closing programs and browser windows. Then we’ll move on to your GPU. You might want to check your GPU drivers and make sure they’re up to date. If that’s not the issue, try switching off some of the most demanding graphics features in the game like v-sync and Ray Tracing or try out windowed screen. As a last resort, check your GPU settings and set it to best performance on your respective manufacturer.

Black screen at startup

Any of the aforementioned practices could help you with black screens as all these are universal fixes. This means you can follow the steps:

  1. Run game as administrator
  2. Whitelist Watch Dogs: Legion from your antivirus and firewall
  3. Update GPU Drivers
  4. Lower graphics settings in-game
  5. Run in borderless or windowed mode

No Sound in Watch Dogs: Legion

If you get no sound feedback in the game then the first thing you’ll need to check is whether or not you have a wrong sound device active. This may seem silly but is a common culprit. If you are 100% sure this is not the case, then check whether or not you have Windows Sonic Headphones enabled and disable it. Check if the game runs correctly now. If not, then go to your playback settings and set the Default format to something with 16bit. If that doesn’t work too then check whether or not your sounds card drivers need updating.

Keyboard-mouse not working

The one thing you can try to prevent Watch Dogs Legion from denying access to your mouse and keyboard is to make sure that there are no other devices plugged into your PC that the game could mistakenly take for a peripheral. If this doesn’t work then try disabling the enhanced mouse movement from mouse settings. If you have more issues on that front, you should wait for the next patch or contact Ubisoft’s support.

No Auto-Save

The no auto-save issue is currently in the known-issue list for the developers and there is no apparent fix for now. Until the next patch is up and you can depend on auto-saving, make sure to manually save after some time so that you know you are up to date at all times.

These are all the fixes we have for Watch Dogs: Legion errors and crashes right now. If you have more specific problems you should go ahead and contact Ubisoft’s support center or wait until the next patch rolls out to fix more issues.

Always looking for a deep story, empathetic characters, and a great soundtrack in video games. Hardcore game hoarder and a strong believer that one day Xbox will win the console war.