Arkane’s recent and well-regarded immersive sim isn’t the only death loop of the fall. Thanks to a rare autosave bug in Far Cry 6 that spawns players milliseconds before a death, some players have found themselves stuck in an unbreakable feedback loop, with no apparent way to break the cycle.
Far Cry 6, out last week for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, is the latest in Ubisoft’s long-running series of open-world shooters. Set on a fictional island nation in the Caribbean, you spend your time doing things you’ve done in previous Far Cry games: capturing bases, shooting poorly dressed baddies, and driving vehicles that must’ve been worked on by the automotive shop in John Wick. Notably, Far Cry 6 doesn’t allow for a manual save, a divergence from the prior mainline entry, 2018’s Far Cry 5. This has screwed some players, creating a save file in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment before a death.
“A bug has wiped my entire campaign because every time I load the one possible save, my character falls three feet to the ground and dies. lmao,” Alice Caldwell-Kelly, co-host of the Trashfuture podcast, said on Twitter. Videos on Reddit show a similar fate. One, in which a player spawns a few feet off the ground only to land and then instantly die, laments the loss of “20 hours of gameplay down the drain.” Another, showing basically the same exact thing, highlights the “DEATHLOOOOOOOOOP!!!”
There’s no easy way out. Trying to use the game’s “reload last autosave” option—found in the system menu—may sound like a fix, but it boots up your most recent autosave, not your second-most recent one (as “last” could imply). Fast-traveling to any bases, hideouts, or checkpoints you’ve unlocked will indeed create a new autosave file, but Far Cry 6 doesn’t let you fast-travel when you’re bleeding out. Instead, you’re stuck there, gray screen
When reached for comment, a representative for Ubisoft told Kotaku, “The dev team is looking into the issue for a permanent fix. In the meantime, players can have someone join them in co-op.”
Noted.
The insistence on autosave makes a certain amount of sense. Far Cry, as a series, thrives with chaos and unpredictability. By removing the option to manually create save files, Far Cry 6 forces players to live with their mistakes. It’s a similar design choice underlying Returnal, the PS5-exclusive roguelike that made waves earlier this fall. If players could create saves whenever they wanted, they could save-scum their way past the game’s inherent difficulty hurdles. Even Deathloop’s lack of manual saves has irked some players. Since the autosave triggers infrequently, it’s effectively impossible to play Deathloop in bite-sized sessions.
For games that put the “play your way” mentality on a pedestal, relying solely on the autosave really seems to get in the way.