This section is here to tell you that in August of 2022 I had a 2600x and the game still didn't work even after I got my 5600x. In fact I still had this issue even after upgrading to 32 GB of RAM. In other words this doesn't require an upgrade unless you want to or if this guide works but your PC doesn't perform like you want it to. Just make sure your spec meeting or exceeding the minimum or this guide may not help. I also recommend Windows 10 because that is the same OS I used to get this game up and running without or with minimum issue.

Step one may seem obvious but sometimes drivers are an issue for other games. In my case specifically drivers were not the issue in getting the game to start let alone run for hours. With that said you mileage may vary. That being said if you as the reader of this guide think the drivers are an issue, if the game still doesn't work I'd suggest using the DDU driver remover to roller back drivers or erase possible corrupted drivers. I didn't use and maybe I was lucky since I didn't need DDU but it can be last resort. However, this isn't a guide for DDU and I don't plan on adding one here. Please go to reddit or google it yourself for proper guide and use DDU at your own risk. With that out of the way updating your drivers to latest is the best and most basic move you can make to resolve bugs from older drivers.

Again another obvious step but in order to work you'll need to install it on the drive with the OS. Or at least that was what Ubisoft support told me at the beginning of June when I resolved the issue. It makes it easier for the Ubisoft connect app to interact with the game. Speaking of, the app is unavoidable because Watch Dogs 2 will autoinstall Ubisoft Connect's old version before the app is update to Ubisoft Connect. This is why you may need Windows 10 as the new version, I suspect, doesn't work on Windows 7 or 8. Since I don't have either this is the best I can come up with.

This step will involve editing or deleting files. This step has been mentioned in several other guides before to try and get the game working but I don't think they are on the steam forums. Please see the two screenshots.

As you can see one is of the gamerprofile.xml file within the game files and the other is the full list of files for the steam application found in file explorer. In the screenshot with the gamerprofile, please open the file in notepad and scroll to the DeferredFXQuality setting and replace "console" with "pc". I don't think it matters if it has capitals but please follow the format within the file and keep the setting lower case. Please keep the quotation marks as is and then save the file.

Then make your way to the steam application within your file explorer and within the 'bin' file of the Watch Dogs 2 game file you can delete the Dbghelp.dll file. I say "can" because for me it doesn't seem to matter if the file is deleted or not as I can still open and play the game. However, many online guides recommend this file be edited with it being all lower case or outright deleted completely to get the game to work. It make no difference to my situation but it may help you if need be. If the file is needed, it can be restored by verifying the game files. Be warned that verifying the game files will restore all game files to their default which means the changes made to the gamerprofile.xml file with be back to default.

Open up the steam application on your computer and make your way to your library. Right click on the cog on the right side and click on properties. In the command line please enter "-eac_launcher" but without the quotations, then close the window. That is all for everything outside the game.

This last step seems to have solved my issue the best over all the other steps because without this step I would only be able to have the game open for fifteen minutes. For whatever reason there seems to be an issue with the game's full screen monitor settings that make it impossible to play for longer than 15 minutes. For this last step change your in game settings from fullscreen to borderless full screen. Save then restart the game to apply the new settings. I don't know why full screen doesn't work but after I changed it I can now play the game for longer than an hour. As it turns out it was UbiSoft support that made the suggestion and when I applied the setting it worked.

If none of these steps work and DDU doesn't help, please contact Ubisoft support. Submit a ticket to their website because that is the best way to resolve bug like these. The more we complain and send bug reports the more likely they narrow bugs like these down, since this guide may not work if another bug gets introduced that break this guide I made. Keep in mind it took 5 months to figure this out and this may or may not work for you as it has for me.