Soapbox: After The BG3 Saga, I'm Nervous About How Xbox Handles My Save Data

Save corruption/deletion issues have always been a thing.
Understandable that it's frustrating, especially if the systems in place to avoid it malfunction. But i feel it's just a part of gaming since the beginning. Sometimes you just lose that save file.

Recently lost all save files for all my Switch games. I didn't have the subscription, so they weren't on the cloud, and i lost it all changing to a new console. It is what it is

Do the games not save locally on your Xbox aswell if not you wouldnt be able to have a save for any game if you are offline playing or is it that the cloud save overwrites local save games because I'm nearly positive save games still get saved to the console you are using

i just assumed my series x was just saving my games on my hard drive and reading them from there.

so what is it actually doing?

I can image this can put you off gaming forever after losing 100's of hours of gameplay.
I can remember having a Dreamcast, the push in memory card corrupted a few game saves. I took the mem card out, took it to the spare bedroom I was doing up and put a big file through it with a hammer!
Deeply therapeutic at the time..

@MrList it’s all in the cloud so you can access it from multiple devices

This has been a long standing issue. Been happening since the Xbox One.

I've lost saves from Battlefield 4, Tales of Vesperia, Skyrim, Halo 4 and 5, Mass Effect Trilogy, Alan Wake remastered, Shadow of Mordor, and many others.

It is crazy this is just now being looked into due to Baldur's Gate 3.

I assume the reason they don't offer local save backups has something to do with sharing save files to get achievements or something? I remember back when you'd get Demo discs with magazines hat included some save files on to unlock all the characters in a fighting game, or all the racing tracks.

I have lost multiple saves on BG3, and I now refuse to play it until the issue is resolved. I am also in the Insider Alpha ring, so whatever they are testing has not fixed the issue.

I am really disgusted to have lost around 30 hours on this game. I can't believe that QA didn't pick up this issue before launch.

It especially stings that he game won GOTY, was likely held back to be launched during the game awards with this glaring issue that could have been resolved before launch.

Yeah it's definitely a bummer especially for such a long game. I'd probably give up if I put over 10 hours and the save vanished. I remember wiping memory cards back in the day because all my siblings had our own cards. If you swapped on some games while they were still inserted they would corrupt the memory card. Also saving and loading where exponentially worse on n64 and ps1 so we would watch tv while things saved and loaded. Incidents occurred which usually meant you moved to another game.

I had this issue start with Dead Space at the beginning of November.

However for what it’s worth; it never deleted anything. And neither did Like A Dragon Gaiden that I was playing at the same time. I think it’s just Baldur’s Gate that is actually deleting the saves. I’m not worried about any other game as I think it’s a specific issue with BG3. Don’t get me wrong it’s Xbox’s issue but when combined with BG3; everything goes kaput.

For me to fix the issue I had to click “delete all local saves” and then now each game I start just redownloads my save from the cloud and i’m good to go. Everything is good now. But still scared to continue BG3. But I can’t help playing it. Help.

I've not actually had any issues with BG3 yet fortunately but it does make me concerned.

I've been playing on Xbox for only 2 years but never had any problem. Never.
Got all the achievements from Hogwarts Legacy too.

What weird me out about this hug is that whenever I load a game after playing cloud/elsewhere it asks if I want to load the clod save or the local save, so what's happening to the local save in this bug?

lol, I remember an era when you were just glad a game actually loaded (from a tape)….you could wait ages and the game would crash at 99% loaded, or just randomly and repeatedly as you were playing.

Ok games still crash but for 99.9% of the time the modern gamer is living a life of luxury. Sometimes we need to remember that.

It seems like a tipping point has been reached with this issue… I can’t think of a worse problem than this other that the console breaking or games disappearing from my purchased page but that would never happen ….

@Feffster or even better … buying a magazine and typing in the game code for 20 hours and then having to debug it as you typed in sonething wrong…

Sure it's backed up...saved on the console and the cloud

Only game I can recall in years gone by where I've lost a saved game is Horizon on the psvr 2....just went to load it up and I was back at the start and my saved game was randomly gone...so never gonna complete that i wasn't restarting it

It happened to my Starfield save, 38 hours down the drain so I have up on that game unfortunately

This situation begs many questions:

1. Why Baldur's Gate and not other games?
2. What is the cause or known causes?'
3. What happened to the local save?
4. Was there a single save file or multiple deleted?

After a decade or two (Steam and Xbox), I've never had this happen to me. The worst is a message that the cloud save is older than the local save, without having played on another machine.

Games definitely save locally. My cyberpunk 2077 save got corrupted. Every file, unreadable. I was able to recover by DELETING my local save Data and then resynchronizing from the cloud. I didn't lose any progress.

I have a Series X with the 1TB Seagate card and knock on wood i haven’t had a single issue with game saves. But as the old sayings go time is money and time is not something you can buy back. I would be highly upset with a game this long and complex to have to start all over. If i lost a short singe player game i wouldn’t be happy but starting over isn’t the worst thing ever, but lengthy RPG’s is just a no no. Hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else and MS get’s it corrected and soon cause this is saving the time we gamers put in. That should be respected with the highest of quality work to ensure we are invested correctly.

The only time i remember this being an issue was for Starfield when i was switching between my Series X upstairs and Series S downstairs, only come to find out it was because i had over 100 saves since each time i saved it was a new file and it slowed the syncing WAY down. But I did have the option to load the one already on the console or from the cloud, so there is a local save for sure.

It's clearly a problem with the save server farm not having enough bandwidth dedicated to it. Like a low quality network system like Optus in Australia.

@Reaper_cet

Last 2 weeks I also had CP77 saying "Save failed" as the save being pushed to the cloud save servers got rejected due to their terrible input bandwidth/processing-power. They just need a better high-quality server farm for save file storage.

@SAHgamer I think it's a bit of a multifaceted issue. My corrupted CP save was over 500mb in size. I'm sure whatever process they have isn't designed to back up that much Data on a constant basis. I think the games need to figure out how we compress the save files. Half a gig seems excessive.

I lost Starfield Save data about a month ago and tonight I just lost my BG3 data. Thank God I have it backed up to Steam.

@AlwaysPlaying - too true!

I so far have never had this issue on Xbox. I feel for those who have because it has happened to me on other platforms. It sucks but it is what it is.

@abe_hikura it's basically asking you which save do you want to use: the save that's backed up to the cloud where you accessed it on another device or the save that's local to your primary device. Choosing one overtired the other so choosing the local save overwrites the cloud save and choosing the cloud save overwrites the local data, as a sync is done immediately after choosing either.

They also ask this if for example during a sync, the local save made offline was more recent than the last save synced to the cloud. You'll be prompted to either pick last cloud save or the offline local save.

I might be mistaken but this feels like the save files are too large and are hitting the save file partition limits which are in the save settings. The hardrive save then prevents the cloud save from working so you need to delete the local save and let the cloud re-load the save back on your system. I am unsure if you can change the partition size though.

What are save files? Technically they're obviously just a small text list of coordinates of shifted items in the 3d game space and a list of inventory items and a log of quests/missions done and maybe a list of discussion tree selected dialog. So, should be a megabyte or a few in size only.

I agree that Xbox should handle saves slightly different and should give you always the option to backup physically in the console. I did not yet play bg3 but I had an issue in the past with Life is strange true colours where when starting the dlc I got a phone call and had to go out in a rush. When coming back I was received with a message stating "you need to finish the main game before starting the dlc" which I obviously had (the 1000GS says anyways )... Could not turn it around so in the end I gave up and watch a playthrough on YouTube...

Is the bug also deleting local saves?

Cloud saves being deleted is one thing, but local saves as well!?

Been fortunate enough to have never suffered this issue. Only save file 'issue' I get is being asked to choose between a local or cloud save which are identical in size and save date/time.

Xbox’s software has felt like it’s stuck together with bubble gum and tape for a while now. First with the slow as hell dashboard, the store needing updates multiple times a day and now how it handles saves. Not to mention all the rewards points bugs, achievements not unlocking (Still denied my Dark Souls dark ending achievement) and so on. It’s just a mess and makes the experience of being an xbox gamer feel so budget.

I lost my cloud AND hdd save — minimum 200 hours — of Dragons Dogma on XB360. Played it summer '14, and returned to the console a few years later to consolidate old files and stuff.... And nothing was there. Never figured out what happened.