Baldur’s Gate III is taking over Steam right now, but one small save bug is stopping some players in their tracks and forcing them to lose valuable progress in their journeys.
As first spotted by IGN, some players on the game’s Steam Discussion page and subreddit have encountered an issue where they can’t save their game or load an old file. They were able to create their characters and begin playing the game for 30 minutes to an hour before first encountering the issue. “I tried exiting and restarting the game,” wrote one player. “Had to go through the character creation and everything again. Still having the same issue...”
The problem appears to occur for some players when the game attempts to sync cloud saves. They’ve had succes with the following workaround from Steam user [NSC]Hybelkanin:
1. Turn off the Cloud Sync to Baldur’s Gate 3
2. Remove the folder “C:\Users\myUser\AppData\Local\Larian Studios\Baldur’s Gate 3"
3. Start the game and not enable the Cloud Sync.
Read More: 14 Things To Know Before Starting Baldur’s Gate 3
It hasn’t worked for everyone, however. Larian Studios is aware of the issues and has already posted a detailed support page for players facing bugs that pevent them from saving their data. Among other things, it suggest players take the following precautions:
Shut down all non-essential programs before starting the game
Try browsing to the ‘C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Larian Studios\Baldur’s Gate 3\LevelCache’ folder and delete the contents
Try verifying local files in the Steam library by right clicking on the game and select Properties, switch to the Local Files tab and then click on the ‘Verify Integrity of Game Files...’ button.
Try browsing to the ‘C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Larian Studios’ folder and rename the ‘Baldur’s Gate 3' subfolder.
Try doing a clean boot and then test the game.
Larian Studios says that some players have experienced save irregulatiries with anti-virus and backup programs that monitor disk activity like BitDefender and Windows Defender, so make sure those are up-to-date or turn them off altogether. The biggest thing you can do is just check to make sure your save button is working in the menu so that you don’t play for hours without realizing something’s up.
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that the issue is super widespread at the moment, and so far players haven’t reported running into tons of other bugs, crashes, or performance issues. Fingers crossed, Baldur’s Gate III appears to be one of the cleaner blockbuster PC launches in recent memory.