Unfortunately, the issues that’ve been causing Baldur’s Gate 3 players on Xbox to lose their saves are still a thing as of writing, but Larian has provided another handy workaround for those keen to plough on without having their progress disappear.
Since Xbox BG3’s Game Awards shadow drop, these issues have unsurprisingly put a bit of a dampener on fans’ ability to enjoy it on the new platform. After all, you can’t exactly rush all the way through the colossal game in one sitting in order to minimise the chance of having your progress zapped.
While Xbox and Larian have already confirmed that a proper solution to the firmware-based bug is in the works and provided some steps to help players minimise their risk, the latter has recently taken to Twitter to suggest that you make use of its cross-save system as a temporary workaround.
“Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working on it, but obviously during the holidays everyone is working at lower capacity so it may take a while before a proper fix becomes available,” the studio said, before outlining the steps you’ll need to follow in order to execute the cross-save workaround.
These steps are as follows:
1. Create a Larian account at https://larian.com/account.
2. Go to the options menu from the main menu. Under gameplay, activate cross-saves, linking your Larian and Xbox accounts.
3. From now on, your last 5 saves will automatically be uploaded to the Larian servers. It is important that you do not exit the game before the upload is finished. The upload is finished when the message ‘Syncing cloud save’ is no longer visible.
4. If the firmware bug occurs, you will need to re-activate the cross-save functionality in the options screen. This will give you access to the save games that were successfully uploaded.
“We will make this process more fluid and extend the number of save games that get uploaded in the coming days,” Larian added. “We’re doing everything we can to ensure this problem – which we understand is unique – is resolved as quickly as possible, and we’ll keep you up to date with progress.”
Naturally, VG247 is keeping an eye out for a full fix for the problem, which Larian says is “a firmware issue” that causes the game to think a save has been successfully completed before the file has finished being committed to disk, and as soon as one is available, we’ll let you know.
While you wait, why not check out our explanation of why Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of our 9 million GOTY picks for 2023 and see if our reasons for loving it match your own.