‘The Witcher 3’ Save Bug Biting Xbox One Owners, How To Avoid
Xbox One owners that picked up The Witcher III: Wild Hunt should be aware that the game currently has a save bug that could cause you to potentially lose hours of play time. Fortunately, it is easily avoidable, as long as you take a couple of simple steps when finishing your play session.
The Witcher III players on the game’s official forums and Xbox One subreddit have reported that they have lost hours of play time after the title’s auto-save feature stopped working. Some reported that the ability to manually save the game failed, as well.
This save bug appears to be tied to the Xbox One’s ability to suspend and resume play. Specifically, The Witcher III will experience save errors if you back out to the dashboard, open another application, and then open the game back. It can also occur when you turn off the Xbox One in the “Instant-On” power mode versus the “Energy Saving” power mode that shuts the console all the way down.
The Witcher III‘s save and checkpoint features are being disabled somehow, meaning that any play after the point that a player switches apps or turns the console off in Instant On mode is not being saved. To avoid this, it is suggested that you quit the game when you are done.
Quitting a game on the Xbox One can be done via the following steps.
- Press the Guide button on the Xbox One controller.
- With The Witcher III highlighted on the dashboard, press the menu button (the hamburger button to the right of the Guide button).
- Select the Quit option from the menu.
Shutting the Xbox One all the way down, either by pressing the power button for 10 seconds or changing the power settings to “Energy Saving” power mode, will also work. Just be aware that this makes the console take longer to boot up.
Obviously, it also helps if you save your progress manually in The Witcher III prior to ending a play session. Don’t rely on the auto-save and checkpoints to capture everything for you.
The Witcher III developer CD Projekt Red has acknowledged the existence of the bug. “We are treating this issue very seriously and hope to deliver a fix as soon as possible!” a developer wrote in response to comments on the forum. Updates to the PC version of the game have come quickly since its release just two days ago. We’ll have to see how fast they can get this save issue fixed for the Xbox One.
If for some reason your Witcher III save file becomes corrupt, you can restore a previous version of the save file from the Xbox LIVE cloud. Simply highlight the game in the Xbox One user interface, press the Menu button, and Manage Game. From there, you can delete the local save data for the game so that the save file in the cloud will be copied down the next time you start the game.
[Images via The Witcher III]
