My just under 100 hour honour mode save corrupted. I don't remember exactly how, but I think there was a crash or I accidentally quit the game while it was still saving somehow.
This is my first play through, and I was far along Act II,
getting ready to join Halsin on the journey to Shadowfell after clearing the Gauntlet of Shar, but not wanting to continue further since I still haven't made it to Moonrise,
when I saved and exited the game. I had gotten very invested in the story and characters, and although I'll want to do another run sometime, it's less fun when you haven't seen the conclusion of many of the choices I've made so far.
Few pointers:
* Yes, I was dumb to start my first playthrough in honour mode. I'll own up to that poor choice. I died early on, but kept it since it forces me to stick to my choices kind of like in real D&D.
* Yes, I took a long while to reach that point, but I was simply enjoying the incredibly detailed environment and story to the fullest.
* Yes, I've submitted a report to Larian and I know that this is a known problem.
* No, I have never installed any mods into the game.
Here's how the problem describes itself:
There is no character name displayed in the load menu, and the location beneath 'Manual Save' is empty. The Play Time counter shows 1193044h 52m. The version says: "- Deprecated version". Thumbnail is accurate. Clicking Load Game does nothing except clicking and giving a sound cue. In the local save folder, there was a meta.pck and SaveSize.txt files. The meta.pck is 143 bytes and the SaveSize.txt just has a "0" written in it if opened in Notepad. As I said in the pointers section, there were no mods installed.
I've tried clearing the LevelCache folder and verified game files to no avail, which isn't surprising since it seems to be an issue with the .lsv save file. I tried to delete all save files so that the game would open up 'for the first time' prompting me to select brightness and profanity settings and letting the cloud storage sync the backed saves. This seems to be the method that works for a lot of people, but it made no difference with me. I suspect this workaround fixes patch related issues, but there have not been any updates or patches during this playthrough (started mid May) to my knowledge. I also tried renaming the Baldur's Gate 3 folder in my Local Appdata folder, but it didn't work either.
Is there anything else that could be a potential fix? The problem is clearly the save file itself and the cloud copy seems to be equally corrupted unfortunately, so most workarounds won't do any good.
Is there any potential to manually unpack the save file and edit it to try to salvage it? The save doesn't have to be
perfect, managing to salvage the character and quest and choice progression, would make me very very happy. I don't have much experience with modding or programming in general, but perhaps this information can be salvaged from the file, even if there is something else that is corrupting it, or is it just going to be an ineligible random mess of encoded information?
I tried to recreate a broken save file by forcing the game to crash through task manager as it was saving, but it never corrupted. Unfortunately I don't remember how this came to be, as I didn't play the game for 3 days after the save corrupted. There may have been an in-game crash as I was exiting. Perhaps it was simply normal. I didn't notice until I pressed 'Continue' like I usually do, and it loaded an older test save I started.
I'm not very hopeful however, but wanted to post it here just in case. If there is a fix, hopefully someone else who has the same problem can stumble on this post as well. Any help is much appreciated!
