A fix for the save-deleting bug that has blighted Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox is coming next week, as Microsoft has apparently found the root cause for the issue in the Xbox Series X|S system software.
This will be a part of a system software update that will go through Microsoft’s usual automated rollout over the course of a week, but Larian Studios state that Baldur’s Gate 3 players will be able to manually update their consoles from 16th January.
The studio wrote on the thing that was once Twitter, “Microsoft have identified the cause of the save bug on Xbox, and will be issuing a firmware update to fix it!”
“You’ll be able to update your console manually on the 16th of January, or wait a week longer for the update to roll out globally.”
However, this is all going on with Larian’s direct channel to Microsoft’s tech teams, and they note that, “Although we haven’t been able to independently verify this fix, we’re optimistic that Microsoft have gotten to the bottom of it!”
This save bug has been a blight on the game’s launch for the Xbox Series X, which came during last month’s The Game Awards. Shortly after its release, some players started to report that their saved progress was being wiped out completely. Larian found a workaround that involved enabling cloud saves to their own servers as a fallback, but could not fix the issue on their own, as it related to the Xbox system software in some way.
The search for a fix has likely been extended by developers downing tools over the Christmas and New Year holidays, but we’re thankfully close to a resolution.
This isn’t the only problem that Xbox players have faced, though, with the parallel saga of users getting banned for game captures that feature nudity being auto-uploaded to the Xbox network. Microsoft’s only suggestion there is to turn off the default setting that auto-uploads captures, but hopefully they’ll address their banning policy and implement features to filter 18+ rated games.
And all of this has come after the game was delayed on Xbox because of Microsoft’s understandable policy of requiring feature parity across Xbox Series X|S consoles. Thankfully, Larian was able to carve out an exception to this rule, so that split-screen could be shelved on Series S. In our experience, the game works marvellously well on the lower powered machine with this one caveat.