Baldur's Gate 3 Deleted Save Bug Continues on Xbox, Larian Offers a Cross-Save Work-Around

It's been a few weeks since Larian Studios surprised players with an Xbox Series X|S release during the Game Awards, and some players have faced a bug that deletes their saves upon exiting the game throughout the holidays. Microsoft hasn't yet been able to patch it — but Larian Studios now has a temporary fix.

Yesterday, in a post on X/Twitter, Larian Studios acknowledged the bug and said Microsoft hasn't been able to fix it yet because less people are working over the holidays. Instead, it announced the following work-around that lets players make sure their games are saved:

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.

Larian Studios mentioned that the issue is happening because of a firmware issue that causes the game to believe a save was completed when it hasn't been fully committed to the disk. It also plans to increase the number of save games that get uploaded via cloud saves to make this work-around easier for players.

"We completely understand that losing progress is frustrating, and unacceptable," Larian Studios wrote in the post. "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."

This isn't the first time Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox has had issues with deleted save files. Despite its issues on Xbox, however, Baldur's Gate 3 has had a great few months. We gave the game a 10/10 in our review, calling it "the new high-water mark for CRPGs." Since then, it's gone on to take home a wealth of awards, including Game of the Year at the Game Awards as well as IGN's own Best RPG and Best PC Game awards.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they've contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.