Following a rather successful showing at The Game Awards, Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is finally available to play on Xbox consoles – something quite a few people are happy about. However, if you’re one of those people, you might actually want to wait a little longer before you jump in and play. A growing number of BG3 players are reporting a Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox save bug online that is deleting hours of progress and corrupting entire save game files. So, if you’re pressing through The Forgotten Realms, you should really stop and wait for a hotfix update.
When you take a look at all the new Xbox games we’ve been able to play as of late, it’s hard not to name Baldur’s Gate 3 as one of the best games available on Xbox Series X|S – even though it’s just dropped. It’s easily one of the best RPG games of all time – as the six awards (including GOTY) at the 2023 The Game Awards shows – and one videogame everyone with an Xbox console should give a go. Although, as controversial as this might sound given the fact that Xbox players have already waited months to play Baldur’s Gate 3, you should wait before you play Baldur’s Gate 3; anything you do right now might not actually count much at all.
Why won’t it count? Well, an increasing number of frustrated fans are reporting a save state bug affecting Baldur’s Gate 3 on both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S online – an issue that is completely deleting hours of your progress through the game. This isn’t just something affecting a single gameplay session, either; several players are reporting a complete corruption of their save game data for Baldur’s Gate 3 – something that forces them to start from scratch.
As you can see from this Reddit post (which is just one example of quite a few appearing online since the Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox release date) or this GameFAQs forum thread expressing the same sentiment, Xbox players are unexplainedly losing all their Baldur’s Gate 3 progression after experiencing a crash on Xbox Series X|S. If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this issue already, the best way to preserve what save game data you have is to just stop playing.
We know this isn’t exactly what you want to hear, but looking at all the reports from players experiencing this issue online (of which, a quick search will show you quite a few), there’s no single identifiable cause for the crash and subsequent save game bug. While players are all reporting that this occurs after Baldur’s Gate 3 crashes, these crashes are all happening at different stages of the game – with some players just in the RPG’s menus when it occurs.
As there’s nothing actually stopping this happening multiple times (so, deleting all your save game data and reinstalling the game is rather pointless, the only thing we can suggest right now is that you head over to Larian Studios’ suppport page to report the bug and then stop playing. With all this popping up over the weekend, we can’t imagine Larian Studios’ silence on this issue is intentional – although, that silence is frustrating. From what we can tell, it seems to be an issue with Baldur’s Gate 3’s ability to sync up to the cloud – which is where all your Xbox save game data is stored.
So, while it does definitely seem to be an issue with Baldur’s Gate 3 and not Xbox as a whole (as all your other save game data should still be fine), the fact that it’s an issue intrinsically involving the two could make it a little trickier for Larian Studios to solve. However, only time will tell how long this will take to fix – and, with any luck, we won’t have to wait too long to find out.
While you wait, though, there’s nothing stopping you from preparing for your next Baldur’s Gate 3 adventure. You can find out about the best Baldur’s Gate 3 class here – and, with BG3 players spending over 8,000 hours in the Character Creator, it’s clearly not a choice you should take lightly. If you’re into your magic, you can check out all the best Baldur’s Gate 3 spells right here, too. Oh, and it’s also worth checking out the best Baldur’s Gate 3 party options while you’re here, as well. We know Astarion is great, but you need to think about more than witty banter when it comes to building a squad that compliments your Tav.