Some Elden Ring PC players are losing in-game progress due to a Steam Cloud error that causes them to overwrite previous saves.
Elden Ring’s PC version continues to have issues, thanks to a new Steam Cloud error that causes players to lose their save data, forcing them to either restart the game from the beginning or continue with chunks of their in-game progress missing. Elden Ring, the latest action role-playing game from FromSoftware, was released last week to almost universal critical acclaim, quickly becoming one of the highest-rated games ever. While the game received positive reviews upon release, it also received some criticism due to technical issues that were not addressed by the developers.
Most importantly, Elden Ring had performance issues that prevented many people from playing it, including those who were using high-end PCs. Despite having computer specs that were above the recommended level, players reported poor graphical performance.
Within the first hour of its release, Elden Ring had over 600,000 players on Steam, but it was quickly met with disgruntled players who review bombed the game due to stuttering issues, frame rate drops, and sudden crashes. Despite being one of the highest-rated games of all time, the game received “Mixed” reviews on Steam upon release.
However, despite several remaining issues, FromSoftware has released minor Elden Ring patches to fix many of the third-person action RPGs issues, and the title now sits at “Very Positive.”
An ongoing Steam Cloud issue is causing players to lose their Elden Ring save data, according to IGN. When trying to play the game on Steam, players are prompted to choose between downloading their cloud save or uploading their local save. However, the cloud’s data synchronization is out of date, and players who opt for this option risk downloading saves from hours or even days ago.
This will overwrite their most recent save data, causing them to lose hours of progress or forcing them to restart the game from the beginning. While several players have expressed their dissatisfaction with the problem on social media, publisher Bandai Namco has acknowledged the problem on Twitter and created a tutorial to help players avoid it until it is fixed.
Despite technical issues on PC, FromSoftware’s newest title continues to set records. Elden Ring is the third most-watched game on Twitch in recent history, according to recent analytics. With nearly 900,000 views upon release, the game also nearly tripled the previous highest Twitch viewership for a FromSoftware game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which had only 280,000 viewers.
Of course, as the PC version of Elden Ring becomes more stable over time, these numbers may rise. The majority of the criticism for the game has centered on Elden Ring’s technical issues. If FromSoftware does not release patches to rejuvenate its PC version soon, things could get a lot worse. Until the Steam Cloud data synchronization issue is resolved, players are advised to be cautious when playing the Steam version of the game and selecting how to load a save.
