Epic Games confirms Borderlands 3 cloud save glitch

Epic Games has confirmed a bug in its freshly-launched Epic Games Store cloud save functionality which has been nuking players' progress in Borderlands 3, saying that it has shipped a hotfix that should fix things going forward - but that any progress previously lost is not recoverable.

Launched back in July, cloud save functionality is a key part of Epic Games' attempt to bring its eponymous Epic Games Store digital distribution client to feature parity with rival Valve's Steam. As with Steam's implementation, the idea is to make it easier to manage save games across multiple devices: Players with both a desktop and a laptop, for instance, can start playing on one device then pick up where they left off on the other.

Those who have picked up Gearbox's Borderlands 3 recently, however, may have run into a bug in Epic Games Store's handling of cloud saves - and one which will have nuked their progress beyond recovery.

'We've received reports of an issue with the Cloud Saves feature that can cause some players to lose their save data for Borderlands 3,' Epic Games confirms in a support document 'We have identified the following chain of events that result in this issue: You play on Machine A offline or with Cloud Saves not enabled; you then play on Machine B online, realise your save from machine A has not come over, and then quit the game. Now, you swap back to play on Machine A online, pulling down the empty profile from Machine B. When this happens, the screen pop-up [designed] to help resolve the conflict between the save states should appear. However, we've identified a bug where that screen is not always appearing.'

Epic Games has confirmed that a hotfix has already shipped to resolve the issue, bringing up the conflict resolution screen and allowing users to choose which of the two save states should be kept; it does, however, admit that 'any progress lost is not recoverable.'

Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, meanwhile, has claimed that launch-day peak-concurrent players for Borderlands 3 is about twice as high as for Borderlands 2 - suggesting that the move to timed exclusivity on the Epic Games Store and the wave of ill-feeling from the community that followed has not harmed sales any.