At one point while playing Witcher 3 (PS4) I tried to manually save my game and got a message like, "You can't do that at this time."

At first, I assumed it was because I had started in on a mission. No spoilers, but I was on my way to back to the baron after the part where you ring a bell. I went through all the stuff you do there, then set out on the next part of the mission, still unable to save. Now, just before confronting the baron, I fast traveled back to the starting area herbalist. I bought a few things from her I'd been unable to find, then went back. The load going back took a really long time. Just before I shut the console down, it loaded up. That's when I started getting the "You can't" message.

I noticed my last manual save was from nearly an hour back, even though I had saved after the herbalist before fast traveling. My auto save was more recent. When I loaded the auto save, though it had a current timestamp, I noticed I had lost quite a chunk of progress.

Tried loading other saves, encountered the long load again. This time, after five minutes I decided to close the application. It wouldn't close. Tried again. Nope. Tried to shut down the PS4, couldn't get the menu. Then the console locked. I had to hold the button on the console face until the system shut down.

I reloaded and selected the most recent save, got in and tried saving my game. Got an error saying my save was corrupted and had to be deleted. It deleted the old save and wrote a new one. I've lost maybe an hour or so, so it's not the end of the world. Thing is, I'm afraid to even keep playing now.

I've heard this bug was on Xbox, but I'm playing on PS4. I always rotate my saves, manually saving over the oldest save most of the time. I am a bit obsessive about saving. I just noticed that my damned saves were not going to the cloud, so had to go delete a bunch of online saves to make room. (Note: buy a damned flash drive).

TL;DR

This is a warning for anyone getting into the game. There is a save bug that can corrupt your save on BOTH consoles. Can't speak for PC. Rotate your saves, back them up. If you experience an abnormally long load time, you may be experiencing this bug. You will probably lose some progress, but hopefully you can roll back your save. I have read that you may have to COMPLETELY POWER DOWN your console and restart. I did this because my console locked, but I read later that it may be necessary (Xbox One).

Anyone else have problems? Anyone unable to recover? Will this bug likely hit multiple times in a playthrough? Anyway, be warned. Maybe don't buy this game until it's been patched again. I took two days off of work for a long weekend to play this. Really hope I don't lose a bigger chunk of progress.

Do you only have a limited amount of saveslots?

My saving strategy for Witcher has always been a new savefile every save.

Well, that doesn't sound good at all. I hope they patch that issue immediately.

@rethla: On PS4 you are limited to 8 manual save files.

@rethla: Yes, it limits you to 8 or 10, not sure at the moment. But I have been just overwriting the oldest one every time I save because I have no option to make a new one.

And after reading this and a couple other save horror stories, I am syncing my latest save manually to the PS+ cloud every night as well just to be safe.

The scary thing is I'm not sure what causes the corruption. I was saving without an error message, but after the error my last save was time stamped recently but was more than an hour back in progress. By time you notice the problem, it may be too late. My fear is that if there is some trigger in the game that causes this, and you back up your save, you may just be saving the trigger. So far, I've been okay. I thought maybe going to fast travel at that point in the mission may have caused an issue, but I did it again after recovering with no issue.

I'm just even MORE compulsive now about saving, so none of my saves are more than 20-30 minutes apart at most. Saving at every decision, fight, fast travel, etc... I wish it didn't have the save file limit, though. I'm okay with having fifty saves 20-30 minutes apart. Would like to see a quick save option. Also, a better way to change signs mid fight, but that's a different issue.

I'm going to get a 32GB flash drive and start backing up there. Sick of seeing the notification that my saves aren't being sent to the cloud. Not sure if PS4 will auto upload to a flash drive like it does the cloud, though.

Just ran into this bug and have to thank @r3beld0ggfor making me aware of this issue beforehand and changing my save slot strategy.

This needs to get patched immediately.

Save loss is the worst, on PC no joke I have 60+ Manual saves in 20 hours I refuse to lose progress I have had enough of save loss bugs the last 2 years nothing will make me quit a game faster.

@sessh: Hey, hope you didn't lose too much progress. I'm curious as to what was going on in your game (no spoilers) when it happened. Did you encounter the long load? Did you do anything out of the ordinary? Just wondering if there is anything that might trigger this or if it just kinda randomly happens.

Another thing I was thinking of was running the game for extended periods. I had been playing for a few hours, I think, when it happened to me. Also, I just save and hit pause when I put the PS4 into rest mode. Made me think of the Bloodborne bug where leaving it alone (even in rest mode) for like 12 hours effected the boss AI.

@r3beld0gg: Only about 20 minutes thanks to your warning, so it wasn't that bad for me.

And it just happened completely out of the blue, no long load, nothing else special going on and had been playing for just over an hour. Got the "You can't save message.", immediately quit and tried to load an auto-save, which turned out to be corrupt. My last manual save had disappeared on it's own, but the second newest one worked and now everything seems to be okay again.

Also I never put the PS4 into rest mode directly out of a game, so I don't know if that's actually effecting it.

Hmm, I was going to start playing the game later in the week once my classes had finished, but this is making me think I should wait for a patch. Have they given an ETA for a fix? They really need to address this quickly.

I've had it say that to me, but each time I've just waited a few seconds and it let me save then.

Having horrible flashbacks to the dying light save bug AHHH!!

It will say that if you are trying to save while the game is doing an autosave. Wait a sec and it will let you save manually. I've also had that happen after fast traveling or even talking to certain people. I actually have to move away from the area a little to get it to let me save.

Ugh! Yep, totally just had it bug out on me. Had no idea this was a thing and I started playing last night. Lost about 3-4 hours worth of playing time. So annoyed. Playing on XBONE.

As someone who doesn't have a lot of free time between full time school and full time work I am so SO bummed about losing so much time invested. I personally hate re-doing things like this in games so its extra annoying. Almost to the point I want to sell the game but I want to play it so bad!

I had just gotten to the new area. On my way to the Inn I made the rookie mistake of cutting across the open land and not being on the road, and I died. Upon death, I couldn't load back into the game. It was just stuck at the screen with the loading circle in the bottom right going on and on. I then quit the game and re-opened from the dashboard, but couldn't get past the "press any button screen." As I would hit a button and it would say "please wait..." and never do anything. I then fully POWER CYCLED my console, unplugging it and it let me get back into the game. However the only save that was left was from very close to the beginning before you had talked to the Nilfgaardians in the first town. Ugh! Thinking about all the crap I have to re-do and the fact I won't enjoy it and it just will feel like a chore is extremely frustrating.

I had attempted to save multiple times but was getting an error that states "cannot save at this time" or something along those lines. Reading into it now, that is the start of your save being a problem. From what I am reading about in XBOne, it has to do with putting it on "standby" mode and running other apps. A workaround for the time being seems to be to fully quit the app/game when you are done and not leaving it up active on the dashboard.

Ugh...so annoying...I guess I'll just go back to playing, save and quit all the time... so bummed right now.

EDIT: Okay, it wasn't as bad...got back to where I was the second time around in about an hour and a half. Skipping through most stuff. Did feel like a chore though. That being said, back on the path.

Definitely recommend anyone save very regularly, alternating saves along with quitting the app fully when done and not letting it go to "standby" as that seems to be when the problems arise.

Yeah, I'm not sure that the bug comes from putting the game in a suspended state or not but I have heard of and seen games on both consoles that have negative reactions to that. Bloodborne was the most recent, also Ori and the Blind Forest did not like being put into suspend. Hopefully a patch for this issue comes soon, or at least some word from the dev on how to maybe avoid the bug, if there is a way.

I was going to say, while reading your post, that 3-4 hours in a game like this can often be recouped much more quickly, depending on what you were doing. You can skip through cut scenes and just skip any less productive exploring you may have done. It would suck if you lost a save after a boss or a particularly long quest in a dungeon or something, but I know I do a ton of screwing around in games like this. :)

And I'll just repeat it again, ROTATE YOUR SAVES! It really sucks that they limit your save files and don't have an option to delete saves in the menu. I'd like to just create new saves whenever I think about it, then spend a few seconds deleting all the excess ones before I quit.

Not really worried cause cloud saves yo.

That's really weird that they took this functionality out of the console versions. I wonder if it's something to do with how the PS4 and Xbox One handle automatic cloud save backups?

On PC it is handled more or less like I expected it to be. I let autosaves do their thing, and then I create a new manual save whenever I feel like it and then occasionally go back and delete the oldest ones. However, I have all of my saves automatically being backed up to an external hard drive and to cloud storage as soon as I create or modify them, but I do this for all of my games just in case anyway.

@mb said:

This is almost certainly the case. If you look at the save files on PC, you can see that they get incrementally bigger the further you progress. I wouldn't be shocked if late game save files creep into double or even triple digit megabytes.

I have experienced the issue on Xbox One where games can't save/load when resuming the game in "instant on". No issues with any files actually getting corrupted. I've just gotten in the habit of checking to see if I can save the game when I first start up, and if I can't, I do a full reboot. It's only happened a couple of times, so it's not really been a showstopper for me.

For the record, this isn't the first game I've seen have issues with resuming from standby on Xbox One. It seems like a feature that both PS4 and Xbox One developers are still familiarizing themselves with how to handle.

Yeah, but cloud saves only upload once a day, so you could still lose your progress since the last save or, worse, send a corrupted save to the cloud. This bug seems to only effect your current autosaves and your last manual saves, so far as I can tell. So the progress lost can't be gotten back from cloud saves.

Maybe, I guess that would be a semi-valid reason considering the 1GB limit. I'm constantly going in and deleting cloud saves because I'm out of room. When I first ran into this issue, I exited out of the game and saw the notification that none of my saves had been sent to the cloud due to lack of space. Still, I don't think that's a good reason to limit saves. First off, you don't HAVE to send saves to the cloud. I'm about to go pick up a flash drive to start backing my saves up to. I don't know if the PS4 will auto backup saves to USB like it does the cloud, though. If not, it should have that option.