Difficulty randomly resets to "Just the Story" after 1.07 update (Xbox One)

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Difficulty randomly resets to "Just the Story" after 1.07 update (Xbox One)

Since the 1.07 update, the difficulty of my game has mystically reset from "Blood and Broken Bones" to "Just the Story". I haven't yet figured out the pattern, but it is very distressing - I'm trying to get the difficulty achievements and don't usually notice the change until I've played for a bit - then I have to go back and load a save that still has the Blood and Broken Bones difficulty.

I play on the Xbox One.

The glitch does NOT seem to be connected to:
- Manual saves
- Combat
- Checkpoints

The glitch MAY be connected to:
- The problem MAY be occurring when I resume gameplay on the Xbox after shutting down the console but not shutting down the game, i.e., when there's no hard re-load of the game from a save file but play resumes after being suspended in the Xbox memory. I am not certain because it is a new bug and somewhat sporadic.
 
The problem MAY be occurring when I resume gameplay on the Xbox after shutting down the console but not shutting down the game, i.e., when there's no hard re-load of the game from a save file but play resumes after being suspended in the Xbox memory.

I can all but confirm that this is the case. Since the time it caught me off guard, I've been able to replicate the random difficulty switch down by pausing the game, going to xbox home, turning off the console, and turning the console back on. That seems to be the order of events that sets off this bug.

I can also say that with several attempts, when you exit the game through the game menu before cutting your xbox off, then load you game, the bug doesn't come up. So it is highly avoidable if you're aware of it, but annoying. Being able to hop back into your game quickly without the notably long load times at the startup of Witcher 3 was a great perk that is now gone.

I can't imagine how many gamers going for the difficulty achievements are going to be screwed over by this glitch without realizing it and have to start over.

Another thing I noticed when the bug popped up: I am playing on Death March difficulty, and when you see that your game's difficulty has been lowered, if you try to adjust the difficulty back to (in my case) Death March, no warnings pop up. When I tried to manually set the difficulty to any other setting (including the setting the bug had set my game to), the game displayed the warning that my action could affect potential achievements.

To test if my game was actually still in Death March and just saying it was lower, I took some damage and meditated, and sure enough, my vitality auto-replenished. So that's just one more quirky aspect to this bug: the slider tells you the difficulty level you're actually playing in, but some part of the game still recognizes that you were supposed to be at a higher difficulty. (Otherwise, why the warnings?)
 
I'm so glad I haven't started my deathmarch playthrough yet. Still waiting for you know who to get fixed.
 
I can also confirm that all saves post 1.07 have reset difficulty to Just the Story from Blood and Broken Bones. Lost a whole weekend's worth of game-play now :angry2:
 
Damn, I am scared to go home and check my game now. I fear I might not have any save games prior to 1.07 anymore. If this is the case, CDR better damn come out and confirm this bug, and also fix it so that you are allowed to change back to Death Marxch and continue on without any ramifications to our achievement progress!
 
Damn, I am scared to go home and check my game now. I fear I might not have any save games prior to 1.07 anymore. If this is the case, CDR better damn come out and confirm this bug, and also fix it so that you are allowed to change back to Death Marxch and continue on without any ramifications to our achievement progress!

I'm not going to continue playing until CDR have commented, I personally can't see how they'd allow you to change back if you haven't got a pre 1.07 save, as anyone could bump the difficulty up even if they were never originally playing Death March for the achievements.
 
Just checked my save and indeed I am now playing on "Just the story" difficulty, after putting 100+ hours into Death March. So that's neat. Conveniently, I have been spending the past couple days finishing up some old quests which were all way below my level, so nothing seemed out of the ordinary difficulty wise.
 
Have this issue too!

Sadly I had pumped an entire day of gametime into it before I checked my settings and now I'm thinking of just powering through for the story before restarting on Death March again. I imagine a lot of the players on the 2nd hardest difficulty who have been reset haven't even noticed yet!!

Would love a fix for THIS save but unlikely given how long has passed now, really gutted now :(

UPDATE: Bumped the save up to Blood and Broken Bones and was greeted with the warning that I may lose achievements for changing (which I accepted as I thought I'd lost out on Death March anyway), went with that to keep things interesting but wasn't expecting anything to pop. As it happens I got the achieve for Blood and Broken Bones anyway so read into that what you will!
 
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add me onto this list as well. i really don't know what to do now as i've put a lot of time into this game

 
This just happened to me as well. I have over a hundred hours in on Death March, and I check after saving every time. I just checked my save, and literally every 1.07 save has reverted to "Just the Story". I am totally gutted, as I am a big achievement guy and now it looks like my only non 1.07 saves are probably 30 hours worth of content behind. Please can we get an official response?
 
I experienced the same issue, on top of the fact that I had just completed my griffin tier 1 armor, had a quest that forced me to be naked with Kiera, then I was unable to re-equip it. No idea how many quests I completed after the patch did this. I started on Death March. This thread has been open six days and I don't see an official response yet. Very depressing.
 
Yep, I checked the difficulty settings because suddenly all the monsters were A LOT easier to kill, and found out that the difficulty setting
got changed to "Just the story". I lost 50+ hours of gameplay trying to unlock the "Death March" achievement.
 
So I decided to just set the difficulty back to Death March and keep trucking - any thoughts on whether or not the achievements will pop? Any official response about this?
 
Wow. I just found out about this whIle looking up a bug where I can't play Roche in Gwent. I've done every other quest and ? in the map. Just about to go to Skellige.

I was finishing up lower level quests so I didn't notice the difference. I don't have ANY saves that are before 1.07 now. I have at least a hundred hours into the game. What am I supposed to do now?

I don't even know how this could be fixed, but it's completely ridiculous. I've enjoyed this game, but am putting it down now out of pure disappointment. This is a shame, a real shame. I hope they acknowledge how much of many people's time they wasted with this.

You might not be able to fix it, but at least acknowledge it. It's the least that can be done.

Gt: ShatterLSS on Xbox One
 
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I just noticed the same problem too. I meditated randomly at one point just to get a vendor to show up and I noticed my health recharged. After a good bit of swearing I headed to the forums to see what's up. Still no answer to this question about the achievement? I really don't want to load a save hundreds of hours back if I don't have too.

Gt: Octavionus on Xbox One
 
Just had the same thing happen to me too, after 150+ hours i noticed my difficulty was set to just the story from death march and sadly all my previous saves are all the same :eredinfacepalm:
 
Man...I have just seen this pop up elsewhere on the net and I've just noticed that my meditation was refilling the vitality. Checked the difficult and, yep - It's gone down to Just The Story

Well over 100 hours of gameplay grinding for the achievement out the window...Really disappointed
 
Same problem, pretty much soured the game experience for me. Too many hours lost to go back.
 
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