Genoan (GOG.com) Dec 18, 2020, 15:50 GMT+1 Hello Unfortunately the save is damaged and can't be recovered. Please use an older save file to continue playing and try to keep a lower amount of items and crafting materials. If you have used the item duplication glitch, please use a save file not affected by it. The safe file limit might be increased in one of the future patches, but the corrupted files will remain that way. Sorry for the inconvenience. Regards Genoan GOG Customer Support |
True, there really should not be a cap or at least not one so small in the first place, and while in the short term they should just increase or remove the cap, they should also figure out what is causing the save file to grow so much since it also makes the game hang and stutter whenever you quick or auto save and takes forever to load with that black screen once your file gets bigger than about 5.5MB. The game felt really smooth at the start when I was quick saving or loading but by the time I was starting to reach the cap it felt terrible to save or load.
Cleaning your inventory won't help. This is probably caused by game tracking your stats just make sure you have a returnable manual save we can't do anything until they fix this thing
support.cdprojektred.com
Then, there's no need for you to follow it. Go ahead, and keep on loading saved games as you will. If the bug is occurring during the loading process, as opposed to the saving process, then you'll eventually corrupt all of your saved games and have absolutely no backups to return to, ensuring all of your progress is lost. That is entirely your choice.
Secondly, this is not official CDPR Tech Support. This is a community board where players can come to check on known issues or try to troubleshoot problems on their own. If that's not working out, then let me repeat, yet again:
Technical Support — CD PROJEKT RED
Welcome to CD PROJEKT RED Technical Support! Here you will find help regarding our games and services, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.
Please, read the appropriate FAQ section to the end, ensuring all suggestions have been followed. If the problems persist, you can use the "Contact Us" link to send in a ticket.
Be sure to include your system (including specs if on PC), a brief description of the issue, and the steps taken to reproduce it (if applicable).
Right -- now here's a reality of the way that inventory systems work sometimes. (TW3 has a similar sort of limitation.) Whenever you create an item in the inventory, it creates an ItemID. For every new instance of that item (like if the number of that item changes...or I pick up two of the same type of gun) the game will need to assign a unique ItemID for it in order for the program to be able to tell the two different items apart or record the change to the stack, and that number, for each successive instance, will obviously get bigger.
So, if I am rapidly adding / removing items from my inventory, I may inadvertently increase that ID number to something that the engine no longer recognizes. Or a number that conflicts with some other function of the inventory. Or save system. Or loading system. Whatever. Something doesn't like it. That's where the bug must live.
BUT -- considering that CP2077 probably works similarly to TW3, Bethesda games, Bioware titles, etc. -- this also happens to your inventory whenever you save --> reload a game. First, the game reads your save file. It loads an "active" version of your inventory into RAM, and assigns new ItemIDs to every single piece of your inventory from top to bottom. It re-saves those larger numbers for every new save / quicksave, and they become the new default. This is how a program can correctly load older savegames. It compares the newer numbers with the older ones, and chooses the older, smaller number instead. (Computers can't "think", and items in your inventory are not "guns" and "medkits" to the computer. They're collections of data that it needs to be able to tell apart from one another using a numerical expression.)
Not all games are designed for unlimited, endless play. Not all games are designed for NG++++ etc. CP2077, as of now, seems to have been designed with upper limits in place (likely to avoid issues elsewhere in the engine, just like TW3).
The workaround for now?
Don't do it. Play the game until the end, then start a new game. Don't continue saving and reloading the same character for too long. Don't craft thousands of items at once.
Is that ideal? No. And hopefully it can be worked out in the future. Although...maybe not. No game that CDPR has ever created has ever been designed for ongoing, unlimited play. (NG+ was added into TW3 after its release; it was never intended. It was extremely difficult to get working without major issues, is capped at level 100, still gets wildly weird at higher levels, and there is no NG++. It can only be done once per playthrough.) CDPR designs their games with a finite structure: with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They are not meant to be played on and on like Dark Souls, GTA, or an MMO. They're meant to be restarted from the beginning with a new character and played differently. Love it or loathe it, that's the design.
So, for right now, the best step is not to put the game in this sort of situation. It's the nature of the machine. Or, more classically:
Patient: "Doctor! Doctor! It really hurts when I do this!"
Doctor: "Then, don't do that."
Now, the treatment can begin.
Its not like they can just snap their fingers and uncorrupt your saves, nor can they rush out a patch based on a few hunches. The important thing is that they're aware of the problem, something as big as this will be on their top priority list in no time.
