How to fix the Baldur’s Gate 3 Incompatible Version Save Error

After loading up Baldur’s Gate 3, you may have noticed a nasty little bug: the “Baldur’s Gate 3 Incompatible Version Save Error.” Since you’re probably freaking out about it, let’s take a quick look at what happened, and how to fix it.

The official stance from Larian on Baldur’s Gate 3 save errors

Due to a build error causing new crashes, we’ve rolled back Hotfix 4 for the time being. We'll re-release it as soon as we’ve fixed the cause.

If you’ve saved since updating, you won’t be able to load those saves until we’ve re-published Hotfix 4. Sorry about the inconvenience.

— Larian Studios (@larianstudios) August 16, 2023

As the above tweet from the official Larian Studios Twitter account notes, the issue was with the initial deployment of Hotfix 4 on August 16, which was subsequently rolled back after users reported save file issues.

So what’s the fix? Well, you’ll need to update to the new Hotfix 4 (which was redeployed on August 17), so make sure you manually update your game if you’re not on the current version. Larian was hard at work diagnosing the issue since August 16, and now that it’s pushed out, saves will retroactively work, so long as you’re fully updated. Note that saves are not “corrupted” in any form, they were just “incompatible.” This was due to an error on Larian’s part, which was swiftly fixed, and has evidently changed the way the studio will be handling patches for Baldur’s Gate 3 going forward.

Incompatible saves for Baldur’s Gate 3 should be a thing of the past

Not only is the problem solved as of the time of publication, but Larian also issued the following lengthy statement in a Steam blog post:

“Yesterday we had to rollback hotfix 4 because of a rare compiler issue. To avoid this from happening again we’re changing the way we deploy patches. Players who had downloaded hotfix 4 were unable to continue from their hotfix 4 saves once we had rolled back the patch. While this is not ok, rolling back the patch in order to diagnose the problem and limit those exposed to it was the lesser of two evils. We truly appreciate your patience & understanding while we worked to understand the problem. This situation is remedied now with the re-release of hotfix 4 but we recognize the frustration caused by this and want to apologize. That’s why we’re changing things up.

All of you should now be able to continue your adventures, but essentially, here’s what happened:

Hotfix 4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn’t cause crashes to – you guessed it – cause crashes. Since compiler issues like that are extremely rare, we weren’t prepared for it. We should’ve been. We messed up. It didn’t help that it happened at the worst possible time of day but luckily we have studios in multiple countries. Overnight (for Europe), our teams in Canada and then Malaysia worked to diagnose what went wrong, so that work could begin on redeploying a fixed version of the hotfix

To avoid this from happening in the future, we’ll make sure that any change made to future version candidates – no matter how small, or innocuous – will always go through our full & comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing.”

In short, although Hotfix 4 looked good to go, it was corrupted at the last minute. Larian immediately owned (and fixed) their mistake in less than 24 hours, and came up with a way to prevent it from happening again. How’s that for a games industry response?!