Early adopters of Dead Island have been battling with dozens of reported issues since the game released earlier in the month. As with some of Bethesda’s games, these glitches range from the noticeable and sometimes comical to directly wearing down the game experience. One of the most notable known issues causes auto-saves to cease, completely stripping players of hours of work. After some thorough investigation, we’ve found the culprit, and have devised an FAQ to help people understand the root of the problem, and better yet, how to avoid it.
What causes auto-saves to become glitched?
Testing has revealed that data becomes corrupted when Dead Island‘s online infrastructure attempts to join two or more players with the “Join” feature.
How do I know if my game has been affected?
There are a few tell-tale signs that your game has been glitched. The most certain signs are the following:
- During game saves you will no longer see the save indicator on the top-right. This happens because saved games are no longer being written.
- After completing the requirements for a trophy the trophy doesn’t unlock and/or a trophy unlocked message doesn’t appear.
Can I recover my hard-earned progress?
Unfortunately, once a game has been glitched all progress made is lost.
How can I prevent this from happening to me?
Since the glitch is caused from the behavior of online connections, the best way to avoid your saves from being impacted is to limit yourself to the single-player experience until a patch is released. The best way to accomplish this is to configure yourself for one of the following two models:
- Play Dead Island while disconnected from the PlayStation Network. You can either disable the internet connection on your PS3 or sign out of PSN to accomplish this.
- Set your Game Visibility setting to LAN under Game Type: Cooperative under Settings.
Techland hasn’t replied to the thousands of reports involving corrupted saves, and no fix has been announced either. With that said, due to the scale of the issue, chances are that the developer is working hard on a patch to remedy the issue (Update: Techland have revealed that they are working on a patch to fix the auto-save problem). Stay tuned, and until then, save yourself the grief and disable your connection.
