hzd won't load save games

[aka]

this is a strange and intermittent issue. been playing steady for a couple weeks now and have encountered this problem more than once. i usually just go back and find an older manual save and manage to load it but i can't figure out why i have to do this. i'm looking to lose 3 hours on this last go-round (which i saved with a manual save that fails to load on the last tiny fraction of the progress bar) and i'm thoroughly sick of dealing with this bug. newest vid drivers, running as admin, files verified, re-downloaded and verified, no mods, yadda yadda.

any other suggestions?

[Death Approaches]

Did you ever HAVE mods, though? Cause it sounds like mods. residual mods. uninstalling and verify do nothing for mods, Steam didn't put them there, so Steam doesn't know about them, that will never remove them, you have to. Or you have to whack the whole game manually from File Explorer, and then verify.

The only other thing I can think of, if the game starts and runs just fine, jut's just saves is the issue... is that can happen is you are on a GPU that your settings put you near max for your card, say you have a 6G VRAM card and are on Medium; you have about a gig of overhead, but you have a yt window streaming some video that's paused, you have a really busy hwaccel'd site or three loaded, you have a paint program running, etc... next thing you know, you're over-allocated... the save worked fine, but bringing it back in, not as fine... loads almost alll the way, then gives up...

have you tried immediately after a clean boot, without starting anything else, steam, HZD, load save, see if that works? That would solidify my VRAM resource starvation hypothesis.

running as admin won't do anything for you, it would only solve permissions issues, and steam has it's own runtime environment these days; even old games from the XP era aren't helped by running as admin anymore, these are just people too lazy to solve permission issues, I mean it's minimal risk unless the program really is badly coded, but it's just a bad habit to try giving something that isn't behaving total control over your system...

[aka]

yeah, i tried the clean boot trick, didn't work. could be residual mods, but that would seem to affect all the save files, not just the most recent, no? like i said, i can go back 3 hours to my last manual save and start from there (which is probably what i'll have to do). as for the other 'fixes' i was just trying everything that i'd read about to get around the problem and not having any success.

thanks for the advice. as for the overhead, i'm running an retx 3080 and only have a dormant browser open in the background with 32 gb ram, so i don't think that's it either.

[Death Approaches]

yeah probably not, but I had no idea, so... damn... I mean at least it's a fun game, so 3 hr isn't excruciating pain or anything... start staggering full saves with quick saves... we could probably hammer on it some, but if it takes 3hr frustrating trial and error or 3hr of just playing a game... which do you prefer? :-)

[Seamus]

Last few times I've seen this issue, it's either a corrupt save or corrupt config file

Turn off cloud saves, copy your save folder (Documents\Horizon Zero Dawn\Saved Game\) outside of the original folder (just drop a copy on your desktop) then try deleting your config. It's the profile folder inside the saved game folder.

If that won't work, nuke the saves themselves and see if it goes.

[aka]

yeah, i'm kind of reconciled to the fact i'll have to go back. what i can't figure though, my last save was also a manual and it didn't take. the previous two manuals will both load but none of the quick or auto saves between them will load, they don't even come close to the end of the progress bar when loading.

strange, to say the least. most of the progress was in the dlc whereas the older manual saves were in the base game, i'd just finished getting all the power cells and was about to pick up the armor in the underground bunker.

<sigh> appreciate the advice. as you say, it's a fun game so i don't mind going over the same ground again. i played through it once, years ago, and i was just warming up for the release of forbidden west.

[Seamus]

Still sounding like a corrupt save. If you can nail down exactly which slots it is, you can delete just those ones while cloud save is off.

[aka]

was experimenting today and i noticed sometimes it would load an auto save (nothing else except very old manual saves) yet sometimes it would not. the progress bar goes all the way to the end minus a hair and stops, every time.

going to try your advice above, if that doesn't work, i think i may just wait on the new one to come out and hope it's not buggy as hell. i had zero problems with this game until i started into frozen wilds; then it went to ♥♥♥♥.

[aka]

did as you suggested, but it still can't load anything after i started into the frozen wilds, now. earlier today, there was one autosave that would reload, but now it won't. oddly enough, my old 'new game+' files will load just fine, and that character has gear from the dlc equipped, so i'm really stumped.

[Dimossa]

any solution?...all my saves went dead as well...

[Skelzarr]

I'm running into this issue as well. Never once modded the game. All saves are basically dead.

[Dimossa]

Originally posted by Skelzarr:

I'm running into this issue as well. Never once modded the game. All saves are basically dead.

Originally posted by Duranu Lithdel:

Run the game and get it to crash, then Open event viewer, click WIndows Logs folder, then click Application, find where it says "Error <DATE&TIME> Application error 1000 Application Crashing Events" at the same data and time that the game just crashed, then, check the general info at the bottom to see why it crashed to give you a better idea what to look for, In my cause, the game was crashing when I tried to start/load NewGame+ due to an issue with USER32.dll

My Event Viewer Log[i.imgur.com]

You can try to run Command Prompt as an admin and use "sfc /scannow" as well as the DISM commands:
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth <- This one can appear to get stuck at 62.3% but thats normal and can take it a minute to get past that point

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1151640/discussions/0/4208119548516893759/?ctp=2#c4295942652161725158

It doesnt find any errors, but fixes the saves.

[Skelzarr]

Originally posted by Dimossa:

Originally posted by Skelzarr:

I'm running into this issue as well. Never once modded the game. All saves are basically dead.

Originally posted by Duranu Lithdel:

Run the game and get it to crash, then Open event viewer, click WIndows Logs folder, then click Application, find where it says "Error <DATE&TIME> Application error 1000 Application Crashing Events" at the same data and time that the game just crashed, then, check the general info at the bottom to see why it crashed to give you a better idea what to look for, In my cause, the game was crashing when I tried to start/load NewGame+ due to an issue with USER32.dll

My Event Viewer Log[i.imgur.com]

You can try to run Command Prompt as an admin and use "sfc /scannow" as well as the DISM commands:
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth <- This one can appear to get stuck at 62.3% but thats normal and can take it a minute to get past that point

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1151640/discussions/0/4208119548516893759/?ctp=2#c4295942652161725158

It doesnt find any errors, but fixes the saves.

I did the DISM commands, but everything seemed fine there. I ended up getting a save to load afterwards, and managed to get the information I needed from there as I was checking something to compare in Forbidden West. Thank you