While Returnal has reviewed incredibly well, and many fans seem to be enamored with Housemarque’s work, it is not without some technical issues. While crashes have been a big problem up to this point, update 1.3.3 saw an even bigger save deletion issue added to Returnal.

While Returnal’s 1.3.3 update fixed various crashes and other problems yesterday, it also removed the healing exploit from the game. Used by many players to refill their health, returning to Selene’s ship to sleep saw gamers instantly able to reach a full health bar. From there, they could backtrack to the boss fight or the start of a new biome with all their healing items in tow. From now on, that will no longer work, a change that saw some players refusing to download 1.3.3. As it turns out, though, there was an even bigger reason to avoid this patch.

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Yesterday, Housemarque itself warned gamers to avoid the new update, as a nasty save bug saw players punished for upgrading to the latest version of the game. The studio reverted to 1.3.1 quickly, though before the patch could be removed, several had already downloaded it. If the patch impacted them negatively, they would see the error code CE-100028-1 appear on their screens, a process that forced gamers to re-download the entire game. Thankfully, patch 1.3.4 has been released, ending worries about the issues.

returnal shooting red bullets at monster

The patch is now live, and any fans of Returnal that have been anxious to get back into the game can safely do so after 1.3.4 is downloaded. While the trophy issue fixes and keyboard exploits have carried over, 1.3.4 essentially takes Returnal back to the 1.31 version of the game. While this is good news, as it allows for a stable version of Returnal to be played, it seems as if update 1.3.3 did not come without a cost. The update seems to have corrupted several saves, with some of this corruption being on a far more damaging scale.

According to Housemarque, save states that say corrupted but keep a proper file size have been saved by the update. Upon 1.3.4’s install, Returnal fans will be good to go. However, corrupt saves that show 0 KB have been deleted by the faulty update, essentially forcing players to start from scratch and play through all of Returnal’s biomes again.

As outlined by Housemarque, the only hope in this situation would be if an unbroken save backup exists in PlayStation Plus’ cloud storage – though it warns that this too may have been overwritten when playing the game after update 1.3.3.

Depending on how far players are into the story of Returnal, this detail regarding lost saves could be negligible or utterly devastating. Still, losing even a small amount of progress because of something like a faulty update is going to be frustrating, so hopefully, nothing like this happens to Returnal fans again.

Returnal is available now on PS5.

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Source: Housemarque