Lords of the Fallen 2 arrived a couple of weeks ago and it's proving to be quite a worthy souls-like with its strategic combat and beautifully built world populated by manic zealots, undead and some truly frightening bosses. I've been enjoying it greatly yet it has opened to a real roller coaster of emotions and mixed reviews. Viewing the Store page on Steam shows a fairly divided community with 59 percent of the 15,000 plus reviews being positive. Stability and performance seem to be the main issues. For myself it's definitely been stability that's been the negative. Let's take a look at this a bit.

In last weekend's WRUP I mentioned finally being able to sit down and put some real time into what is ostensibly an awesome souls clone. I also mentioned that along with many, many others I experienced a fatal game crash that corrupted my save file and I lost my character. There's still no real and true fix for this as far as I've found, but there are ways to be proactive and hopefully prevent the issue from ever becoming a rage quit moment for you out there as it almost was for me. And there may be some options if like me, you've already had this happen. So I decided that rather just leave some potentially helpful tips in a WRUP I'd go ahead and give it its own spot.

First off let's take a look a preventative measures. It sucks that we have to worry about this stuff in the first place, but here we are. Something about lemonade. Unfortunately I can't help a lot in this case for consoles, but we'll get to what to do fix the problem further down. As of patch v1.1.282 an extra fail safe was added to help prevent the save corruption to begin with, but it can still happen, at least on PC. How can you help prevent this from happening to you?

• Playing multiplayer with friends could be an issue. I don't see a ton of info about this out there except to say that crashes happen in mulitiplayer, particularly when one of the party rests at a Vestige. This can corrupt saves for both members and as a result I would just steer clear of multiplayer for now as it's just too risky. This is invite only multiplayer here, by the way, not normal cross play including invasions etc.
• Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. It's a simple step to keep things going smoothly in general. In the case of this particular game though, the launcher will check for you during startup on PC. If drivers are out of date it'll recommend you download new ones first.
• Don't play the game with mods. The game version and mod version may not always match and that can certainly cause crashes and system locks that could ruin your saves.
• Install and play from an SSD if at all possible. It's pretty likely that you've got an SSD. Most systems now are built and sold with them, but there are still a fair amount of old school platter HDD's out there and for some reason they may have trouble writing save games. This is how I understand it anyway. It's possible it's got to do with loading map areas or textures and what have you, but slower drives have been reported as being problematic.
• Turn off PSOs. Pipeline State Object calculation is a handy dandy Direct 3D 12 way of handling rendering quickly and helps to ensure smoother frame rates. The game engine Lords of the Fallen uses can have some problems handling PSO operation and can cause crashes. It's not very common for the game to crash from PSOs but it could help to turn it off and see if there's a causality link via game play. To do this just open Steam and navigate to the Lords of the Fallen tab in your library. Next, right click on the icon and select properties and while under the "general" tab you'll see a "Launch Options" section at the very bottom. Click that field and type -nopsos then click out of the field and exit. That's all you've go to. Your frame rate could suffer a little, but you may be able to play long enough to determine if PSO calculations are causing the crashes.
• Turn off cloud saves and back up your game manually. This is something I've been doing since starting over. In the WRUP I stated that I haven't experienced crashes since playing around with some of these fixes and workarounds. But, since then it's happened a few times. Nothing that's corrupted my saves yet, but I'm still glad I'm doing manual back-ups because clearly we can't trust that the game is stable yet. To do this just navigate here: C:\Users\YOUR USERNAMEFolder\AppData\Local\LOTF2\Saved\SaveGames. Once you're there just copy the SaveGames folder to a different location. I've just made a shortcut on my desktop and I do it after each session so the most I can lose is progress from "X" amount of time I just spent.
• Run the game in administrator mode. So far this is the most effective in my case. I did this a day ago and I've played several hours since then with no crashes. At least not yet. I even turned PSOs on again to help with the occasional chops. Open up Steam and go to your library. Once there locate your Lords of the Fallen icon and right click. You're going to go down to "manage" in the dropdown menu and click on "browse local files". Once you're in the file folder take a look for the LOTF2 application and right click on that. Head the "compatibility" tab and click the, "run this program as administrator", box. That's it. You may also decide to run windows 8 compatibility mode while you're there as well as turning off full screen optimizations. The extra actions will definitely tank your frame rate so keep that in mind. But again, this is about determining the issue and maybe it'll still be playable enough to run the game. Perhaps try them and uncheck the boxes one at a time until you find the culprit. For me it was simply running in admin mode that seems to have done the trick. Your mileage may vary.

Now, what to do if your saves have already been corrupted? Don't throw your controller, keyboard or similar peripheral against the wall just yet. There may be some options that could restore your play.

• It's possible that reinstalling the game will fix the problem. It's unlikely, but it's worth a shot. It didn't work for me, but people out there have reported the issue being resolved this way.
• If you have access to multiple computers you can try installing a copy on a separate machine and using your Steam cloud to download the save to that copy. It may be fixed with that download, then you can reverse the process and play as normal on your main computer.
• If you're playing on console the fix can be simpler as the backup save options are much more reliable and it's likely you won't have actually lost much progress, if any. For PlayStation you can simply download your backup and get back to it. If you're playing on Xbox it's a little more difficult because you'll have to delete your save file before you close the game. Doing that will replace the corrupted file with a good backup. You'll know if it's corrupted because you'll get a message about not being able to load the save. It's also possible you'll end up in the main menu and it won't show your character.
• You can still email your corrupt saves to CI and get the experience boost for a new character a little while longer. That offer won't last forever so this isn't a super reliable solution in the long term. Hopefully there won't really be a long term. Instructions for navigating to your saved games for PC are as follows - C:\Users\YOUR USERNAMEFolder\AppData\Local\LOTF2\Saved\SaveGames once you find the folder, copy it and email it to support@cigames.com. Include your lost character level and how many hours you've played. It could be quite a wait but you'll eventually get your vigor skulls and at least be able to reroll a character that can progress quickly. Just keep in mind that you will be starting over from the beginning. Your save can't be fixed as they're stored on your rig, not CI's game servers.

Luckily enough for me I only lost a character with around 15 hours of play time. It was disheartening but I hadn't made it very far and I was mostly farming gear when it happened. It was an easy decision to just start over and blast through until I was back where I was. I do feel for those who have lost 100 plus hour characters. Lords of the Fallen is a ton of fun to play and it deserves attention, but this is truly a game breaking problem. One that doesn't deserve a pass. Thankfully patches are being released and are steadily solving problems. Don't trust it fully though, take steps to prevent save corruption or just wait a while to play until the issue is fully resolved.