Baldur’s Gate 3 ‘incompatible version’ save error – how to fix

If you’ve been trying to play Baldur’s Gate 3 and you’re encountering the ‘incompatible version’ save error, here’s everything we know alongside what you can do to mitigate the effects of it.

Larian Studio’s latest game launched in early August, and while it’s seen critical success and an extremely warm reception from fans of the franchise, there’s been a few pesky issues with the games saving functionality.

With over a hundred hours of gameplay available, and possibilities of multiple different playthroughs via the game’s different classes, losing your save is not something you are going to want to experience. In fact, upon launch there was an issue with Baldur’s Gate 3 not saving which caused issues for many players out there.

How to fix Baldur’s Gate 3 ‘incompatible version’ save error

The Baldur’s Gate 3 ‘incompatible version’ save error seems to be a symptom of the recent hotfix 4, though it was recrently rolled back due to issues with the game crashing.

The recent hotfix was flashed in order to fix a few in-game errors, crashes and such, though it quickly became apparent that it was causing new issues despite solving old ones. Since then, it’s been rolled back, though this is causing issues with the ‘incompatible version’ error. Here’s what can be done about it:

The issue is caused as it is likely that in the few hours that the new hotfix was live, you saved your game. Following the roll-back of the hotfix, your game save file is now registered with the hotfix version, despite playing through the older version of the game. The issue is effectively caused by the current version of the game not being able to read the save file due to an incompatible version.

Until the hotfix is flashed again with compatibility for the new game version, you’re not going to be able to access your latest save file. This might be slightly irritating, but the only way you can get back into the game is by loading an older save file which was saved before the hotfix was flashed.

While this fix is extremely irksome, it’s the only thing you’re going to be able to do until the developers fix the hotfix. If you played for a long time while the hotfix was live, you will lose some game progress, so your only other alternative is to wait until the hotfix is repaired.

In the meantime, you can wait for the next Baldur’s Gate 3 patch.

About the Author

Amaar Chowdhury

Amaar is a gaming journalist with an interest in covering the industry's corporations. Aside from that, he has a hankering interest in retro games that few people care about anymore.