Here's a shitty bug for ya: A fair number of players are reporting that they've lost all their progress in the new PlayStation game Helldivers after their controller died while they were playing.


Apparently, if you're playing the game and your controller runs out of juice, the game spawns in a level 1 character when you plug back in, saving over your character progress if you let it get to a save point without restarting. Yep.


I first heard about the bug when a reader who lost a level 15 character wrote in over the weekend. The game's developers Arrowhead acknowledged the problem—among a handful of other bugs—a couple of days ago on the Helldivers subreddit. They say that they're working on a fix in the coming (but not yet released) 1.03 update. Meanwhile, over at the PlayStation forums, players are reporting lost progress for a variety of reasons, not all due to the controller bug.

Here's Arrowhead on how to deal with the controller bug, if it happens:

Wiped progression? Don't turn off your controller! There is currently an issue with players experiencing wiped save data. We found an issue related to the controller dropping its connection to the game and then when you reconnect, the game spawns your avatar before it manages to load your old save. This results in what looks like lost progress, and often results in progress being lost if you let the game finish its save. What we are doing about it: We have fixed this specific occurrence and are investigating other ways that save data might get reset as we are seeing reports of unrelated save reset issues. The fix for this specific issue will be in patch 1.03. What you can do about it: Make sure your controller has a full charge when you start playing. Don't switch controllers if you battery is running low, just connect it to a cable, and wait until you are on the bridge and done with saving before switching to another controller. If this issue should occur, restarting the game without saving will cause it to try and download the cloud save next time you start it up. This may solve the issue, but will not work if you have managed to save since you got reset.

Arrowhead doesn't specify whether the PS3 or PS4 versions are having more (or fewer) problems, though most of the people posting in the PlayStation forums are on PS4 and/or Vita. Players are also reporting other issues like trouble transferring progress between Vita and PS4, matchmaking difficulties, lobbies crowded with full parties, that kind of thing.

Arrowhead, to their credit, are being very open about the various issues players are having, and are promising to address many of them in the 1.03 patch. Still, until there's a video game bug that actually physically enters your apartment and kicks holes in the drywall, any bug that erases your progress is one of the worst kinds of bug there is. Woof.


I've reached out to Sony to try to get a better sense of when 1.03 patch might be out; my guess/hope is it'll be sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if you're thinking about waging war for Super Earth, be sure to keep your controller charged.