TL;DR: You can use Larian’s BG3 cross-save feature to preserve PS5 game saves onto a desktop system, provided you’re willing to purchase a second copy of BG3.
Why?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: This article will be useful to you if you own a Playstation 5 and you play Baldur’s Gate 3, or you’re playing BG3 multiplayer with a PS5 user as the host. If you don’t fall into either category, it may not be of much use to you.
Of course, you may want to read it anyway for the joy of basking in my writing style. That’s of some value, right?
Let’s break down that “Why?”:
- Why are game saves a problem on a Playstation 5 and not on any other platform?
- Why is this a particular issue for Baldur’s Gate 3?
- Why do these issues affect me?
Why is this a PS5 issue?
Answer: Because of the PS5’s strange approach to disk storage.
It’s not the amount of disk storage. My PS5 has plenty:
One page says 192.2GB of free space, the other says 153.9 free console storage. Either way. 1.51GB of BG3 save files is on the order of 1% of that. What’s the problem?
The problem is the PS5 places a limit of 2GB of saved-game storage per game.
Don’t ask me why. I can’t think of a rational reason either.
For me, this explains why so many of the games I play on the PS5 have a limited number of “save slots”, often 3-5 in a game. I had thought it was some kind of user-interface limitation. Now I know it’s a limit imposed by Sony in their Playstation software.
Why is this a problem for Baldur’s Gate 3?
It’s because of the nature of the game.
As you can see by skimming the posts in my BG3 series, the game has a complex storyline with lots of choices.
There are also many challenging combats for which it’s a good idea to make a save before starting. In fact, the game will automatically save the game for you at certain points. In the picture below, those saves begin with “Autosave”.
The result is that, as you play the game, you accumulate many “save points” that you might want to return to. You can see an example the picture above: I’ve got a game save that I named “Minthara’s Choice.” I might want to explore the different choices Minthara can make and what the consequences are.
Surely one can impose some kind of discipline or limit? There is some of that in the game itself. The game has a “Quicksave” feature (R2 and triangle on the PS5; F5 on a keyboard) to (spoiler alert!) quickly save the game. You can set the limit on the number of Autosave and Quicksave files you’ll keep:
In addition to Autosaves and Quicksaves, there are also “named” saves, that is, saves for which the player supplies a name of their choosing. “Minthara’s Choice” above is one example. These are completely under user control, and are not automatically deleted under the options I show above.
Isn’t this all quite indulgent? Well, yes. But playing BG3 or any other video game is an indulgence. The nature of BG3, the reason why it’s so popular, is the panoply of choices it offers to its players. Game saves are another aspect of that.
The per-game disk-space limit that Sony has imposed on the PS5 restricts those choices.
I’ll touch on a couple more points that hint at the ultimate solution that I found. Let’s look at the freedom of game saves available on non-PS5 platforms.
With a bit of research, I found the location of the game save files on my Mac: ~/Documents/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/PlayerProfiles/Public/Savegames/Story. This is a fragment of the Terminal screen in which I typed a command to display the sizes of the save files (du -shx * if you’re curious).
26M Wyll-46211251612__Ready For Mor'lith 25M Wyll-491412511616__QuickSave_1 25M Wyll-49141252652__AutoSave_1 26M Wyll-50221253553__AutoSave_0 25M Wyll-511912521649__AutoSave_12 26M Wyll-5191257610__QuickSave_21 26M Wyll-54181252610__AutoSave_4 26M Wyll-5418125263__QuickSave_10 27M Wyll-56191253627__AutoSave_9 27M Wyll-562012518619__QuickSave_34 26M Wyll-582012516629__QuickSave_29 27M Wyll-582012519615__AutoSave_13 25M Wyll-583012423530__A date with Karlach 26M Wyll-6181251621__QuickSave_6 26M Wyll-6261252537__Betray Aylin 26M Wyll-72012516647__QuickSave_25 Multiverse-WGS:[8:19] ~/Documents/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/PlayerProfiles/Public/Savegames/Story >
You can see the sizes of some of my saved-game files. When they’re all added together, it comes to 4.8GB; more than Sony allows, but not much in modern computing.
Why do I need old game saves?
There’s another aspect to this limit that affects me and my approach to the game.
If you glance at the titles of the posts in my blog, it’s obvious that I’ve written a series of posts on BG3. I plan to write more. These are not just essays, but photo essays. (This post itself is a photo essay, though most of the photos are screenshots of the game’s option screens.)
Other players, even those who do multiple playthroughs, may be content with deleting their old playthroughs once they’re done with them. I’m not. It’s not just sentimentality.
When I wrote my first BG3 essay, I was glad that I had at least one game save from each of my prior playthroughs at the time. I could show images from the playthroughs to illustrate what I tried to say.
Bear in mind that, up until my sixth playthrough of the game, I either did not know or was unable to transfer screenshots from my PS5 to my desktop Mac. (I plan to write a separate essay on how fiddly the process is.) If I didn’t have the old game saves, no pictures.
Later, Larian introduced photo mode into BG3. I could go back to some (not all!) of my old game saves and display interesting images of the characters from that playthrough.
The only reason I could make the above image (as sexist as it might be) is that I preserved a game save from playthrough 3 that let me pose those characters together. In contrast, I have exactly one game save from playthrough 1, and it’s not one from while I can re-assemble the party for a group picture.
In addition to new pictures from old playthroughs, the game saves also allow me to look up the abilities and gear of the characters. Remember the long lists of attributes and equipment in my earlier essays? If you don’t, here’s an example of what I’m talking about; scroll to the end of that post.
Of course you don’t remember those lists, because you never read them!
They were useful to me as a record of what was successful and what wasn’t in terms of gameplay. If I keep enough game saves, I can look up the information whenever I please.
Instead of as a system log, I can use the blog posts for more entertaining purposes: to craft what I hope are amusing photo essays about the BG3 experience, and tell a bunch of lies about Real Angela.
I’ve had 13 playthroughs of BG3. (Playthroughs 1/14 and 2/14.5 were hosted by Real Angela. The save files were on her PC, not my PS5.) If you do the arithmetic, you’ll see why trying to keep even a few game saves for every playthrough can hit the PS5’s 2GB limit.
This is not the solution
When searching the web for a solution for how to keep old PS5 game saves to avoid the limit, I came across a piece of advice that was totally wrong. In case someone comes across this post in their own searches, I’m going to leave a warning.
If you hunt through the menus on a PS5, you’ll find the Back Up and Restore option.
We’re done, right? No. When we look at what’s been saved:
In the end, I accomplished nothing (except giving my cats catnip).
However, that’s not the danger. The danger is what would have happened if I tried to restore my game files from that USB flash drive. I only learned this after I hopefully went through the above steps.
When you use the PS5’s Restore function, it doesn’t simply copy the files back to the console. It WIPES the console and replace its contents with whatever is on the Backup/Restore drive. If you were to try to restore game saves using the procedure I gave above, the ONLY thing that would be on the console afterwards would be those files. Apps and settings would be wiped.
The above procedure is a good idea if you want to preserve the contents of the entire PS5 console storage onto a 1TB-or-so USB drive. But it’s not a way to preserve just the game saves, much less BG3 save files.
This is not the solution either
From the time I purchased the Playstation 3 until about a year ago, I never signed up for Playstation Plus. While it’s now being marketed a service for console owners to play older games, at the time I purchased my first console its main virtue is that it allowed you to play multiplayers games with other Playstation owners who also had PSP. (This is different from Playstation Network (PSN), a free service whose main purpose is to allow you purchase and download games without using physical DVDs.)
PSP is a paid subscription. Since I didn’t know anyone else with a Playstation console, I didn’t see any reason to purchase a service that I’d never use. PSP would allow me to play games like Overwatch with strangers, but given the poor quality of my gaming, I felt that would be a repeat of experience I had with World of Warcraft: I would not be able to keep up.
Then Real Angela thought she might purchase a PS5 in order to play BG3 with me. Now I had a reason to purchase PSP; without it (at the time) we couldn’t have played together. I signed up for a subscription. In the end, Real Angela set up a gaming PC instead. That will prove important for the “real solution” that I’ll discuss below.
I found another use for PSP: It allowed me to transfer screenshots and videos from my PS5 to my desktop Mac.
While doing the research for this essay, I discovered yet another use for PSP of which I’d been unaware: It can be used to backup game saves to Sony’s cloud service.
It turns out that when I purchased PSP, the account includes about 100GB of space on Sony’s cloud. It was automatically backing up the save files for all my games into that storage.
All well and good. This is nice to have if something were to happen to my console, and I did not have the drive image backup that I described in the previous section. I could re-download the games I’d purchased (thanks to PSN) and restore my game saves via the PSP cloud. It would take a long time, of course, but it was a form of backup
However, this doesn’t increase the 2GB per-game limit that Sony imposes on individual PS5 games. Having 100GB of PSP cloud storage means I could theoretically keep the save files for 50 or more different games, but it wouldn’t let me keep and manage game saves from older BG3 playthroughs.
The solution
You skipped over the previous stuff, didn’t you? You just scrolled here, right? Surely you didn’t read of all of the above impatiently to get the actual procedure?
Now we are going to learn how Real Angela solved this problem for me, without being aware that she did it.
Remember the Sandalwood game saves in the pictures above? Here they are again, so you don’t have to scroll up.
How did those additional saves get onto my Mac? To understand, I have to continue my story of how I played BG3 multiplayer with Real Angela.
At the time Real Angela was setting up her gaming PC. BG3 cross-play between consoles and desktops was not yet available. But it was possible for Mac owners and PC owners to play BG3 with each other. While there are a couple of ways to do this, the most practical one for us was to use Steam, a popular platform for distributing games.
I purchased another copy of BG3 from Steam. (I said this was a solution; I didn’t say it was a cheap solution.) I had some problems getting BG3 to work on my Mac; I wrote a separate essay about that.
Here’s a quote from that essay:
One nice thing I discovered through this process is that Larian supports cross-saves between the desktop and console versions of BG3.
The terminology can be confusing:
- “Cross-play” means that players on different kinds of systems (e.g., one person on a console, another on a desktop) can both play in the same multiplayer instance of the game. Larian does not yet support this.
- “Cross-save” means that you can save a game instance on one system, and continue it on another. This is done by saving the game’s file on servers maintained by Larian.
I confirmed that this works. I was able to continue games on the Mac that I started on the PS5, and vice versa.
To test this, I turned on “cross-save” in both my PS5’s and Mac’s options screens. Here’s a repeat of the PS5 screenshot I posted above:
In order for cross-saves to work, you have to create a Larian account. Although I’m always skeptical about “free” services offered by a company, in Larian’s case this seems a benign thing to do: I’ve never received any spam or advertising from them, and the only personal information they request is your email address. At this point, if you play BG3, there doesn’t seem to any reason not to create a Larian account.
Real Angela and I embarked on playthrough 1/14 together. At the same time we were doing that, I was going through playthrough 13 on my own. When I played with Real Angela, I used my Mac; when I played by myself, I used my console.
As I was nearing the end of playthrough 13, BG3 started displaying messages that there was not enough space for more saves. I was irritated; I had not yet done the research to understand that this was Sony’s fault, not Larian’s. I grumbled and started deleting old saves. In retrospect, I was more aggressive about this than I would have liked; there are some old playthroughs for which I wish I could load and look at the character stats or pose the party for photo mode (believe it or not, it’s only playthrough 3 for which I’d pose sexualized pictures of the characters, for reasons I’ve previously explained.)
Larian enabled cross-play between consoles and desktops in October 2024. I shifted to using my console while Real Angela continued to use her PC for playthrough 1/14.
However, I’d still start the Mac version of BG3 from time to time. I still wanted to solve the problems I wrote about before. There were also some issues with interface differences between the platforms that I wanted to understand.
Recently the issue of old game saves hit a fever pitch on my console. The essay I wrote on photo mode brought home the value of having old saves. While I didn’t need every Quicksave and Autosave from the old playthroughs, there were key moments that I wanted to be able to revisit. As I continued on playthrough 8’/2.5 (there’ll be an essay about that too!) the messages about deleting old files became more frequent. I had to become more aggressive about letting go of old save files.
At some point I noticed that some of these old playthrough save files were showing up on my Mac somehow. In particular, many playthrough 13 game saves that I’d been forced to delete on my console where still available on my Mac, as I show above.
Finally, I figured it out. It was the cross-saves.
When Larian enabled cross-play, Real Angela and I stopped using the Steam network to communicate between our systems. My PS5 and her PC were “linked” using Larian’s servers. When I went through playthrough 13 on my PS5, the cross-saves would be stored on Larian’s servers. When I played with Real Angela on my Mac, those cross-saves would be downloaded onto my system.
When this all came together in my head, the solution was obvious.
Although I didn’t really notice at the time, when I alternated with playthrough 13 on my PS5 and playthrough 1/14 on my Mac, the cross-save mechanism was copying those files onto my Mac. Later, when I deleted the save files on my console, they remained on my Mac.
More recently, when it became clear that I’d no longer be playing in a BG3 playthrough that Real Angela hosted, I looked for incentives for Real Angela to play in a game that I hosted. (If this seems asymmetric, recall that she doesn’t need me as a guide anymore; she wants to make her own choices and make her own discoveries.)
Real Angela said she’d be interested in a game I hosted, if I could show her something that she’d not seen before, nor was likely to given the flavor of choices she was likely to make.
That led to my exploration of playthrough 8’/2.5 (again, some future essay). Most of my remaining game saves from different playthroughs were made near their end, at a point at which the characters had a final choice between “good” and “evil”. I went back to those saves to see if there were any sequences that I thought would interest her, and were not likely ones that she’d ever choose for her characters.
It was a combination of that, plus research on another essay on a difference between console and PC gaming, that I finally noticed that “antique” saves were available on my Mac. I put the facts together and understood that I now had a way to archive my old game saves.
The steps were:
- Load the old game save on my PS5.
- Save the game immediately, with the same name as before. This lost the date on which I originally made the save, which was useful for me to track my progress. But you can’t have everything!
- Start BG3 on my Mac. This would download any new cross-saves from Larian’s servers.
- Rinse and repeat.
As a practical matter, I did this in batches of ten at a time.
I have to take some care when I do this. If I delete a save with the “X” cross-save icon, it will be deleted from Larian’s servers and that deletion will be made on my Mac as well. I should only delete a save after it’s been synced to my Mac and fallen off the list of the “most recent ten” in save list on both systems.
In the end, we’re back to the TL;DR at the top of the essay: For long-term storage of PS5 BG3 saves, buy a second copy for a desktop system, sign up for a Larian account, and use their cross-save feature judiciously.
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