Hello,
I have experienced weird problem. I have 15 different characters on my console in an offline mode. Now once i create new character and close Diablo 2 Resurrected app the character is gone after i come back. However, all 15 characters i have so far seems to be there with no issues. I’ve read somewhere in the web that there is a limit of 30 characters on consoles. Can someone help?
I’m having the same issue; however, for me 26-27 chars will be kept and the rest will disappear after restart. This difference might be hardware related; are you using the Switch Lite?
I having the same trouble.
I recently encountered this bug. Sadly I don’t have a solution, but I can share how I got to this state and what my symptoms are.
I’ve been playing for a few months on the Switch and enjoying it. It has been a dream of mine to be able to play on the go since forever. I play only offline with several builds and I have a bunch of mules.
Everything was fine until one fateful day when I was running LK for runes and the game crashed on me. I immediately logged back in and saw I hadn’t lost any meaningful progress aside from my map not being revealed. What a relief! A bunch of runs later I had a lot of pgems lying around in my stash so I decided to create a mule for them and a mule I created. Now at this point I was scared of the crash and decided to start closing my game after sessions to avoid any loss of progress. Little did I know that I’m already in limbo and closing the game will always lead to loss of progress.
When I logged back in I played a bunch and got a few more pgems for the mule, however the mule was no longer there. A full stash of pgems gone, I didn’t mourn it too much, thought it was a one off. Created a new mule with the same name, maybe it was there somewhere just not showing in the list, but no. Next time I opened the game the new mule was gone as well.
I thought maybe I hit a character limit? I searched the internet and there is indeed a 30 character limit in offline mode on the Switch. I don’t know why that is in the first place, but I have 18 characters so that’s not the problem. I saw there is (or was) a bug with offline and online characters having the same name, but that shouldn’t be the case since I play exclusively offline. Additionally my map reveal was also gone again.
I did some testing with different characters, did some progress to see if that’s the issue, but everything led to them being deleted. Everything else seems to work fine, shared stashes, existing characters, etc. Now I am fearful of playing, because I might lose progress.
I suppose something got corrupted with the crash that is now affecting these aspects of the game. The character that crashed is still playable and able to progress normally.
TL;DR; Game crashed, any new characters I create gets deleted after I restart the game, my map reveal is lost as well.
I found a temporary solution that works for me when creating a new character.
Instead if making 1 character. Make 2 characters right after. The first will be saved. The 2nd will be removed automatically if you close the game down. This leaving me max at 29 characters.
I tried other ways like make 1 character save and exit. Start game again save and exit. This sometimes work. Again required to close game down to be sure. You dont want to transfers any items until you know for sure.
Let me know if this works for you. It’s important for your feedback so we can narrow down the problem for everyone else.
I tried that and both characters got deleted. I also read somewhere it might be a corrupted shared stash so I emptied them. Can’t be corrupted if they’re empty, right? Well, wrong, still my characters get deleted. I guess there’s nothing to do but wait for a fix. I’ll update here if I come up with something. Deleting existing characters is really out of the question. I have mules full of stuff I want to keep and the rest are 70+.
Update:
I tried some more things.
I know about offline characters being deleted when their name is the same as online characters. That is supposedly fixed and as previously stated I have no online characters, but just to be thorough I created a character with a completely button mashed name and it still got deleted.
I had moved D2R to my internal storage, because from my SD card after a while the game started to stutter and supposedly it would load a tiny bit faster. (indeed the stutter disappeared and loading was a fraction of a nanosecond faster) I tried moving it back to SD, I tried deleting and reinstalling the game, maybe some part of the binary got corrupted with the move? Nope, characters still get deleted after I restart.
I have doubts it’s related to shared stashes. As far as I’m aware they are saved separately on a timer or something as can be seen in the many threads discussing gone or duped items via shared stashes. I presume this is to save on disc writes, admirable, though I think unnecessary in this day and age. I created one character and dumped some arrows and bolts in my shared stash (can never have too many of those) and the character was gone, but the ammo was there after restart. Side note: the settings are also saved separately. I changed players X several times between attempts and that was always as I had left it. Same deal with the last played difficulty.
I’ve been scouring the internet for some clues and it does seem this happens on all platforms. I can’t really access the Switch file system to check what exists and what doesn’t without hacking it in some destructive manner. I found some evidence of the problem on PC as well and one person affected stated that there is nothing on their hard drive after this issue happened, so it does indeed look like the save itself does not happen at all. My existing characters do retain their progress made as evidenced by my emptying the shared stashes into existing characters and not losing those, so it’s not quite that simple.
Hopefully someone on PC who’s experiencing this can find their logs and share with Blizzard. (also fingers crossed it’s not a silenced error and it does end up in the logs) I checked if I can fetch some logs on my end, but again without access to the FS I can only rely on the Switch’s logging and it was clean.
Trying a different profile is not possible as the offline mode still requires you to link a battle.net account, so I would either have to go through the painful process of relinking accounts or buy the game again. This in itself is questionable, but a different topic and it probably won’t do anything as the profile will be fresh and presumably won’t have problems. I may be able to find a friend with a Switch and try transferring my profile there, but I would say these options are well beyond what should be expected of an end user.
I think I’ve reached my limits on this, short of actually getting my hands on the codebase and digging through it. Good luck to all of you in the same boat as us and good luck to the dev team on figuring this one out. As a fellow engineer (game dev even) I know the pains with complex systems, I know how every line of code can have multiple unforeseen points of failure and I know how difficult it is to work with closed and outright hostile environments such as these of consoles.
Stay classy and give it your best!
I edited my last post to not be spammy, but I changed my mind.
TL;DR; I believe I’ve tried anything that could be considered reasonable to no avail. Hope we can have this resolved.
Though there’s nothing about this in the patch notes, I tested the new version. The bug is still present and I still cannot create new characters.
I have also confirmed other games can store new save games (and characters where applicable) to rule out any issues with my Switch’s storage.
Hi all, same problem here. If I create a new char, it’s gone after I restart the game. I managed to copy the internal save game storage to an SD card using Atmosphere (a custom FW for Switch) and I have bad news: The files of those newly created chars exist but they are empty (size: 0KB). So, the progress and the items are definitely lost. Pretty bad for me. I am currently pursuing a holy grail and because of that issue I lost some items (Natslya’s mark being the most significant one) plus I can’t continue with the grail now, because I can’t create more mules. The only solution that I currently see is to get the PC version of the game and copy the extracted savegames into its savegame folder and continue there. That will of course not make any losses undone. Best, when playing offline on PC, one should install an automated backup solution for the chars to avoid any item losses to happen in future.
The problem is definitely a bug. And the game is currently unplayable for me on Switch. Is there a way to report that?
Update: Ok guys, I was able to nail down the problem further and also to find a workaround (nope, lost items and progress won’t come back):
When you create a char, the game creates 0KB files for that char in the filesystem. The game will fill those files for the first time once you see the small red swirling pentagram in the right bottom corner of your screen. Appearently, due to some bug, the game for me never saves (i.e. the pentagram never appears) in the first session of the newly created char.
So, what you need to do is, you create a new char, you immediately leave his first session, you start a new game with that char and now at some point you will see the red pentagram. Once you saw it, you can be sure that your char has been correctly saved to the Switch’s internal memory and you can continue using it.
@Blizzard: Please fix offline chars not being saved in their very first session.
Unfortunately, this one didn’t work for me. I did get the pentagram, but upon restart the new char is gone. I tried several times to no avail since a previous comment mentioned these workarounds “sometimes” work. It might just be a numbers game so I may give it several more attempts. Double unfortunately, my Switch is of the patched variety (as far as I can tell) and I can’t jailbreak it and get to the save data at all, otherwise I’d just dump several fresh characters and be happy. As previously stated existing characters have no issues saving progress. (so far)
That’s weird, because it means that there are different varieties of that bug. Seems that D2Rs way to save files is totally unreliable on Switch. I wonder what is so special about D2R that saving to disk is an actual issue. All my other games never have problems while saving. But, I’m afraid, without the source code there is no way to tell exactly what is going wrong here. Please Blizzard, look into that problem.
PS: This website tells you whether your Switch is vulnerable (just google, links are not allowed here):
is my switch patched dot com
I would advise you to remove the link you provided. The site seem to collect serial numbers. I have report you as advertising.
Same problem here… I have 27 chars and when i create a new char it dissapear after restarting the game.Lost some items already because it was a mule char…
Bug still exists, lost many items this way 
No more holy grail hunting this way.
This really pissed me off.
Yeah, seems to happen to quite a few people: [Switch | Single player] New characters disappear after restarting the game - #8 by DungeonMast-2645
Not only is this a problem but I have been playing for two months and I have or had I should say three characters, a druid, a barbarian and a sorceress that I have meticulously dumped hundreds of hours into items everything Runewords everything my time especially has been wasted. I am absolutely defeated right now, I just made a grief last night for the first time and I was playing today. All of a sudden the game crashed and reverted me back to May 29. I am so mad right now that I am done with this game blizzard. This is ridiculous I can’t believe a 20 year old game That I’ve been playing my whole life is giving me this much trouble. Absolutely incredible. You guys need to get it together together I’m so irritated and this isn’t the first time this is happened this keeps happening over and over and over and over and over I get Ormus robe with three to blizzard gone night wings gone deaths, fathom gone. I have worked my sack off for all of this I just got an Ohm last night and jumped for joy gone. I’m so disgusted. I look up problems with their solutions and I scan the system. The game files everything no corrupted data yet the game wants to crash on me when I finally achieve something I would love to be refunded my money for the game considering I spent $100 on it for switch and another big chunk of change for Xbox because I know for a fact, you guys are not gonna get me my progress or items back
Just happened to me. I created a character yesterday in offline. It’s gone today. I’m not sure why this isn’t being fixed. Game isn’t playable.
I can confirm that this happens for me too. New characters get deleted when i close the game. I was able to create a character not too long though, so i dunno what is happening.
I just came to say I am experiencing the same bug. I, like many, tried to change my habits with the game, closing the app and turning the system off occasionally, but it has been to no avail.
I have been trying to experiment by disabling the automatic cloud save data backup and it does do pretty much what I expect in many aspects. I was able to kill a HC character and bring him back by reverting to a previous manual save state available on the local data cloud. I tried a few times booting it up and closing it trying to get him to disappear, but of course can’t get it to happen when I’m testing a theory about it. My theory is that if you disable the automatic cloud save, when the data gets erased or corrupted, as soon as you close the game it updates the save cloud and the cloud gets the same things erased. So if you disable that feature you may be able to recover lost single player characters. The trick is that you need to start the game each time before you save and make sure the characters you expect to be there are there. If everyone is there, you can back out to the Switch menu and perform a manual cloud save which will force the game to close. If you’re missing characters, you should try downloading your most recent previous save state to recover them before updating the save state again. You may lose some progress, but it should help to make it not be hundreds of hours. I have not had the opportunity to test it ON THE BUG because I just haven’t created the circumstance again under scrutiny and using this technique.
If anyone else wants to try this and see if you’re able to recover your characters in any capacity the next time it happens please let me and the community know if it works for you.
The only uncertainty I have about it is that if you go into the game, check for the characters, then initiate a save and the corruption or erasure happens at the very MOMENT the game closes then you may end up with an erased character anyway.
Anyhow, please tag me if you make any finding with this idea. I’m very curious. I will also try to update the forum if I make any findings myself.