Bugs are thankfully less prevelant in games than they used to be. No wonder then that this one is such a strange one while being incredibly destructive to your gameplay when launching yourself into the deep end of the pool that is Helldivers.
People all over the internet began complaining a couple of days after Helldivers launched that they were losing progress for the strangest reason. It turns out that if you turn off your controller or it loses power while you’re playing, all of your character progression is lost. This is because when you rejoin, you’re character will no longer be your leveled beast of alien slaughtering. It instead becomes a tiny little level 1 character. The worst part? This actually saves over your original character so you lose everything.
Here’s what Arrowhead had to say about it over on the Helldivers support page.
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.
So if you’re out there right now and playing Helldivers on PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 3, make sure you keep your controller plugged in okay? Arrowhead are fixing the problem soon but until then do be careful out there marines.