When the original Dark Souls released on PC, the game was a mess. It was unoptimized, featured horrid resolutions, and suffered from constant frame rate drops that rendered it nigh unplayable. Dark Souls Remastered might have fixed all that, but the game is apparently host to an even worse problem: certain popular antivirus programs can screw over a gamer’s progress.
Late last month, gamers started reporting on reddit that save files for the PC version of Dark Souls Remastered were becoming corrupted. After weeks of troubleshooting, an official announcement was posted on the game’s Steam general discussions board. Turns out the culprits were the popular antivirus programs BitDefender and Windows Defender. If these programs didn’t damage Dark Souls Remastered’s save files, they treated the files as corrupted. Even worse, BitDefender and Windows Defender messed around with cloud sync services, interpreting the save files as “in use” and preventing Dark Souls Remastered from accessing them.
Lucky for players, an easy solution exists: add the Dark Souls Remastered save files to exclusion lists. Many gamers report that preventing antivirus programs from accessing the files (and preventing sync services from managing the files) seems to do the trick. However, a few gamers claim the problem persists even after excluding save files.
Dark Souls Remastered’s issue with BitDefender and Windows Defender is fairly unusual, as none of the other Dark Souls games on PC are affected by these (or any) antivirus programs. While several antivirus programs have not behaved well with other games in the past, those issues have mostly been fixed thanks to patches.
With any luck, the developers of BitDefender and Windows Defender are hard at work coding a patch to prevent their programs from screwing around with Dark Souls Remastered’s save files. Although, who knows how many other games could be affected.
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