Both my son and I play Fallout 4 on the same Xbox One S. We have for years, but as of late, with Cloud Saves, it has become difficult to enjoy the game. While my game sessions crashes and my saved game files don’t get corrupted/obsolete as frequently as my son’s do, they still happen at a rate which is annoying. I am not even going to try to describe my son’s experience trying to play the game. I am just going to say that game crashing is way too frequent and corrupt/obsolete save files can set one back hours. For a while we were able to stabilize the game by skipping Cloud Saves syncing, but that only address play session length. It did not really do much to help with game save files becoming corrupt or obsolete.

After some chatting, I found out that he gave his game character a long multi-word name. It became clear to me that the problems he was experiencing, and which were spilling over into my Fallout 4 play sessions, were caused by character limit in the Xbox file system. Unfortunately, game characters cannot be renamed in Fallout 4! We had to delete all of his Fallout 4 saved files, both on the Xbox and in Cloud Saves. For his second play-through he created a new character, with a short one-word name. Doing this not only fixed his problems, but it also fixed any issues I was experiencing. The game rarely crashes now, and save files stay current and work as expected.

So, what’s the takeaway. The Xbox is a computer after all, and file systems and their limits are not something most people would ever consider as a source for an issue like game crashing and saved games becoming corrupted. Depending on how a game creates its game save files this might not be the source of everyone’s problem. We should keep in mind, though, that developing on a game console almost always relies on an SDK for said console from the platform owner. The game save system could be part of said SDK and it can be integrated by multiple games. Therefore, having a game character with a really long name, regardless of the character name having spaces in it or not, can be an issue across games on the same platform version. That does not exclude cases in which a game could simply have really unfortunate naming convention for its save files. I myself have relied on using a file name to have delimited date/time and other sorting markers, when this was not something that could conveniently be store inside said file.

Give your game characters short one-word names, and have fun playing!