Players have discovered that carrying around a large number of items in Cyberpunk 2077 can and will corrupt their save files, with some players having discovered this glitch the hard way while abusing a separate item duplication glitch. Open-world games like Cyberpunk often have an excess of spare items laying around, ranging from sex objects to cheese wheels depending on what the world of the game demands. Once the main campaign is finished off and the credits roll, some players like to find alternative ways to stay in games they enjoyed, and one of those ways is collecting guns, cosmetics, or junk and squeezing the open world for everything it has. However, in the case of CD Projekt Red's open-world, item hoarders might want to hold off for a patch.
In some players' initial playthroughs, they quickly filled up their inventories thanks to a common item duplication glitch. From powerful weapons to crafting materials, as long as a vending machine will accept an item, players can sell it and then press a quick button combo to immediately load back in and buy back as many copies of it as they desire. While this has assuredly made many playthroughs more enjoyable in the short term, the newly discovered save corruptions have spoiled the fun the glitch brought for many players.
As highlighted by PC Gamer, the save file corruptions going around are caused when players have excessively full inventories. It seems that once a save file grows to 8MB+ in size, the game can no longer index the player inventory, causing loading that file to fail. CD Projekt Red currently recommends avoiding the item duplication glitch, as that has been causing the most issues when it comes to this brand of save file corruption, but players are also warned away from crafting too many items, which can produce hundreds of grenades and healing items and also trigger the bug.
There's no word on if the save corruption will be fixed in a future patch, but the developers have a lot on their plate when it comes to getting Cyberpunk 2077 running as intended. CD Projekt Red has released the fifth patch for the game this week, and they're still ensuring that players don't fall down elevator shafts during key missions and that major characters don't pull a disappearing act during key story missions. While it is likely on the to-do list for future patches, these types of issues, the ones that everyone has a chance of running into, will likely take priority over something that is only reliably triggered by purposefully duplicating items. It gives on pause to consider how many or how relative few items would take up the fatal 8MB amount on a save file, but it seems odd that there isn't simply a absolute inventory limit to prevent this issue from occurring.
For any other game as big as Cyberpunk 2077, having a glitch that corrupts saves is a major problem that should be fixed immediately. For CD Projekt Red's open-world game, it seems to be just another in a long, long list of problems to be solved. With the game pulled from the PlayStation Store and being refunded at every other retailer, many already view the game as faulty beyond redemption. Nothing short of a No Man's Sky-level rebirth will bring the CD Projekt Red's reputation back from the brink, even if players on PC are still having a grand old time navigating the bugs of Night City as they're being squashed.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available for PlayStation 4 (retail-only), Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. It will launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2021.
Source: PC Gamer