Mass Effect 1 cannot load any save file

[tcostley]

Hello All,

I have been trying to troubleshoot to the best of my abilities but I haven't been able to find a solution to my problem, so here it is and I hope someone can help me out:

My ME1 game doesnt seem to be able to find or load any save files. I am playing on Origen (although I also own the game on steam and have the same problem) on windows 10.

Every time I play the game it runs fine, lets me play to any point I desire and from what I can tell it autosaves properly and every time I save the game it says the save is successful. 

However each time I exit the game and go to play again my title screen doesn't give me the option to resume. This forces me to start a new career each time. I have also noticed that each time I open the game it doesn't load my config settings (resolution, gamma, subtitles etc.) It seems like every time I open the game it thinks it is the first time I have ever done so.

I have looked through a decent amount of the forums and found threads with similar problems but none have seemed to work for me. I don't have any files in my "documents" folder and cant seem to find a spot where my save files are located when I search for ".masseffectsave" however I find some old save files from when I was troubleshooting weeks ago. The biggest thing that I can notice is that every time I start a new game a new file folder shows up in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Mass Effect\Binaries" folder it has a really weird name that looks like an Asian character which holds a set of files of BioWare--->MassEffect which then have Config, Logs, Published and Save folders that all have what seems to be default files.

Every one of these oddly named files have the same things inside.

Lastly, I built my own computer so it may have some weird things about it, I have the game on my SSD in hopes to avoid any problems however ever since I recently got a new HDD some of my default file save locations I have to reset. Eg. when I download a file from the internet I have to manually select the "downloads" file in my HDD because my computer tries to save it to my old HDD that no longer exists. I don't think this should have any effect since everything should be on my SSD but I thought I would mention it anyway.

So I would really like to play this game as it doesn't feel right starting at number 2 but I am starting to lose hope haha.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

[holger1405]

@tcostley

This is a permissions/access problem.

The game can't write to your "Documents" folder and it seems that not only the game has difficulty's to access the right folders, so the "Download" issue is pretty much related. 

I normally would recommand a complete fresh installation of Windows to get rid of the problem, especially because it is not only the game who has a problem.

But it that is too much work for you right now I would recommand to move your "Documents" folder to your secondary HDD. (Here is a guide how to do that.) (You need to Move the content from the old folder to the new one as described!) > reboot > test.

You alternatively could set the permission of your new drive strait.