It happened. I logged into World War Z and my character was showing 0 across the board – no character progress, so class levels and no weapon upgrades. I hoped it was a glitch, and tried again later. Still zero. Maybe logging out and back in to Epic would do the trick? Nope – still zero.
Some time spent googling and this is a known, if infrequent problem, where it seems that Epic will accidentally overwrite your save file in the Cloud, and there’s nothing much you can do about it.
I logged a ticket with Epic, but with everything that’s going on right now they estimated it might take 9 DAYS to get back to me. I didn’t really want to wait that long, so I dug around a bit to see if there was anything else I could do. And it turns out there was…sort of.
To give you a bit of background, WWZ stores its game profiles here:
C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\EpicGamesLauncher\Saved\Saves
Note, replace ‘[YOUR USERNAME]’ with your Windows username.
If you have Epic’s Cloud Save enabled, then it will just update that location with the latest copy whenever it syncs.
If you look in that folder, you’ll see at least one folder with a long name of random characters. This is your unique ID, and in that folder is the various files that make up your saved progress and configuration.
What I found is that Saber, the game’s publisher, also takes some copies of this data. Go to this folder:
C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Saber\WWZ\client\storage
And you’ll see a folder with the same unique ID. Open that, and in there will be the same files you saw in the original folder above. NOW – if you’ve already launched the game, you’re probably going to find that these saved files have also been updated to the latest version, and therefore your progress is stil lost…but Saber do something that Epic don’t – they keep older versions, too.
Go back to the folder location above, and as well as the folder with your unique ID as the name, you should also see one called ‘slots’. In there, you’ll see a folder with your unique ID as the name again, and IN THERE….there’s lots more folders, rather than your saved data.
These are old versions of your saved profile, and if you order them by date, you can pick one that is BEFORE you noticed your account had been reset.
All you then need to do is copy the files in that folder into the Epic folder you opened at the beginning, overwriting what’s in there. I’d highly recommend taking a backup of that original folder and contents before you do, of course.
What this did for me is restore my progress to a day earlier, meaning I still lost SOME progress, but it was a ton less than it being completely reset.
I did this a couple of days ago and it’s been fine for me ever since, including updating through Cloud Save, so this looks to be a perfectly legit way to restore your account if you do encounter the dreaded reset problem.
