Thief’s bizarre April Fool’s save “bug” leaves players stranded

Oh god this means you might be stuck on the Erin level FOREVER.

Well, this is a strange one. Reports have been flooding in to the Thief Steam forums of a weird and frustrating bug that appears to have triggered on April Fool’s Day. In a rather nasty act of trickery, it over-writes your save with one that takes you back to the start of whichever area you were last in.

Thief players have noted it happening in Chapter 2, Chapter 7 and various other places in the game. You think you’ve finished the mission, but then you’re sent back to the very start with a messed up save.

According to a post by the developers Eidos Montreal, this was all down to some weird time-stamp calculation issues:

Basically, it’s an issue with the mathematical calculations of time-stamps from March 30th – April 2nd, which meant systems didn’t recognise the most recent time-stamp and instead took the previous time-stamp save (re-starting the level). So if you saved your game on March 30th, you may have experienced a disruption yesterday on April 1st and if you saved your game on March 31st, you may have experienced disruption yesterday April 1st and today April 2nd.

There isn’t much you can really do to fix this except wait it out, or perhaps change your PC’s clock to 3 April and beyond.

After today [2 April] the calculations are accurate and there should be no other issues. We are working on a patch to ensure this doesn’t happen next year with these March/April calculations.

You’ll probably have to restart whatever Chapter of the game you were on, but Eidos claims that saved games should not be corrupted.

The timing of this “bug” has led players to speculate that it may have been an intentional act of sabotage. A number of employees were laid off from Eidos Montreal following Thief’s release, and during development there were multiple reports of a troubled working environment.

Thanks Jason Reimche on our Facebook page for the tip.