One of my favourite things about owning a Steam Deck is the fact I can get away from the shackles of my desk when playing a game, and pick up where I left off portably. I was looking forward to doing the same with Oblivion Remastered, until disaster struck: My save files were nowhere to be seen.
Turns out I'm not the only one, as my meticulous research (Googling my issue and adding "Reddit" on the end like any good netizen) pointed me to loads of folks facing the same issue. Turns out the way Oblivion handles save files is a little skewiff right now, and Bethesda says it's "investigating" the issue.
So, uh, where are my save files?
Turns out that, for whatever reason, Oblivion Remastered doesn't tuck its saves away alongside all your other ones. No matter where you've pointed your saves to go, Oblivion Remastered will just go ahead and create its files in C:\Users\[yourusername]\Documents\My Games. Fine if that's your default anyway—which it is for our writer Joshua Wolens, who confirmed his saves are syncing up fine across his PC and Steam Deck.
But if that isn't your default directory, Steam won't necessarily be looking there for your cloud saves. If your PC is set up like mine, it'll be looking inside a OneDrive Documents folder instead, which is notably missing from Oblivion Remastered's own directory. In other cases, if your user profile is set up on another drive, Steam'll be looking there instead.
That mismatch can cause a bit of panic, like it did for me. I've even seen some fringe cases on Reddit where the game initially sets up in your correct folder, but then subsequently tries to pull from the default C Drive Documents folder, making it look like you've lost hours of precious adventuring around Cyrodiil.
If you're playing on Steam Deck and trying to get your saves onto your PC, thankfully the solution is pretty simple. I was able to dive into my OneDrive folder and find my Steam Deck saves safely tucked away, which you can then copy over to the non-OneDrive Documents folder.
Trying to zap things from PC back to Steam Deck was a little more frustrating. I tried dumping the files back into my OneDrive, but I had to fiddle around: disabling and re-enabling cloud saves on both my PC and Steam Deck while launching the game on both devices a few times before the cloud save synced up and let me continue on. Definition of insanity, and all that.
The solution may be even simpler than that, though, with Reddit user MightyHorn pointing out that simply disabling OneDrive in the Documents folder should patch things up.
Otherwise, it's basically a matter of trading files between your default user profile location and the folder that Oblivion Remastered is creating while ignoring your usual settings. It's a massive ballache right now though, especially when the game is not only Steam Deck verified, but supposed to be cloud save compatible.
Hopefully it should be a relatively easy fix on Bethesda's end to get Oblivion Remastered saving in the correct folder. Quite frankly, I'm not smart or proactive enough for all this endless file shuffling, and don't even get me started on potentially faffing around with symbolic links.
