Banner Saga 1 Save Import to Banner Saga 2 and Crashing on Steam Deck

Originally Posted 5/22/24

image of four of the main characters from Banner Saga. One is a red headed girl in green cloak, another a man with long hair in a red cloak and beige clothes, another a woman with black hair in a blue cloak with raven feathers, and a large varl character

This article is basically going to be a copy paste of a post I made elsewhere explaining an issue I came across while trying to play Banner Saga 1 and 2 on the Valve Steam Deck. I originally noticed these issues roughly a year or two ago (Dec 2022/ Jan 2023), so they may have been fixed.

Crashing

First up: Crashing. The game would seemingly crash randomly, and sometimes multiple times at the same spot. To fix this, i moved the game to internal storage. While it didn't completely fix the issue, the frequency went down significantly and usually just restarting the steam deck would keep it from happening again.

Importing Data from Banner Saga 1 to 2

I was very scared when Banner Saga 2 was not finding my save. From looking at this and this, it seems like the steam deck saves files as if it's in a windows environment (or mimics the folder structure). And so in Banner Saga 2 I couldn't find a way to get to the first game save. To do this, I followed the instructions in that second video. Written out, it's:

  1. Go into Desktop mode
  2. Go to File Explorer
  3. Enable to see "hidden folders", by going to the top right hamburger menu
  4. Go to Home -> .local-> share -> Steam -> steamapps -> compdata
  5. Pick the game you want (Google "Steam ID for _________"). Banner Saga 1 is 237990 Banner saga 2 is 281640
  6. From there, pfx-> drive_c -> users -> steamuser -> appdata -> roaming -> The Banner Saga ->Localstore and then your save file is in the "Save" folder.
  7. I copied the entire local store folder from Banner saga 1, renamed it to say it was Banner saga one's, and pasted it into "The Banner Saga 2"'s folder (Follow steps 4-6 but use Banner Saga 2 data)

From here, go into Banner Saga 2, start a new game, import game. It'll bring up an old looking file explorer. For me, it defaults to showing Adobe, Microsoft, TheBannerSaga2. Click on Banner Saga 2, and you should see the folder you pasted in earlier. Click it, then:

save->saga1->0->sav_finale_save.json and click open

And that's it! It should then bring your save over to Bannerlord 2! Hopefully this helps some people out!