Screenshot of Mad Max (2015) Mad Max wandering the desolate wasteland searching for the lost savegames of lore.

I recently started playing Mad Max but noticed that it corrupts the settings and savegame files on exit. I found some mentions about this around the internet and in the Steam community but none of the suggestions permanently resolved the issue for me.

The problem presents itself in the following way. As the game is starting up it attempts to verify the internal files, sees them as corrupted and proceeds to delete them. From there the game continues as if it was the first launch and plays the intro video. In my testing it was always able to resume from the previous game once I got to the main menu but it wasn’t able to recover the game settings.

Technically what seems to happen is that the settings and savegame files stored by WB Games are replaced with empty versions. The actual files stored by Steam are OK. I noticed that simply copying the Steam files to the WB Games location corrects the issue. I guess this could be a situation where the game is not fully compatible with Steam.

In order to have the game remember my settings and to skip the intro video I wrote a small batch script that automates this process and also makes a new backup of the files every time just in case one time the files truly are corrupted and I need to refer to an earlier copy. For now I simply run the script every time I exit the game. It is safe to run it also afterwards, when I accidentally start the game without having remembered to run the script since the last game (but I would recommend to always close the game first before running the script).

In case you have ecountered this issue as well and no solution has helped, I’ll leave the script here. I’m running the game on Windows 10 on a 2019 iMac 27”, YMMV. Copy the file locally, locate and fill in the file locations so that the script knows what to copy and to where, and finally rename the file suffix to “.bat”. I’ve created a shortcut to the script and pinned that shortcut to the Start menu so that it is a bit easier to run the script.