Crysis Remastered is now available on Nintendo Switch, and we're really liking what little we've played so far. Unfortunately it took some time before we were able to actually play it due to an oversight that seems to prevent the game from making 'proper' save data in specific circumstances.

We changed the character to a full stop so that it read 'nl.Alex' and the issue melted away like an ice lolly on a hot patio.

Upon initially loading the game we were able to get into the main menu and tried to launch a campaign. A bog-standard loading screen appeared but after around 30 seconds or so the game crashed completely and was forced closed. These things happen, so we didn't really pay it any mind... until it happened the next ten or eleven times afterwards.

After reaching out to others and much gnashing of teeth, it seemed that it wasn't a widespread issue with the game, but it was so consistent we couldn't believe it was just poor luck each time. Stranger yet it worked flawlessly on other accounts on the same Switch, and so the solution slowly started to reveal itself.

The original account we tried to use contained a colon in the username, 'nl:Alex' to be precise, and yet none of the other accounts had this character. We changed the character to a full stop so that it read 'nl.Alex' and the issue melted away like an ice lolly on a hot patio.

In computing terms certain characters are deemed 'illegal', meaning a system will not accept them so that they won't cause issues within a machine's workings (we're oversimplifying massively here). It's possible that that's what's happening here, and Crysis Remastered just flat-out doesn't want to create save data with certain special characters to avoid causing wobbly code, but the result is that the game has no idea what to do when it asks for save data and gets a whole lot of nothing in response.

The offending username

Without delving into the code ourselves we can't be completely certain that this is the whole truth of the issue, but it seems that for the time being at least certain characters within your user's username will not be allowed if you want to play Crysis Remastered on your Nintendo Switch.

We've reached out to Crytek for comment and will update this article in due course.