Why am I unable to import my Mass Effect 2 saves?
Solution 1:
After looking around a lot I finally, finally found the answer to my problem:
In BioWare\Save I had a folder character. However, when I started looking around on the web, I saw people were having names like character_10_Soldier_123456. After searching some more I found out what this extra data stands for, and it is the following:
- First number = origin (1 = from space, 2 = colonist, 3 = earthborn)
- Second number = your back story ( 1 = sole survivor, 2 = War Hero, 3 = ruthless soldier
- Name in between = your class (Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel or Vanguard)
- Last 6 digits = creation time. So for example 100211 would be "10 february 2011"
I do not know if these values have to be exactly correct for the import to work (the data is also in your savegame) but I filled them out as correctly as possible anyway. You can use Gibbed's save editor for retrieving the data. After changing my folder name to something like this everything works. Most likely this is some legacy issue from my original ME1 savegame.
One last thing, I also changed GamerSettings.ini in BioWare\Mass Effect 3\BIOGame\Config to add something like:
[SaveGames]
Location=E:\BioWare\Mass Effect 2\Save
I do not think this actually helped my problem, but I mention it here because it seemed to help for some other people. Another solution I encountered frequently is to copy your BioWare\Mass Effect 2 folder to the documents folder of your admin account if that's a separate one (for some reasons ME3 looks there).
Solution 2:
Unlike certain other games, where you typically see credits after beating the game and then are returned to your previous save (just before beating the boss), Mass Effect doesn't consider your saved game to be "complete" unless you click "Continue" after beating them game, then save once more. This will cause Mass Effect 3 to treat your save as "not completed" and thus not valid for importing.
Solution 3:
A potential gotcha is that only a save after the suicide mission is completed can be used to import. If you choose not to continue your game after completion of that mission, the only save representing a completed game is the autosave that ME2 makes on completion.
If (in ME2) you open an earlier saved game for that career (for instance because you wanted to check your Shepard's appearance before importing into ME3), the game may do a new autosave that replaces the completion autosave. If that happens, you will have to replay the ending from an earlier save.