"A problem occured while saving the game. No game session data was preserved."

Hello all,

The full erorr I am encountering in-game is "A problem occured while saving the game. No game session data was preserved. Please try again". For context, I got the game through Steam as a gift from my boyfriend. Whenever I launch it, so does EA.

I didn't have this issue until very recently. In fact I am nearing the end of ME1 which is why I would love to figure out a way to resolve this without having to restart the whole game. I would be open to it if it was the only solution, but if the problem persisted even then I might just combust...

I've tried pretty much anything my relatively tech-illiterate self could think of. Firstly doing as the game asks and trying again in every single possible way - from overwriting saves to creating new saves to loading and saving or waiting on auto-saves, all lead to the same error message. I also tried verifying the integrity of my files through Steam, backing up my data and reinstalling the game, launching it as an administrator,... nothing worked.

Not only that, but to launch it as an administrator I had to mess around in properties and actually allow ME1 to even do so. And for some reason whenever I'd open it  as an administrator, the launcher would open fine, but then never actually launch ME1. It would briefly fade to black and then return to the launcher, but I would be unable to click on anything. And no, it's not my antivirus, at least I'm pretty sure it isn't. It never notified me about anything concerning this game and my Controlled Folder Access is turned off. I don't have OneDrive saves turned on either.

I wonder whether it could be related to me having two discs on my computer and having redirected the game from the default disc to another one. I do have one empty EA file in my default disc as well as a "SteamLibrary" file with some data in it, but the rest is in the disc I installed the game in. Either way (I think) this has always been the case, and it hadn't been an issue up until now.

Please, I really really want to love this game but this has been driving me nuts. I would appreciate any help or guidance. I read through a few threads but as I said, nothing has seemed to work so far and other solutions I encountered were hard to understand for me since I'm not all that tech-savvy. I've never had this issue with any other game I've ever played, a legendary edition no less! It's incredibly disappointing and frustrating, but I don't want to give up on this franchise.