Why am I unable to import my Mass Effect 2 saves?

I just bought ME3 but I don't seem to be able to import any save games from ME2. I even launched ME2 to be sure I certainly finished the game, which I did (and Shepard's alive). I triple-checked that the save files are in the right folder (Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect 2\Save).

Is there any reason why ME3 doesn't see the ME2 character? (Absolutely nothing shows up in the import screen.)

Update: I checked the raw save game as suggested in the link posted by @BenBrocka. I notice some discrepancy here. I have each savegame apparently twice, one times in the folder "BioWare\Mass Effect 2\Save" and one time in the folder "BioWare\Mass Effect 2\Save\CharacterName". The save games look identical, but in the first folder the main quest is incomplete, in the subfolder the quest IS complete. I tried copying the files over from one folder to another but this trick didn't work.

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5 Answers

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).

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.

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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.

Maybe the game can't find your ME2 install try reinstalling ME2 so it adds the registery keys.

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Probably because if Shepard dies in Mass Effect 2, then you can't import to Mass Effect 3.

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