I recently decided to purchase the Pillars of Eternity Deluxe Edition on Steam after playing roughly 35 hours of the game on Game Pass via the Microsoft Store.

After downloading Pillars of Eternity from Steam I ran it and my only option was to start a new game (which I assumed would happen). I made a new character quickly to generate a save file so I knew where to place my old ones and closed the game.

I had looked into copying the save files I previously had over (I made one specifically to do this) so that Steam could access them and after pasting them into the appropriate folder when launching I had the options to continue or load a game.

Unfortunately, when loading in I get a dark screen with no characters or portraits and nothing shows up in character menus, etc. I've tried copying over the rest of my saves but none of them load properly and I encounter this issue regardless. The only way to have them function properly is to load the game through Game Pass which does not have the White Marches expansions.

I wanted to switch to Steam as the Definitive Edition is a better deal. I was also getting frustrated by a bug encountered in the Game Pass version of the game where certain maps, particular Caed Nua and Defiance Bay, would overlap with other zones and create clutter as chests/lootable objects, doors, and environmental information prompts would continue to appear where they shouldn't. This often hindered the ability to move characters around as the popups would block pathing and made speaking to NPCs impossible with the only solution being to completely close the game and launch it again. This only started happening after going to Copperlane in Defiance Bay but it seems to happen everywhere I go now.

Is there any way to have Steam read the save files properly? I also have a TempSaveData and SavedData folder if those would be helpful to see.

I tried uninstalling the Game Pass version of Pillars of Eternity but the save files still won't load properly.

I have a fix for this, see my update and offer at https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/114569-xbox-gamepass-saves-transfer-to-gog-version