Please pin this.

The Auto-save slot / the manual save slots are all SHARED between GTA 4 and its episodes!

It means that, if you finished GTA 4 and went on to play one of the episodes, any saving of the game, either manual or auto, will delete a former save, if there was any.

Workarounds:

1) Remember to turn off Auto-save before quitting one of the above games.
Because they share the settings too (controls, graphic options, audio...) so if you enable auto-save in GTA 4 / episodes, it is automatically enabled in episodes / GTA 4.
If you didn't turn it off, like me, then you will activate, say.. GTA 4, after you played GTA The Lost and the Dammned, only to discover that your "Story complete" auto-save slot was deleted.................................................

2) Backup your GTA saves, so you will have a save of every game. You will have to manually load it (by backing-up the current save files, and overwriting it with the saves of the GTA you now want to play).


3) another suggested workaround (un-applyable on the autosave) is to divide the save slots between the 3 games.

There are only 12 slots and they are all shared between all 3 games.
So you can use the first 4 with GTA 4, the next 4 with LATD, and the last 4 with Tony's ballad.


Since Rockstar patched this game in 2016 (after 8 years), maybe they will solve this simple to solve problem too.