Hi, thank you for the reply. All of that is completely fair as I failed to include a major detail:

I started a brand new character August 30th 2021 around ~10PM EST. That character is completely missing. Yes, the original character is missing

The early access saves are in the My Documents folder (D:\My Documents\Saved Games\wolcen\savegames\characters). I now recall the progress no longer saving to the files as the reason I stopped playing. There is no save directory at C:\MEDIA\GAMES\Steam\steamapps\common\Wolcen\Game.

Okay, after a few minutes I realized that my directory paths are different. Because I work in technology I don't trust it. So my D:\ is a RAID 1 with my My Documents directory. I used to outright hack the entire registry because they removed the option in Visa to simply right-click on My Documents and move it. Now I right-click on most directories such as Music and Saved Games and move them to D:. So I manually created C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\wolcen\ and made a copy of the files over there and the old character showed up.

So all of this is 100% entirely my fault as I failed to realize it late at night when I just wanted to relax, my apologies. I have the old character back.

That being said there is room to learn from this. Your developers may be statically referencing %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games.

Here are the instances where it is overwritten in the registry by Windows:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\
{4C5C32FF-BB9D-43B0-B5B4-2D72E54EAAA4}

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\
{4C5C32FF-BB9D-43B0-B5B4-2D72E54EAAA4}

Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2590041573-1464078526-3945011801-1005\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
{4C5C32FF-BB9D-43B0-B5B4-2D72E54EAAA4}

Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2590041573-1464078526-3945011801-1005\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
{4C5C32FF-BB9D-43B0-B5B4-2D72E54EAAA4}

All four instances are set to:
D:\My Documents\Saved Games

The only change I made was again, right-clicking and going to the properties of each My Documents directory. Then you click on the Location tab and change it to another directory or in my case drive and directory using RAID 1. I can technically move the entire My Documents directory from C:\Users\John to D:\My Documents by thouroughly going through the registry and while it's a pain it works flawlessly when you do it properly. The key: not losing my data when (not if) Windows takes a dump.