Sno

Lost progress

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Have any of you guys gotten a good portion of the way through a game and lost your saves? Did you just stop playing, or start over?

It's been on my mind because i've been playing through the excellent Virtue's Last Reward on the 3DS and hit a really nasty save bug that cost me close to eighteen hours of progress, i had to completely erase my save and start over from scratch. I think it's probably one of the first times i've ever lost progress like this.

I was invested enough in the story to start over, and i'm confident that i now know how to avoid the bug. So i have my 3DS sitting a little to my left and i just have it auto-scrolling through the dialogue scenes, ocassionally taking over to make choices or puzzle things out, but mostly waiting things out until i'm back to where i was before. (It's a visual novel, so it's mostly story.) If nothing else, it completely killed the momentum.

This is kind of a problem distinct to Video games, isn't it?

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I played through the majority of the first Neverwinter Nights three times, running into the same closed-off exit at the end of Act 3 every time. By the end of that whole fiasco, I had ceased to be the guy who beat every game he played, like I was the guy who finished every novel he started. I still have a nasty habit of seeing bad games through, bitching all the while, but a serious loss of progress that isn't my own fault is pretty much a dealbreaker now.

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I played the first episode of The Walking Dead, and a little way into the second, and next time I ran the game it said I had no saves. The files are still there, but it won't read them. It won't even make new saves, so I'll probably never end up finishing it. I am deeply displeased with this state of affairs.

Also Carmageddon on iOS deleted my save yesterday, curse it

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My most recent System Shock 2 can save the game fine, but when I quit all my saves disappear. So now I can't replay it anymore. Someday I'll figure you out, System Shock 2 :(

I played Space Pirates and Zombies for a while then one day I had been playing for a long time since the last save and it crashed. I was like "fuck this" and haven't played it since - I had hit the point in that game where things got pretty grindy so that was a great excuse to stop.

The Developer's Commentary version of Thirty Flights of Loving keeps crashing at the very end of the game. There are like 3 unread commentary nodes or something that I still haven't made it to.

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I was just playing Deadlight the other day and the game crashed. I only lost a few checkpoints, but it upset me so much I actually felt like quitting.

I'm pretty sure if I ever lost a lot of real progress I'd either just quit and watch a walkthrough unless I really loved the game.

It is a thing that only relates to game, if you lose you place in a book or movie you can advance to where you lost your place, games will never let you do that.... unless it's an older game with a level skip code.

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Phantasy star online - Dreamcast. Me and a buddy wanted to jump online and do some minor trolling* over my 56k connection, so we created a new character and in the process saved over my 100+ hour main. I remember being utterly dumbfounded when i had realised what i had done.

And i'm pretty sure my xbox GTA vice city save corrupted when i was 95% of the way through the game

*Minor trolling consisted of making our robot dance in front of people in the lobby whilst we giggled like school boys....quite sad considering we were probably at an age when we should have been out fingering girls

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i was 17 years, 10 months and 14 days old.... i definitely should have been out fingering girls, multiple girls at the same time in fact

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I think the last two I had were pretty fucking annoying.

The first is no fault of the game developers, but right after I beat Kirby's Dreamcourse to the fullest and unlocked the special multiplayer levels, the battery back up died. I guess it's my fault for playing old games with batteries, but I am usually sure to change them ahead of time with a fresh battery these days. This is mainly annoying because Kirby's Dreamcourse is a super difficult game if you want to unlock everything. I have tried to use some saves for emulators I found on the internet so that I could just skip straight to multiplayer unlocked, but they seem directly tied to a certain version of the emulator or the ROM and I can't figure out which is which.

I had finally gotten around to playing Escape from Monkey Island on PS2 earlier this year and apparently there's a known bug in the act before you land on Monkey Island where the game "freezes" when talking to Otis the second time. I had finished almost all tasks on the island and was about to wrap up the chapter until I ruined my game and had to start over. When you talk to Otis the second time, the game still operates and you can use the menus as usual, but the controls in game don't work even though characters are still moving and walking around. I made the mistake of quitting and saying "Yes" to saving my game when it prompted me, finding that when I reloaded, the freeze of the controls was still intact. Still took me about 4 hours to get back to the point I was at.

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Occasionally I've lost about an hour of progress due to a crash or something. But one time I "lost" complete progress of a game. I didn't actually lose it, it was just that all savegames I had at that point were in a dead state. This was with C&C Renegade, I was using like 2 or 3 savegames just to make sure I wouldn't suffer a corrupt savegame. But during the mission on a boat I managed to get into part of the ship I shouldn't have been to this early in the mission. So at one point I had to go to that part of the ship and kill the captain to continue the mission. But I already killed him like 1 hour ago. Of course all my savegames were updated after the point I had killed the captain. I'm not sure if there was a restart mission feature, but I didn't feel like replaying the same 1+ hour.

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I was an hour or two from the end of the Darkness when my Xbox 360 was stolen. I never bothered to replay it.

More recently I was roughly half way through Assassin's Creed Revelations when Uplay decided to fuck up my save after a patch. This was actually sort of a relief because I had burned through the end of Brotherhood to prepare for Revelations and I was kind of preparing to do the same with Revelations prior to AC3, but wasn't enjoying it nearly as much. So I ended up reading some of the plot on Wikipedia and watching the rest of the meta-narrative (Desmond and Subject 16) stuff on YouTube. I feel pretty ok with it.

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I lost 7 hours of Darksiders 2 back in August. I actually replayed during what little free time I've had since school started, and I'm now on the final dungeon of the game. I still like it, but goddamn that was frustrating.

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I've never finished Baldur's Gate despite starting playthroughs perhaps 6 or 7 times. It just happens to be long enough that I get distracted before the end, and then lo and behold, I lose my saves the next time I reformat my PC (or in one particular case, discover the version of the game I'm playing is broken and can't export saves. Thanks Gametap.) Despite this I still periodically get that itch and go back and try again. Most recently I decided to try it in the BG2 engine using BGT, so we'll see if I get around to finishing this time.

The worst example in my gaming history is probably The Last Remnant, though. According to Steam I have 180 hours of playtime logged on that game and it is probably accurate. I was literally on the last boss doing optional content and managed to lose that save. :cry: I like the game enough that I've tried restarting from the beginning at least once but the idea of having to spend even half that much time to get back to where I was is kind of a downer.

Sno: Really sorry to hear you hit the VLR save bug. I was terrified of that the entire time I played. For you or anyone else playing on the 3DS, my trick is to use the Flow button to go back to a story section any time I hit a new puzzle room. Once you're in the story section you can safely save, and then jump back to the beginning of that puzzle room.

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]Sno[/b]: Really sorry to hear you hit the VLR save bug. I was terrified of that the entire time I played. For you or anyone else playing on the 3DS, my trick is to use the Flow button to go back to a story section any time I hit a new puzzle room. Once you're in the story section you can safely save, and then jump back to the beginning of that puzzle room.

I had read that only the PEC room is affected by the bug. Are you aware if that is that the full story here, or is there anything more to it?

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I had read that only the PEC room is affected by the bug. Are you aware if that is that the full story here, or is there anything more to it?

There are other puzzle rooms with save corruption bugs, PEC is just the worst. The general advice I've heard is not to save in any puzzle rooms. I'm not aware of anyone losing progress by saving outside one.

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There are other puzzle rooms with save corruption bugs, PEC is just the worst. The general advice I've heard is not to save in any puzzle rooms. I'm not aware of anyone losing progress by saving outside one.

I appreciate the heads up. Had i lost another playthrough, i probably would have given up on the game. I'll take more care about where i save from here on out.

Huge shame that it has such serious problems, it's otherwise a wonderful game that i would discourage no one from playing.

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I lost my Dawn of War 2 save in an HD crash (before steam cloud) on the last level on the hardest available difficulty. I replayed that entire game again (I also really liked it thankfully). That's one of the reasons it's my #1 player steam game. I think I have over 100 hours of just single player logged on top of my 100 hours of multiplayer...

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I think my most extreme example was the day after I'd completed Dark Souls after with about 65 hours on the clock, accidentally deleted the save trying to move it from that clumsy 360 cloud storage thing back with my main saves as I intended to let my gold account lapse. Didn't go back to that game for six months when I bought it with a PS3 and platinum'd it in under 50 hours. Dark Souls is the best.

And then just this morning. I was about five or six hours into my first playthrough of Super Metroid there, nudged the cartridge and it's erased everything. Ouennndaaaaaaannnnnn.

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I had Crackdown fail on me after someone inadvertently bought the game save destroying DLC on my account. Luckily it was the Keys to the City thing, that essentially lets me cheat my way to where I was before in a couple of minutes.

I was more irritated that I was incredibly close to getting all achievements, and the way they work meant that I would have to sink hours into it to get even close to where I was. At least you can't lose the collect all orbs achievement.

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So there's this game called VESPER.5. Made for a month-long game jam with the theme of "Ritual" by the guy who did Vertex Dispenser and Zaga-33.

VESPER.5 takes place on a top-down square grid. You can move exactly one grid space per day. No more. No less. You can't buy any energy to move faster. One move a day. That's all.

It takes at least 100 moves to finish VESPER.5, but to say anything more goes into spoiler territory.

I played VESPER.5 for several months. Months.

Then my laptop died.

I know I can easily cheat and

fiddle with the system clock to get back to where I was

but that's not the point. It won't have the same weight. It won't be my game.

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I lost some progress from the Steam cloud sync, I had a cloud sync error and foolishly choose the one from Steam, which was several hours before.

Mental note: Always choose the files on your drive, unless you're syncing from a new computer. :(

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Regarding the sync thing, there should be a «no wait, let me choose the other thing instead» option. I can understand why they wouldn't want to keep multiple versions on the server, but they could do a temporary backup of the local files at least.

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If memory serves me well, it doesn't even tell you the hour the sync was made, just the day, I know I was stupid for choosing the server option, but still, if the hour the sync was made was there, I wouldn't have made that mistake.

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I played through about 2/3 of Final Fantasy 8 without a save card, pretty much constantly playing between sleep and school. At some point I came home to find my PlayStation switched off, at which point I basically killed myself.

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Argh! Didn't you cover your PSX in post-its with "TURN THIS OFF AND I'LL MURDER YOU PAINFULLY!" on it? :(

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Ooh I have one. It happened just now so it's fresh! I got The Walking Dead a little while ago and started playing through it. Last night I played and finished Episode 2. I loaded it up just now to play Episode 3 and my save is at the end of Episode 1. No evidence that I ever played Episode 2, even though last night I made it all the way to the end, sat through the stupid spoiler "next time on The Walking Dead" video, saw the stats at the end, etc. Laaaaame. Episode 2 was a lot worse than Episode 1, too, which kind of kills my enthusiasm for slogging through that all over again. Judging from the Telltale forums and from other posts online this is fairly common as things go - I tried the fix which makes my save show up again, complete with a stat screen with my choices, but when I go to start Episode 3 it thinks I haven't finished 2 and asks if I want the game to generate choices for me. So, that's still "lost progress" just as much as if my save was gone, because The Walking Dead is pretty much nothing but the choices you make.

If this were 10 years ago I would just download a save game editor or trainer for the game, start Episode 3, and edit my saved game to have all the proper story flags and so on, but today's video games are all about making sure you can't do a goddamn thing because they're locked down tighter than Fort Knox on an Easter Sunday where all the guards are angry that they have to be there on Easter and they're just ready to shoot anyone who tries to steal the gold from the fort. So now I just have to let The Walking Dead languish in my games list until I decide to play through Episode 2 all over again or something, although I've seen posts from people on the Telltale forums saying that even after replaying things they just run into the exact same bug, so if I'm perpetually stuck in no-progress limbo I'm not sure I'd find that very enjoyable.

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