The advance of technology has changed the way we interface with many things, it has even given us new things to play around with, video games being the obvious focus here. Initially game saves were a thing of pure desire, they didn’t exist, on consoles when they first started showing up it wasn’t a case of saving your progress but rather receiving a code to restart at a certain point in a game.
Storage mediums and story based experiences along with progress driven and inventory reliant titles has all added up to needing to restart where you left off and the ability to do so either by a cartridge save option a removable device or an inbuilt hard drive. For example in Elderscrolls III: MorrowWind I was able to reserve both my progress in a dynamic world. The save retained not only my past experiences with non player characters and side quest progress, but also my weapons that I had purchased/found/stolen, expensive gems, hard to find potion ingredients and importantly my skill attributes and rankings, and all this with the quick press of a button. or two.
The fact is that many of us now use multiple game saves (when available) to both experience the game in different ways and to alleviate the paranoia of reaching a point of no return. There are many ways that this can be achieved but whether it be an autosave, manual save, or toilet save system the end result is the same and the ability to pick up where you left off has helped the gaming industry progress to explore new types of experiences and allow gamers with distractions such as children, work, or wives that want to you get off your lazy ass and help around the house now and again to enjoy gaming when they can without having to worry about starting from the beginning.
But what happens when your game save doesn’t work when you go back? If you’ve only been playing for 20 minutes your not really going to cry about that will you? But if it is an hour? 3 hours? 5 hours? 20 hours? where do you draw the line in the sand and say “Hey, F#@K you, that’s not how things are supposed to work, I am not going to play your broken game anymore”
It has happened to me twice in recent memory where it has considerably dampened my enthusiasm for a title, the reason for writing this is that it occurred just this weekend. I was on a break at work and thought it would be a good time to break out the Pink DS and have a bash at a mission in GTA: Chinatown Wars, to my surprise the normal loading screen was replaced by a message.
Your Game Save data is corrupted, all saved progress will now be lost
I had played for about 8-10 hours at this point, do I want to go back and start again? Hell no. The fact that I would need to play through all the initial missions again just to get back to to the same point and deal all those drugs again doesn’t enthuse me.
The other time cut me a little deeper, despite the fact that I maintain it is one of the best games of this generation, Crackdown burnt me with it’s first update and consequent reset of game save. The update added a lot of great content to the game but its unexpected side affect was to completely reset my game back to zero. This by it’s self wouldn’t have been too bad as the process of getting your character to max level was a lot of fun, but it was compounded by a corrupted game save yet again but this time when I only had 4 agility orbs left to collect. I’ve put the game back in once since then.
Many titles get hit by this issue sporadically and some are affected worse than others but the result is the same whether you are the only person affected or there are many people that have the same problem. It sucks, and can completely ruin what would otherwise be a fantastic title played over and over again.
