Thank goodness I finally finished this deck job I've been working on yesterday. It's taken up way too much of my time and though the end result was a pretty decent pay day it shouldn't take 75 hours to paint deck railings. It was build without a permit by an engineer about 20 years ago an it's a pretty good looking structure, but it's full of lights and switches and wiring so I couldn't disassemble much of it to help my progress. There are metal pickets that weren't allowed to change color with the rest of the structure so they all had to be masked. I had fifteen hours alone just taping. Ridiculous. The lumber was being painted is dimensional so there are lots of little nooks to get in to. And since it's non-permitted it was built without stairs on what is effectively the second story facing downhill on a slope so I also had my 24 foot extension ladder to be able to prep the outer facing sides. But hey, the owners are happy and I think I'll have more work there in the near future. That was more or less the last half of October for me and I'm done whining about it. Let's look at what's going on in actual WRUP land and discuss a seriously game breaking issue for Lords of the Fallen.
I have finally been playing Lords of the Fallen with some vigor and man, that is a truly awesome Dark Souls clone. I got about fifteen hours in and I've been hacking my way through Axiom and it's opposite, Umbral, exploring and gathering items and leveling up... Then my game crashed during a load screen and corrupted my save. This is an issue that apparently took place after what has been rightly seen as an extremely unpopular patch. It happened to lot of people and the devs don't have an actual fix for it. The best that was offered for folks who had this happen was to send the corrupted save file to them and eventually they would send you the items required to bring a new character back to the level you were when your save was destroyed. No fixing the save (unsurprisingly), no reacquisition of gear and items, all progress remained lost, but folks were told - Hey, you'll get back there way faster with a high level character. This is a dismal handling of a game breaking issue that should have never happened in the first place. I chose to just start over because while the crash demoralized me for a few days, I was only about fifteen hours in and two bosses in. Starting a new character wasn't a big road block. I feel for people who had made much more progress and had hundred hour plus characters already. If I were in that boat I would have likely just stopped playing.
Okay so what do you do if you encounter this issue? Well, if you don't just rage quit there could be options that might restore your save:
- It's possible that reinstalling the game will fix the problem. It's unlikely, but it's worth a shot. It didn't work for me, but people out there have reported the issue being resolved this way.
- If you have access to multiple computers you can try installing a copy on a separate machine and using your Steam cloud to download the save to that copy. It may be fixed that way then you can reverse the process and play as normal.
- If you're playing on console the fix can be simpler as the backup save options are much more reliable and it's likely you won't have actually lost much progress, if any. For PlayStation you can simply download your backup and get back to it. If you're playing on Xbox it's a little more difficult because you'll have to delete your save file before you close the game. Doing that will replace the corrupted file with a good backup.
- You can still email your corrupt saves to CI and get the experience boost for a little while longer, though it won't last forever so this isn't a super reliable solution. Instructions for navigating to your saved games are as follows - C:\Users\YOUR USERNAMEFolder\AppData\Local\LOTF2\Saved\SaveGames once you find the folder, copy it and email it to support@cigames.com. It could be quite a wait but you'll eventually get your vigor skulls and at least be able to reroll a character that can progress quickly.
As of patch v1.1.282 an extra failsafe was added to help prevent the save corruption to begin with, but it can still happen, at least on PC. How can you help prevent this yourself?
- It seems playing multiplayer has been part of the issue. I can't really find any info about this outside of resting at a vestige can crash the game for your partner and that crash can potentially corrupt both of your saves. So for now I'd just steer clear of multiplayer. This doesn't include being invaded as I understand it.
- Don't play with mods. The mods themselves can crash the game since the mod versions may not match up to the latest game patches.
- Play from an SSD if it's possible. Slower drives seem to have issues writing the saves. This is dumb, but so is the entire problem in general.
- Turn off cloud saves for LOTF on Steam and manually back up your save folder. Just right click the game in your library and click the "properties: tab in the dropdown menu. Under the "general" tab turn off steam cloud. This is what I've done since I restarted. I just made a shortcut to the save folder and copy mine to the desktop after every session. Use the same instructions as above to navigate to your save folder and copy to a different location. This way the worst you can lose is the last arbitrary time played.
A couple more patches have been added since this started happening to people and so far I personally haven't experienced any further crashes, hopefully this is an indication that the issue is fixed. Or at least well on the way to being fixed. I don't fully trust it yet though and neither should you.
Destiny 2 is losing players and employees. Bungie has laid off about a hundred Destiny 2 staff blaming a loss of players due to a less than stellar response to the Lightfall expansion. According to Kotaku this has also lead to the Final Shape expansion being delayed until next June in hopes of winning players back before the Destiny 2 story is closed out.
What are we playing?
Greywolfe: well, i decided - after playing some fairly old and cranky [and sometimes terrible] long-term games i haven't finished, yet, that i'd treat myself and play something actually good, so i'm doing a slow run through of quest for glory 1 in preparation for a scary sort of randomizer that i'd like to try [where i turn on /some/ of the more difficult flags in the randomizer's settings.] - after that, since it's the year of king's quest, i'll probably dip into kq5.
AJ: Just picked up Astalon: Tears of the Earth, so likely some of that. I also recently acquired a pretty slick (and much more sanely-priced) custom repro of Crusader of Centy for the Sega Genesis, so I may play a little of that as well.
Scrooloose: Well even with the extraordinary frustration of losing my save game, I have restarted and am already far past where I was and much stronger than ever. So more LOTF for me.