My apologies for starting another GTA IV thread, but this is a pretty specific issue (and, perhaps, it’s not even a GTA issue, but an Xbox issue).
As of this morning, I was about ten hours into the game, having played it casually over the last week. I played about an hour more this morning, autosaved after a mission, and then shut down. But wen I fired up my 360 again this afternoon, my latest autosave file was gone, replaced by one from way back at the start of the game.
I’ve heard of some wonkiness on the PS3 version, but has anyone else had this same experience on the Xbox? Is there a solution for it, or do I really need to go back and play through the game again?
For what’s it’s worth, I called Rockstar technical support, and though they were open on Sunday, which was a pleasant surprise, they told that no one, either on the PS3 or the Xbox, has called and logged this specific issue, so they have no idea how to help me at this point.
I had one other manually saved game from much, much earlier in the game. I think that when my autosave “vanished”, it was replaced by the early manual save, since that was the only save it could find.
Well, my saves getting wiped has happened before on my Xbox. Did you recently recover your profile and were denied? This happened to four people I know, and myself. I left my memory card at my friend’s place where I was playing Rock Band, so the only way to play games as myself was to recover my profile. Unfortunately, they have a bug/security feature (I don’t know which one it’s supposed to be) where if account recovery fails, then the Xbox goes in and deletes all your save games on the hard drive belonging to that profile. So I lost all my save games that I hadn’t made a backup copy on the memory card. (Which luckily, wasn’t a lot of games, but it did include Crackdown, where I almost had a fully upgraded agent, and Forza 2, where I was about to hit level 50, both of which I am yet to start over).
I would have thought this was an isolated incident, but like I said, it happened to two of my brothers, and a friend of mine in Seattle. So if it’s a bug, it’s a pretty repeatable bug. And if it’s a security feature of some kind, then F*** you very much Microsoft.
Nope, never happend. I don’t think a manual save could have overwritten it, as autosaves have their own spot. Is it possible you somehow turned autosave off?
Yeah, this sounds like a profile issue, Greg. I can’t imagine an autosave being “replaced” by an earlier autosave from the beginning of the game, since I doubt the harddrive is keeping multiple autosaves under the hood.
I’ve lost progress when I shut the game down without turning autosave back on. I had it switched off at Shoot Club so the guys could goof around with the game, and then later that night I played in earnest for a while. I didn’t remember to turn on autosave or sleep at a safehouse before powering down, so – poof! – all my progress gone when I came back the next day. But a really early autosave from ten hours ago suddenly coming back? I can’t imagine how that would happen unless you’ve got a few profiles on your 360.
This happened to a co-worker when he turned on the game, it loaded his manual save instead of his more advanced autosave. He didn’t realize this, and went out on a man date, and then when it autosaved it overwrote the previous autosave with the less-advanced game. He lost several hours.
I’ve been careful to check my stats whenever I load up since then.
Now that sounds like a distinct possibility, and I’d rather believe I accidentally did that than believe the game is capable of randomly eating save games. (Scary!) I’ll be much more careful going forward.
Big thanks to everyone on the thread who contributed an idea. :-)
-Vede
PS
After playing like a madman for several hours (not including Peggle breaks), I’m back to where I was before the “incident,” having now saved manually MANY times, just to be safe!
Probably. There’s no reason to manually save unless you’re done for the night, really.
And don’t feel too bad about the replaying, Vede. Since the review copies of the game we got had to be played on locked machines, I had to play the entire thing over again when I got a retail copy.
The manual save issue might have cause the problem originally due to the way the game decides to load a new session, but people who save compulsively tend not to lose more than an hour or two of progress. In this case, it probably would have saved hm some anguish. I guess the lesson is to either to manually save frequently, or to rely completely on a single autosave (which is problematic for other reasons, like triggering an autosave checkpoint just as you die).
So I recently booted up my 360 and popped in Oblivion only to discover that every save I’d made since I moved is gone. Now, my ex had been over to play Oblivion a couple of times and it had worked for her just fine. But since then, I’d started turning the 360 off completely, along with the rest of my AV equipment, using a power strip.
So I do an internet search. Apparently the fact that losing power resets the date causes the 360 to lose saves every now and again.
Really? Really, Microsoft? Really?
Fuck.
Does anyone know anything about this? If I went ahead and paid $100 for the god damn wireless connector, would that save me, since going online automatically keeps the date set? Or do I honestly have to fucking never, ever unplug the 360? Cos if it’s the latter, I think I might just become a dedicated iPhone gamer. Or one of those guys who only champions the PS3.
Yeah, you heard me. I’ll become Dave Long. Music games are for losers.
Woah what? I move my 360 around all the time, and keep it unplugged for weeks, and have never had this problem, at least not with games I consistently play. This is completely new.
Are you connected to the internet when you do turn it on? It didn’t lose any of the save games from before I moved and since I’ve moved I haven’t been connected to the internet since I was previously had it going directly into my router, but in my new place the wireless router isn’t actually on my floor. If it’s connected to XBL, apparently it grabs the date automatically on startup.
