Don't erase old saves. Keep everything.

[Jinix the Elder]

It's sad to read how a player can lose hours or even days of playtime because his/her game messes up somehow.

After having it happen to me more than a few times I save constantly now. In the old days of game playing it was considered wimpy somehow to save, and if you like to live on the edge I guess it is wimpy, but it's a real temper saver to have lots of backups.

It will pay you to save before you 'enter' any entrance, before talking to someone new, or at least every 15 minutes.

Saves take about a megabyte each - a bit more as the game advances. Thats about a thousand saves per gigabyte of hard drive space.

That's one heck of a lot of saves you can keep - so save often and don't erase your old saves.

If you start a new game you can remove the old saves and put them in a storage folder - that way no matter what, you'll not lose much should you have a problem and you can start again from anywhere in the game in the future.

Jinix the Elder

Men, today we die a little.
Emil Zatopek

[alon]

Originally Posted by Jinix the Elder

It's sad to read how a player can lose hours or even days of playtime because his/her game messes up somehow.

After having it happen to me more than a few times I save constantly now. In the old days of game playing it was considered wimpy somehow to save, and if you like to live on the edge I guess it is wimpy, but it's a real temper saver to have lots of backups.

It will pay you to save before you 'enter' any entrance, before talking to someone new, or at least every 15 minutes.

Saves take about a megabyte each - a bit more as the game advances. Thats about a thousand saves per gigabyte of hard drive space.

That's one heck of a lot of saves you can keep - so save often and don't erase your old saves.

If you start a new game you can remove the old saves and put them in a storage folder - that way no matter what, you'll not lose much should you have a problem and you can start again from anywhere in the game in the future.

Jinix the Elder

Agreed.
From years of experience playing such games, saving is a must vs. unforeseen errors - human or otherwise.

[Renevent]

I just hit F5 (autosave) every few minutes and before I do anything major. It keeps 3 autosaves, and everytime you hit F5 it simply rotates the saves and drops the 3rd save with the new save.

First half of the game I hit 'esc' and manually saved...but the # saves was growing exponentially and I found it was just easier to cycle between 3 saves with auto save.

[Jinix the Elder]

The f5 key, and the way it'll make three saves is a great idea, but for me I like to keep lots of saves so I can return to any part of the game.

I do this for a couple of reasons - one, the obvious, so I have a save to go back to in the event of a disaster or to re-start from an earlier save if I made a wrong choice somewhere in the game.

But the other reason I keep lots of saves is so at a future date I can go to the exceptionally tough battles and replay the battle without having to go thru the whole game to get to it. Besides, with harddrive capacity as big as it is and cheap (1tb for $99 @tigerdirect ) keeping a few megs of saves or even gigabytes, is a moot point.

I do that a lot with games now and as look back thru my collection of saves it's great to be able to start from anyplace in a game. Each time I go to a save before a battle, like the one with the giant spider, I can reduce the number of troops or try different strategies with the same enemies. It's a way I get more out of a game.

Jinix the Elder

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

[Jinix the Elder]

I was just reading the thread about the quest Choosing Thomas Cook's Heir, that's where you have to decide which brother out of his 3 sons will become heir.

If you have a save just previous to to that quest, later when you wonder what other quests you could have gotten, you can start from that place and try a different path... think of it like channel-flipping.

When the game is finished you'll not have had enough and so go thru again on a harder level, but after that you'll still want more and that's when all those saves are fun to have.

Instead of the game being a 50hr game it becomes a coffee break game. Fire it up, load save number 84, enter the battle, have ten minutes of fun and go back to work feeling refreshed.

Jinix the Elder

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Lord Chesterfield

[alon]

Originally Posted by Jinix the Elder

I was just reading the thread about the quest Choosing Thomas Cook's Heir, that's where you have to decide which brother out of his 3 sons will become heir.

If you have a save just previous to to that quest, later when you wonder what other quests you could have gotten, you can start from that place and try a different path... think of it like channel-flipping.

When the game is finished you'll not have had enough and so go thru again on a harder level, but after that you'll still want more and that's when all those saves are fun to have.

Instead of the game being a 50hr game it becomes a coffee break game. Fire it up, load save number 84, enter the battle, have ten minutes of fun and go back to work feeling refreshed.

Jinix the Elder

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Lord Chesterfield

That is a very unique way of looking at saves which I think I might try in the future.
Thank you for sharing.