Have to start new AP game for the Orcs campaign? RU Kidding Me?!?

[brettjv]

So I pre-ordered CW from Steam along w/Armored Princess like a week ago, and I've played AP for many, many hours now, fully expecting to continue my campaign with the added content of Orcs on the March once CW unlocked.

But now I go to play and discover that my AP saves are not there when I start up OOTM?!?

I've even tried copying my AP saves in the save game folder with orcs_ at the beginning like the saves are formatted ... still not there in the save list.

I just have to say, if this is the intended behavior, I am officially FURIOUS right now.

What other expansion pack does this, when all the expansion is an add-on to a main game with some new quests, spells, and units, basically?

Off the top of my head, games I've played recently where I didn't have to restart after installing an expansion are Borderlands, Fallout 3, Titan Quest, and Sacred 2 ... and I know there's MANY others that have worked like this.

Can you imagine if they did this on WoW ... if you bought WotLK and later found out that in order to play it you had to restart your entire game and play through WoW to level up all over again?

This is garbage IMHO, and might just be the most infuriating thing I've ever seen a game developer do. It's not like AP is some short game that people won't care about starting all over again

NOWHERE in any promo materials was it explained that the add-on campaign would require a brand-new game of AP be started. Something like this should be in big bold letters everywhere the game is advertised, because NOBODY else does this EVER (edit: okay, not never, but ... usually not)

[DGDobrev]

No need to vent out.

Crosswords' OOTM has a number of new skills (check the skill trees, each class has a new skill), units, items and whatnot. For that reason the saves are incompatible.

It stood to reason that they would be incompatible thanks to the new content. I was 99% sure they will, so I never started a new game till the expansion came out.

[brettjv]

I'm sorry, but I am way irritated ATM. Whether it 'stood to reason' or not, this just is not the way these things are done in ANY other game I've seen. Thus, I think the claim that people should've just kinda 'shoulda known' is spurious at best.

The way to handle this is that if you make new skill(s) you simply put it/them at the bottom of the tree, or you make them 'stand-alone' like Alchemy is. It's not that hard. And stuff like units, items, and quests should be have been no problem to add on to existing game, devs do it ALL the time.

You can defend 1C for this if you like, that's fine. I personally think was very wrong for them to do this without advertising the fact that a brand new AP game would have to be started to play OotM expansion.

If Blizzard did this with a WoW expansion w/o telling people ahead of time ... there'd be open rebellion in the streets ...

So now, I'm like 15 hours into AP, and I no longer want to play AP anymore. NOR do I want to start a brand-new campaign in OotM. Sooo ... $30 down the drain, basically. All it would've taken was a little note from 1C in the Steam advertisement that mentioned this, and I'd have waited to start OotM instead of AP.

[DGDobrev]

WoW is MMORPG, KB is a simple SP game. If any MMORPG forces incompatible saves, it will be the end of it.

I can think of a number of games that had incompatible saves. let's take the Heroes series, for example, as this game resembles them a bit. You couldn't take a heroes 3 game and turn in into armageddon's blade with the new content - you had to play it as it is.

[vmxa]

Well nearly every strat game I ever bought that added changes to the game broke the prior saves and certainly a new addition/expansion would.

Several times for patches alone in civ III. Only way to make them compat is not not change anythig that is keep in the save. That would be a bug fixes at best.

[brettjv]

It may be SP, but it's still very long, and people get attached to their creation that it's taken many hours of their time to create.

I dunno about Heroes, I've never played those games.

But there have been plenty of games along the lines of KB like Sacred 2 and Titan Quest that have seemlessly added expansion packs to add feature to the main game without breaking saves. And TQ:IT was a pretty huge change, with new classes and everything. In order to get the new features, you fired up the IT.exe and used your toon created in TQ, no problems. Same with DLC in Borderlands and Fallout 3.

What I'm talking about here can clearly easily be done, and it very often is. I think it was more reasonable to expect it than not, given we're talking about an add-on expansion with the same core game with some new units and skills and quests.

But honestly, my biggest complaint here is that we weren't informed in any way ahead of time. The issue could've been avoided for many people had they done so.

[Aesir]

Originally Posted by DGDobrev

No need to vent out.
<snip> the saves are incompatible.

It stood to reason that they would be incompatible...

No need to be apologetic on the dev's behalf. They need to hear the problem with the decision to overwrite existing game files, including making it impossible to continue your existing campaign.

Should you expect to run an AP save game through CW? I suppose not.

Should you expect to run an AP save through AP? Definitely so.

For example, on both Impulse and Steam, games with expansions remain eligible to run separately **. Yet, for this game, the installation of CW corrupts a vanilla AP install. You are left with the sole option of starting a new game, and in the process losing access to your AP mods (including the 'official' gift bag) and such.


(**) Games such as Titan Quest, DoW, Dow II, Civ IV, HoMM V, SupCom, Gal Civ II, Sins, Oblivion, Borderlands, CoH, King Arthur, SotS/ANY, Tropico 3. That's just my collection of games+expansion bundles.

[brettjv]

Aesir, I am able to play my old AP saves by using the AP option in the CW exe. Haven't tried clicking AP in my steam list to see if the original app still works ... your posts here and on steam forums have scared me off of trying

Originally Posted by vmxa

Well nearly every strat game I ever bought that added changes to the game broke the prior saves and certainly a new addition/expansion would.

Several times for patches alone in civ III. Only way to make them compat is not not change anythig that is keep in the save. That would be a bug fixes at best.

Well, I'm not a big strat game player, but I know off the top of my head that the Chaos Rising stand-alone expansion allowed you to use your DoW II save game.

And like I said before ... TQ:Immortal Throne was a MAJOR expansion that changed the game pretty significantly ... but didn't break saves.

To me it just doesn't make sense to break save games unless the expansion is legitimately making a huge change in the core game. Now, I haven't played (and may never, now) but from looking at the OotM change list in the manual, I'm just not seeing anything there that qualifies as remotely huge in my book that couldn't have been worked around.

And if they couldn't, they should've told us up front.

[Aesir]

Originally Posted by brettjv

Aesir, I am able to play my old AP saves by using the AP option in the CW exe. Haven't tried clicking AP in my steam list to see if the original app still works ... your posts here and on steam forums have scared me off of trying

Thanks for the info. The failure to load in my case may have been in-between installs, when my install folder had both ap and cw content in it.

[Levesque]

Originally Posted by brettjv

I personally think was very wrong for them to do this without advertising the fact that a brand new AP game would have to be started to play OotM expansion.

+1. I totally agree with this post. KB is one of my favorite game ever, and I have played AP for far too many countless nights without sleep... But I have reach the ''ad nauseam'' level with AP a couple of months ago... So I was all ready to continue my game using an old AP save game... But... But... Sigh.

Can't believe I will have to replay a new game from the start to get to the ''new campaign''. Should have read more before buying this.