So, after an installation fiasco caused by Steam and Steam alone, b/c if Bethesda had simply sent the game out on discs with an activation code all would have worked....

Now....

Save Games, literally hours of our time, are being corrupted and destroyed by Steam. Which, by extension, are being destroyed by Bethesda.

Not by Obsidian. They made a great game. The platform is obviously stable b/c FO3 never, in all my 100s of hours, ate a save.

But, many of us have lost hours and hours b/c Bethesda decided to slap PC users in the face and force feed us Steam which is destroying the saves.

So thanks, Bethesda. It's nice to see the platform that extends the shelf-life of your games through modding get screwed in such a royal way.

There is no logical reason for Steam to have been part of this release. None. Once again nothing really will stop pirates but, in the meantime, you've managed to give the finger to every loyal fan who spends hundreds of dollars on your product, especially in a tight economy.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to stop buying the games - the games are wonderful - but your treatment of PC users leaves a lot to be desired and is beyond angering.

(A few moments ago I went to play for an hour before work only to discover that 5 hours of play last night had disappeared due to Steam eating my save game - hence this post)

J

Steam has nothing to do with the saving system, that's not being handled through steamworks. It's not being corrupted by steam in any way.

Check out this thread; http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1122859-attention-saves-arent-missing/

1. Are you refering to steams "Cloud" save game syncing thing?

2. Have you used quicksaves?

Steam isn't at fault. Obsidian and Bethesda are the ones to blame. Obsidian for their lack of thorough PC testing, and Bethesda for thinking a game with this many game-breaking issues was ready for release.

Personally, I have always turned off autosaves and never use quicksaves. I don't think highly of any such in any game.

"There is no logical reason for Steam to have been part of this release. None."

but you bought the game from steam?

The retail version of the game still requires Steam to work.

Saves have always been iffy with gamesas games. Which is why I've always kept a rotating set of at least 10 manual saves for any character I'm playing. Generally saving every 10 minutes.

really why?

Funny, I've read a lot about the save bug, but I have yet to experience it. I started and exited the game several times, closed and opened Steam in between, but in all tests my Quicksaves and Autosaves were correct. I did set Steam to not use Steam Cloud at all, as I have no desire to store my saves anywhere other than my local Saves folder. Statements that doing this will disable Achievements are incorrect, the two features are unrelated.

I know Steam turned off the Cloud feature for this game once the problems became appearant yesterday, don't know if they've reactivated it. Anyway, to be safe, it's a good idea to always do a manual save at the end of your play session, and it doesn't hurt to do a few more during play as well.

Just a note to all you gamers that are scratchin your head about Steam. Steam has been around for numerous years and all gaming has gone to digital downloads and once you setup your account with Steam your games that are purchased through Steam will never get scratched, lose your keycode or if your hardrive crashes you won't have to fret a bit about your games becouse once you download the Steam software again (www.steamworks.com) and login you will see all your games in the Library section all you have to do is redownload the game you choose, now if you don't have a backup system and your not backing up your saved games to a remote WD Book (1 terabyte) or other external hardrive of some type thats your fault. And yes sometimes games come with Microsoft Games For Windows and yes the saved games are in a different area or folder than your other saved games. Trust me every time a new game is released and over 4 million clients that Steam has the software never causes any problems (now not all pc's are created equally). But please don't start flaming Steam as they have nothing to do with Fallout 3 or any other game in fact the real reason Bethesda choose to use Steam is that Steam does not have any hated security software that alot of titles have and Dev's can choose to use not only Steam's security but also the Steam Cloud (thats short for bandwidth) and their are achievements and all patches are auto updated to your game without you having to go hunt them down as Dev's will release a special digital release for patches so don't go looking for a patch if you here about one trust me when I say Steam will automatically update your game if you choose to allow Steam to be logged in and sitting down by your clock. I could go on and on if I haven't already but understand that Steam is a name that you willl hear more and more about as all Dev's are releasing there games digitally and choosing either Steam or (direct2drive.com a IGN company). So if you have any questions feel free to contact me and I will happly answer and questions that you can't find under the "Help" section inside the Steam software. Good Luck and enjoy New Vegas!!!!!!!!

I've not had the problem either. 18 hours of game play. About to add to that today.

I don't use auto saves though. I disable that. Those in the know did the same with fallout 3 as it was a good
way to end up with corrupted save games. This has always been an issue with the fallout engine (the auto save freakyness thing that is).

So, here is what I do and I've yet to have a problem with FNV.
I don't use auto save and dont' bother with quick save.
I use manual saves. Not that hard.
When I start a game session I LOAD a game I do not hit continue game.

I currently, after 18 hours of playing have 11 save games total.
Some are 'keystone' saves for fallback in case of later corruption (crossing fingers)
Typically I rotate 5 or so saves that I overwrite as I proceed the game.

Again, manual saves.

There is definitely a fark up though with the save game in FNV . One can see that in the way it stores the numeric increments in save game names.

Beth obviously didnt' bother to fully play test this and other issues. (FPS) drop for example around NPC's. /lose.

Steam is my only beef with Fallout New Vegas. I don't remeber anything in thr pre-release write ups mentioning steam being part of the game. My big complaint is it took me almost an hour to install the game because I HAD NO CHOICE but to create a new user on Steam to get the game installed. After an hour of not being able to connect to Steam everything finally went through and I could get on and play. Maybe I'm just old school, but I miss the days where you installed the game, entered the product code and got on an played. If you needed the latest patch you went to the web site and downloaded when you were ready to do it, not forced into it just becuase you happen to want to get on an play while you had some spare time and end up waiting for an automatic upadte to finish. The only real benefit I could see with having to use steam would be if Fallout New Vegas was a multiplayer game. Its not, so there no one I need to chat or talk to while I'm playing New Vegas, nobody else needs to know when I'm playing and it's nobody's business but my own how many hours I've spent playing the game.

Even with the Cloud features off, Steam still syncs your save files for things like achievements, which some people say has caused the save-overwrite bug. I have not confirmed this for myself and the last time I saw it was before Steam did anything about it, if they did do anything about it. Your best bet for this particular bug is not to trust autosave or quicksave.


As general information, this seems to be related to CTDs. For me anyway. When I exit the game normally I don't have a problem, but when (not if, but 'when') I crash to the desktop, the problems start. So, yes, never trust auto/quicksave, but when you can't always predict when your game session will end, it's a little harder to save before it. I for one don't want to fuss with menus every ten minutes just to be safe.

STALKER wasn't this bad, bug-wise...

I want to be able to play my games when I want to play them not when Steam wants me to play. Currantly I'm getting a message that Steam's servers are not ready so I can't play the game
I paid for. If I had known Bethesda intended to tie New Vegas to Steam I would not hace purchased it.

I have had zero issues with Steam. Perhaps you're being isolated in some kind of conspiracy?

I'd like to know WHY Steam even had to be involved?!?!?!?

It punishes the paying customers.

Bethesda, you truly svck in this regard. Looks like you've decided to go "corporate culture" now that you are making millions and screw the people who got you there in the first place.

Because Bethesda decided that they were going to use Steam for their DRM rather than SecureROM like Fallout 3. Which is ironic considering that there was a pirate version available within a day of it's release. So all it managed to accomplish was to make things more inconvenient for the honest user, and introduce a number of bugs that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

DRM is your logical reason. It was this or GFWL. Pick your poison. I personally find Steam more appealing than GFWL.

I don't know if Steam is a problem behind the problems we are all having but I do agree that Steam should not have been a part of this game other than as an "Option". What about the people who buy the game and don't have an internet, what do they do with their $60 purchase? If I buy it I should be able to play it to the maximum capability that my machine provides without concern about Steam servers.

Try "offline mode".

Open Steam, go to (Upper left corner) Steam>Go offline.

The game requires STEAM no matter where you purchase it. Instead of using secuROM as the DRM, Bethesda decided to use STEAM as the DRM. We have to prevent piracy (sarcasm)! So STEAM will monitor all game play. Just what a single player game needs, Right? Bethesda just screwed all of us.

Even if they fix this it is just to late... I can not play through all that crap again. Just the thought of saving that idiot deputy and then the prison part not to mention I need to reacquire my companion makes me sick. Assassin's Creed will be out soon and I won't even remember that this game *ever existed, thank the Gods.
Edit: *even *ever

For the snarky responses and helpful tips about offline mode: You can't play a game on Steam unless it's authenticated with their servers at least once. So offline mode won't get around Steam refusing to activate the game because it hasn't technically hit the release date for their region. Though I do wonder if using a proxy in the US would fool Steam into activating the game. Hm.

Anyway, the reason for using Steamworks was probably the DRM, but also probably something to do with other features like automatic updating, achievements, and online storage of games and DLC activations. By letting Steamworks do it, they don't have to code those bits. It seems like Steamworks would be more of a benefit to multiplayer games than single-player ones, but that's probably not important. Steamwork's list of features would have gotten some manager excited, and that would be that.

But the result is that yes, Steam is required for every installation. And Steam made some people download the installation from their servers even when they had an installer from another source (retail disc or Direct2Drive). And it does appear that even if you turn off cloud syncing, your quicksaves can get overwritten by older versions (and I've experienced the problem with no CTDs, so it's not tied to that either). So there are problems there Valve has to deal with.

But then, someone else had to actually implement the Steamworks stuff in the game. That might have been Obsidian (since they're the devs), but it might have been Bethesda (since they wrote the engine and are the publisher, so might have been involved in customizing the game engine for this release). There may have been something done wrong at that point of the implementation.

Other problems like slowdowns and crashes are in the engine, so we're back to not knowing if that's all Obsidian or if Bethesda coders worked on those bits. And both are responsible for the shoddy QA that should have caught the problems. But what if they knew about problems, and Bethesda the publisher pushed the game to its release date anyway? Or Obsidian didn't tell Bethesda about them because they were worried about their deadline? My brain hurts just trying to figure out who I should be upset with for such a poor release for what has otherwise been a very fun game so far.

None of these companies really have a history of releasing games in THIS bad a shape. Yeah, there were plenty of bugs in Oblivion and Fallout 3, but this release is in a whole other league. I would assume that the problem wasn't necessarily one company involved, but the communications between all three of them.

Hopefully they'll learn from this. If they don't, there are always other games. And other APIs like Impulse Reactor (if Stardock ever finishes putting out fires for Elemental). Though I have to agree, even this mess with Steam and saved games is better than Windows Live and having to figure out what account it thinks your saved games are associated with (if any).