I'm sure this topic has been posted before (at least I hope it has), but I was unable to find any on it. I recently decided to start a new Thief class after investing over 70 hours into my lvl 42 Mage, which I enjoyed playing every second of. I did the Winterhold College quest line, the Main quest line, and countless other quests. I maxed out my enchanting and had all my gear enchanted with the reduced cost to destruction spells and plus magika. I had read thousands of books in dungeons, houses, cities, and villages that gave me random perk levels here and there. I had collected & saved over 30k gold, and probably had another 30k worth of random odds & ends stored in a chest. I put a lot of time and energy into getting this character progressed to where it was, and decided I would like to see a different avenue of this game as a Thief. So, I start a new game... And unbeknownst to me when doing this, I later discovered that when the game auto-saves, it will write over the previous auto save or quick saves... Which happened to be, my level 42 Mage. Now, how in gods name can a company that made one of the best RPG games allow such a MASSIVE design flaw such as this happen? If it wasn't a design flaw, then how in gods name could you justify signing off on this kind of design? Did you really think that everyone playing this game would only create 1 character, with the ba-zillion different perk combinations the game has?

I do understand that this is preventable if I hard save a new file, but I only know that now because I've spent hours researching what caused this and how to get the data back. Which restoring the save folders only brought a character save back from when I was lvl 16 (before I did majority of the quest lines and perk leveling), which makes it completely worthless. There is no way I have it in me to grind out 26 levels again, clear countless dungeons again, complete all those quest lines again, and max out perks again... When it's because of something like this.

So Bethesda, I'd just like to say, great job on making an amazing game that has one of the largest flaws I've ever seen in my many years of gaming, and thanks for wasting 70 hours of my life. You can rest assured this will be the last product I ever purchase from your company.



PS - If you don't think this is a productive or appropriate topic, here's a little trick I learned: Create a new post and let it auto save, or quick save it. This should fully delete all my work.

It never occured to you why there's only ever 1 quicksave or 3 autosaves when you load your save?

This is no ones fault but your own, what the hell were you thinking playing that many hours on just autosave!? Why would you not take --literally- 3 seconds to go into the menu and make a hard save?

Boy you just forgot to real save. I think that there is somewhere where they tell that auto and quick saves are temporary, I only use quick save to quickly save progress in case a horse fall from the ceiling.

I know your anger, feels bad : (
But you have to understand the loss and continue forth.
Maybe next patch bethesda will feature "unique" auto and quick saves for different characters.

God I hope not. My saves folder is already large enough because of these 10 MB saves.

@ Diciple: No, it never occurred to me that the 1 quicksave or 3 autosaves would be used as a community save pool. Every game I've played that has a saving or quicksaving option is character specific, and auto/quick saving never over wrote them.

@ Adept: I played that long while only quick saving, not just letting it autosave. I created a save file at level 1 for the character thinking that every time I used quicksave (F5) it would save it under the newly created save file (like windows). I didn't know it was saving it in a small community save pool that can be over written by any other auto or quicksave.

There's nothing new about this behavior, whether you're experienced with playing TES games or not. Placing the blame at Bethesda's feet for not fool-proofing their game against this kind of absent-mindedness is not justified.

And on a side note, 70 hours is nothing in this game - for good or bad.

Then... you are an idiot.

Really, you are the only one to blame.

This is pretty much how Bethesda's games have worked since Morrowind, regardless; making regular saves is considered routine for any RPG.

No need to add insult to injury.

But these threads remind me of people suing Panasonic after their hamster died in the microwave...

I would consider it routine for any game, regardless of genre to be honest.

Agreed, this is like being surprised that a car has tires.

I make it a habit to save anytime I go up against a quest ending BOSS.

The minute I saw the name "butthustla" I knew this was going to be a stupid thread. You, sir, are an idiot.

Back up your saves elsewhere

3 characters would be 120 MB just in autosaves and quicksaves if every character had their own autosaves. That's if I just do the 3 RPG archetypes. I'd have to write a cronjob to clean up the saves folder constantly. Thanks but no thanks on that, would rather stick to 3 rotating autosaves and 1 quicksave.

Auto and quick saves have, since time immemorial in the computer gaming world, been either singular or very limited in number. I have seen a few games where autosaves were separate, but quicksaves in particular are always the same save. Can't think of a single vidgame ever where this was not the case. This is not a design flaw; it is the industry standard. Bethesda was actually generous in making the autosaves numerous rather than singular.

Computing 101: always back up your data. And to repeat, as it is a critical issue: ALWAYS. BACK. UP. YOUR. DATA. Back it up twice, in fact, if you are concerned abt it. And that's hard backups, not autosaves.

That said, I have had a few characters screwed because I didn't back up and a game bug crept in and surreptitiously messed things up. Not saving is my bad, tho, and much self-kicking has ensued.

P.S. what games did you play with individual quick or autosaves? I seem to recall the Black Isle games having perma-autosaves (and even those warned to back up as the auto feature could drop you in a very bad place), but a perma-quicksave is a rare beast indeed. Only games I have ever seen have background permasaves without user intervention were on consoles, and most of them even overwrote after a while.

I have gigs! Gigs! I water them, place them on a sunny shelf 100 gigs wide, and give them names. Or, rather, I would give them names (for easy reference) if such were allowed. I seriously miss that feature from prior ES games.

However, it is a good point to talk about that: it couldnt hurt if beth (or modder) would change the savegame system. I dont have any problems, but other people do and Im not suprised.


Ok you had almost everything. Try to see this positive: your char was imba, that makes the game boring. Now you could start a new game with some mods like: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=1269 what makes the game more "challenging". Try to play on master or if you cant handle it then on expert at beginning and you will have a lot of fun.

Simply enough, this is not a design flaw but your own, i don't think there is a single person who can go 70 hours without saving properly. It's not just Skyrim, it's nearly any game ever made for a PC. You should know and this will do fine enough to teach you that you have to make hard saves when you play on a PC.


You seem about 14 years old, or around that age so I understand the whining, but it's not like it's going to be your first or last overwritten save. Get over it and move on.

This problem is your problem and no one else's.

You should understand Bethesda's system before you go that far through the game.

Sorry for your.... loss. But always make at least 5 hardsaves that you update from 1-5.
I usually make 10 hardsaves which i update in order from last updated... gives me a
safety-net to go back in saves if something screws up.

Also, i always update a hardsave before entering a new dungeon or starting a questline.

HOWEVER, i don't play Skyrim anymore because Bethesda screwed up quests+exploration
so now i have 3 or so bugged quests. So Skyrim has been put on hold until Bethesda patches
the problem.

Learning the hard way so next time you won't make the same mistake again.

Lol..

some people are just.. well.... oblivious to common sense..

relying on quicksave and autosaves... that's halarious

This is why we can't have nice things.....

and console to pc ports increasingly remove the "save anytime" feature pc gamers are used to and replace it with auto save checkpoints.