The devs are currently looking into the issue of savegame corruption, which I’m quite grateful for, however it appears that despite the presence of a very real risk of losing ALL of your hard-earned progress, there is little transparency about the issue in any devlog update or patch note. After almost 500 hrs of play I only discovered the issue when I was at its mercy, which didn’t end well…
I posted this in perhaps the wrong thread, so in the spirit of doing the right thing I’ve re-addressed it here:
It seems quite easy to replicate the problem. My comp BSOD’ed and, well, that was that - an almost 100% maxed game with 500 hours gone.
I tried several things to recover my saves, but had no luck. Out of curiosity, I checked the corrupted save/backup save files in a hex editor to see if I could compare the data with a much older manual save, and noticed that although the filesize of the corrupted saves were larger, every bit of data was wiped to 00’s (completely blank!). With that, I’m not sure what my save files will do to help, but I’ll shoot them through anyway.
That said, since this bug is the absolute definition of GAME BREAKING -and for some, a deal breaker for ever playing the game again- it seems obvious to me that the most responsible thing to do would be to mention it in every dev update until it’s fixed. I’ve been playing GZ for months now and have carefully read every recent dev update, and yet I still had no idea that this bug was a thing. A simple disclaimer recommending manual backups would have been a lifesaver and still could be a lifesaver for any newcomers, 'cause I doubt they’ll find this thread otherwise! Never in over 25 years of gaming have I ever had to Google ‘save file breaking bug’ for any game…
Perhaps a simple solution could be made by creating a 3rd tier to the save system that doesn’t dramatically change what’s already implemented:
- savegame updates, and backup updates in turn
- upon successful relaunch of game and load of savegame, a 2nd backup is created
From then on, the 2nd backup is ONLY ever updated upon successfully loading the most recent savegame. Therefore it acts as a ‘last working version’ that will only load up if both the main save and 1st backup have both become corrupted.
That’s my 2 cents anyway.