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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Ever lost many hours put into a game because of the game's design?

During the past two weeks I have put a significant amount of time into Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP and was into my second playthrough.  Unfortunately I made the classic mistake of not having multiple saves.  Now I find myself in the position of having lost the 70 hours I put into the game because I can no longer continue to the next chapter.  It turns out that the creators of the game made it so that you could actually kill a character that is required to get to each new chapter in the game.

I originally planned to make a thread to vent but I'm now curious, has anyone else here been in a similar situation in a game?  It reminds me of something I remember reading many years ago.  It was an interview with someone at Lucasarts about their adventure games.  In it they mentioned that it was impossible in their adventure games for the player to put themselves in a position where it became impossible to finish the game.  I think it's extremely cheap and poor game design when designers don't do that.

 

 

 

 



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Well in Empire Total War, 24 hours of gameplay were lost because the game corrupted... because they clearly did not test the game properly, but I have never had the same problem with that level design myself



ive had this happen to me many time on fallout 3 for the ps3

sometimes ive had to replay major sections 3 times because it freezes so randomly



Legend11 said:

During the past two weeks I have put a significant amount of time into Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP and was into my second playthrough.  Unfortunately I made the classic mistake of not having multiple saves.  Now I find myself in the position of having lost the 70 hours I put into the game because I can no longer continue to the next chapter.  It turns out that the creators of the game made it so that you could actually kill a character that is required to get to each new chapter in the game.

I originally planned to make a thread to vent but I'm now curious, has anyone else here been in a similar situation in a game?  It reminds me of something I remember reading many years ago.  It was an interview with someone at Lucasarts about their adventure games.  In it they mentioned that it was impossible in their adventure games for the player to put themselves in a position where it became impossible to finish the game.  I think it's extremely cheap and poor game design when designers don't do that.

That's something I started doing because of problems like this with various games. 

RPGs are notorious for this.  I don't replay RPGs that often so I like to pick everything I can up in one playthrough.  As a result I've run into a lot of situations where I needed to restart the game or reload to an earlier save losing tons of time because I missed something early on that turned out to be really important.

A lot of RPGs also have a "Point of No Return."  Usually this is a point toward the end of the game where once you cross it, the rest of the game is locked off.  You can't go backwards, you can only go forwards and finish the game.  The problem is that some developers decided to put a SAVE POINT after the "Point of No Return."  If you accidentally overwrite your main save with that one then you basically screwed yourself out of ever going back and doing things you didn't do.

Old action games had similar problems where you reach a point that you are unable to pass without losing a certain amount of health or number of lives in the process.   The result is that it's literally impossible to finish if you can't take the beating the game wants you to take.

 



My Majora's Mask has occasionally forgotten that I have saved, so I ended up playing one part of the game three times until I finally gave up and stopped playing for awhile.



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wow, that sucks.

I think I've got stuck once playing a freeware adventure game, That Night Before, years ago. And IIRC, I also got stuck in The Pagemaster. obviously I never played them again (well, I tried to play Pagemaster again but it was buggy in XP)



the words above were backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

It happens, happend to me on Oblivion, where I put over 100 hours of gameplay and was stuck in the quest where you go into a picture, and I couldnt come out until the update was released 5 months later.



Legend dig deeper...are you sure you cant continue???



I lost 673 hours in Pokemon Silver.



After playing for 4-5 hours on Metroid Prime where the first time i encounterd the freezing error when going through the elevators in tallon overworld.