I updated this morning because a new patch was out, cool I thought. Then I couldn't load up my campaign, granted I only spent a few hours in there (I play slowly) and was having fun, but now I can't load my game that I was becoming invested in and excited about, 'immersed' if you will. That really sucks. I'm sure you guys try to keep a patch from breaking save game files, but if it cannot be done, you need to warn us that we can't load previous versions, I see it's out on the blog and that's cool but I read that after the fact, it needs to warn us in Impulse or something. Nobody likes having wasted hours of their life, for any reason, as I've read others say, warn us so that we could ignore the update for a day and finish our game. If this happens again and I've invested 20hrs into a game, I will be upset and be very wary of playing the game with any sense of immersion again. I really hope breaking a save game doesn't happen often, if ever again.
This is pretty simple, just give us fair warning and not on the blog (in my case I updated before I visited the blog, not imagining my games would be un-loadable). I would imagine such a warning should be very obvious and very visible somewhere in Impulse, then I could choose not to update, finish my game and then patch later.
You have a great game on your hands, but this was frustrating, I'm just glad we're not weeks out and I had dozens of hours sunk into a game yet.
It...did say it wasn't fully compatible with old save games.
They tried to keep 1.05 saves compatible the first time they put out a patch. It worked okay for some people, but others were having issues with the old saves and couldn't progress. They stayed up an extra couple of hours trying to figure out how to fix the people that had problems, but couldn't so they had to put out a hotfix to disable the old saves.
They are very conscious about maintaining working saves through updates, it just didn't work out this time.
Unngh. I agree with Mr G strongly. I am a programmer so I well understand that it it may have been too difficult to maintain backwards compatability, and not worth the effort given there are so many other things people would like to see done. Still, if backwards compatability is broken it shouldn't be a footnote in the changelog, it should be a big bold warning first line!
CAUTION: Applying this update will break your saved games! Wait to update if you want to finish your current game!
That's just being considerate.
It didn't say it wasn't compatible with old saves, I only saw that on the blog AFTER I got the update, if it was somewhere in the update, it was not obvious at all. (No, I don't check change logs line-by-line)
I'm aware of the reason the decision was made, they should just warn people. Also, hotfixes aren't generally needed unless things are being rushed and not given the time to be dealt with properly in most cases, I understand they are in a precarious situation, some people can't play the game at all, others (most I suspect) can at least play the game, they are trying to cater to both ends, I get it, it's unfortunate, just warn us or it'll burn us.
Jason has the right idea, a simple red label or something in Impulse would be great, better yet the ability to go back and get the version that it worked on, would be kinda neat too but I don't really expect that to happen.
I'd agree, the message I got upon starting Elemental 1.05 was : 'You Really should update, here's what we've done:', and though I browsed it but quickly I did not see any sort of warning. Might have missed it? If I did or if it wasn't there, then yes, big red letters. Not capitals though, and not multiple exclamation marks. (Not that you:Stardock are particularly prone to those, but people in general are.)
WHEN YOU RELEASE A PATCH THAT FIX EVERYTHING? HOW MANY TIMES I MUST RESTART MY GAME THAT I PLAY MANY HOURS.
I like this game so much, between successive patches i play many hours, each game 1000+ turns and each patch i must start again i'm realy bored of it. That game is not for the 1000 turns it takes a lot more time but when another patch relesed i must start again??
Do something with it Stardoc because if you write as you improve the game for a long time it may be players get bored constantly start from the beginning after the next patch and give up this game.
Then you will not have someone to improve your product.
Simply do something with your patches that before the update save games from previous versions will be compatible.
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