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The Value of Your Saved Game
N'Gai and the LevelUp blog take on an interesting thought experiment: which is more valuable, the $60 game you bought at the store, or the save-game file sitting on your console's hard drive? The article explores the various ways save-games can be backed up, and calculates how much the average saved game is worth based on your age and income. "Our back of the envelope calculations clearly demonstrate that in all but one of the categories, the save file is more valuable than the game itself, and ought to be backed up regularly in recognition of that value. And that's without even attempting to figure out the worth of any intangibles: the frustration of having to replay familiar levels and challenges just to get back to the halfway mark; the attachment that you may have built up to the character; any customization and personalization you did the first time through; the loss of unlocks, user-generated content and other valuable elements." I have a massive save-game file for Oblivion that I would be very distraught to lose. Any saved-games you've been carting around or protecting over the months/years?
I still have saved games from Wolf3D......
But I no longer see the point. I usually complete the game. When I don't complete a game it's probably because the game annoyed the hell out of me. And what use is a savegame of a game I already completed. Next time I play the game I would probably start a new game.
For games that don't really end (like sim city or elder scroll games), why would I continue with the same instance, there was a reason I stopped playing that instance.
When I first started playing RPGs on the PSX, one of the first things I bought after a memory card was a Dex Drive [wikipedia.org] to backup my saved games. After my memory card got stolen by my druggie roommate my freshman year in college, that thing paid for itself.
Games are about the journey, and the ending. Your save file increases in value until just before complete it... After that, the file is nearly worthless.
The exception to this is open-ended games, of course... There is no end to those. Even Oblivion never 'ends' because you can continue doing minor quests after you beat the game. The Sims is another obvious sandbox game that had savefiles that only increase in value... Until a new version of the game (not expansion) is released. At that point, the saves are just as worthless as the ones from games that end.
Any game that you quit before the end, for whatever reason, has no little or no value as well. The effort to get back into the game after a 2 month break is better spent re-playing the beginning and getting better at the game before you get to the stopping point.
And one last remark: Games are entertainment, not work. Playing them produces nothing of value and is only useful for relieving stress or boredom.
BTW, I'm an avid gamer with a couple decades experience.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Like other software, the data I create is more valuable (to me) than the software I bought from the store. During the days I played Disgaea religiously, at the point where I had more than 20 hours of play, lots of bills/areas passed, many characters at least transmigrated once, the amount of time and energy put into that game alone was far more valuable than the disk itself. Far more valuable. The disk could be stolen (or exploded) by Prinnies at that point and I could go out and find a new disk. If the memory card the save game was stolen (or exploded), there is not much I could do because the only way to "replace" it would be to play the game from the start.
You see this all over technology though. The 10 million piece model is more valuable than the CAD tool program that created it. The 500 million row database with years of collected data is more valuable than the software used to serve it up. This is why backups are so important to any IT infrastructure. You want to capture and safe guard the created content, not necessarily the software that runs it.
I have a completed LEGO Star Wars game on one of my hard drives that has been there for a while now. It has survived countless operating system re-installs (it is on a PowerMac, so Archive and Install is your friend), whilst the game itself hasn't been installed for what must be over a year. What surprises me is that I cannot bring myself to delete it - and yet I have no plans to install LEGO Star Wars and play it again. I guess one day I might...
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
I have saved games from Baldur's Gate (I and II) and Neverwinter Nights I. I would have them for NWN 2, but they dramatically increased the size of the save file - around 100MB if I remember right.
I like having saves for multiple points throughout the game so I can replay certain sections or quests if I really enjoyed them and I like to have the option to skip the annoyance of being a low level wizard with almost no hit points.
I don't know how much of a value I would put on the saved games - probably $20 or something. I see it more as a fun thing to have when I want it and not a real need or desire.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Or, at least the Steam service.
I have just re-installed all of my Steam powered games, but what is missing are all my saved games. Wouldn't it be great if I could add those to my Steam account, so that not only do I always have access to my games, but also my saved games? I guess it would only be necessary to store the last saved game, but this could really be a useful feature.
Valve? Anyone?
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Interesting enough, some games have 'hardcore' options : dying is dying. What about them? I imagine having a very-high level save of a living character is worth even more ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Did we forget games are for fun, not for work? You can equate the "value" of your time as if it was work to playing games. If you lose a saved game, then the game should still be fun if you play it again. If not, you stop playing. Not like you're being forced to.
When I was in MOS school a buddy in the barracks had a Play Station and FF7. He gave me the first slot on the memory stick, so when ever I wanted to save, I just hit the OK button over and over. Well, after he moved out I was hanging out with another guy who had just moved in. He also had a PS and FF7 and he let me play on it one day. As we were sitting there chatting, with out thinking about it, I went to save my game, and yup, saved my brand new game over slot one on the stick.
Right over his level 97 toons.
whoops.
I think there may have been tears. There was definitely a lot of anger. I was not invited back.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I still have it backed up from a rom reader, not even sure if i'll ever dust off my team of 99th level guys to go after the pink again, but damn that's a lot of hours invested...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Back in the late 90s I was really into the JRPGs on the Playstation, and I wasted hundreds of hours on the Squaresoft games. A memory card died on me one time that had a save game with an 80-some hours save game file on it. After that I bought what I think was called a "Dex Drive"? I could be wrong on the name. It let you backup your Playstation memory cards to your PC over a serial port. These days I don't play those kinds of games anymore, so I don't have any backup of my console save files. I do keep a folder on my PC with copies of some of my save games from that platform on it though, but I'd hardly be devastated if I were to lose them.
I am sure there is probably a site out there somewhere where you can buy saved games to save you having to actually play them yourselves. Let someone else unlock all the extras for you. Same as 360 saves get passed around for their GamerPoint value.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I just forgot that I didn't grab my Oblivion save before the last reformat. Thanks for ruining my day Zonk!
OnTopic, I've got a roommate that plays SC:4 religiously. He's got CAM and the such all setup and testing out various textures for add-on modders. I can't imagine what would happen if a 6x7 map he's been working on were to suddenly disappear.
import system.cool.Sig;
Upgraded my system last month and my RAID-0 2x80GB SATA-II array didn't get recognised when hooking it up to the controler on the new mobo. Do I miss them? No. I have a whole load of new games to play now that I couldn't run before. I am slightly annoyed about loosing some old level design stuff, but I've got no interest in that anymore. It was mostly sentiment and the fact that it represented 100's of hours in GTKRadiant. Not really missing the files makes me think that maybe I should stop hoarding all those old motherboards, drives and other crap that I think might come in usefull someday.
Did take a hell of a long time to re-download all my steam games though.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
A major reason I rarely play games on my PS2 is because of its alarming frequencey of losing saved games.
Playing for hours on end, only to come back to "saved game corrupted" and the prospect of going thru all of that again, just pretty much nullifies any interest in completing any game, and thus any interest in even starting one.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If you just don't feeling like replaying your game to get back to where you were, you can often find saved games from somewhere else. That's especially true for linear games, like FPS's. Just for example, here's a collection of Half-Life 2 saved games. With some work, you could probably also find (for example) Oblivion saved games that might at least put you near where you want to be.
... is usually the end of the game for me. Somehow I feel extremely demotivated to play for hours and eventually reaching the point I was.
Even worse though, and you ALL know this; Loading instead of Saving. Don't lie, it happened to us all. Saving and loading usually require (with exception to quick load/save) a few simular actions after each other so after a while you have them automated in your head. And one fine day you start the "Load" sequence in your head instead of the "Save".
Brutal memmories.
If it's a game I'm done with, then the save doesn't matter. If it is a game I'm either actively playing, or planning on finishing in the near future, the save file is worth (hourly pay rate) times the maximum of (time spent playing to get save || time to be spent replaying to get save back). Some games have rares that are almost impossible to get. The US version of FF4, for instance, had an item only dropped by an enemy 1/64 battles -- and that enemy only appeared 1/64 fights in one particular place. If I'd got lucky and got that in an hour, it might take a hundred to get it back.
Until the cartridge started to die, I had invested an untold number of hours into the SNES version of Chrono Trigger. I wanted to get to level 99 so I could fight the Red Nu. Never got there, and I didn't have the energy to start over on the PS version with the removable memory card. If only there had been a way to back up that save-game! I always back up my memory card saves. I've heard too many horror stories of the person who invested 80+ hours into a game, only to lose the whole thing when the memory card couldn't be read.
Not quite. My free time is worth more than my work-day time because it's precious to me. The rare-er it is the more it's worth. I do freelance work on the side in my spare time and I price it at twice what I make at my day job. So my free time is worth $40/h, and that will go up as my career advances. So, 5 hours into HalfLife2ep2, my saved game is worth $200. I'll say that's worth backing up alright. ... Note to self...
However, there are often cheat codes that let you jump ahead to any level you choose so you could use that. Plus, if it's a good game, then replaying it isn't TOO much of a pain in the butt. So, that brings the price down too.
Since the Internet is readily available savegames have gotten a lot less important. After losing them, its not to hard to find a savegame online that is close to yours. There might be a few open ended games where that doesn't work, but for most games you shouldn't have much problems. And even when that route doesn't work, you still have youtube and friends where you can watch the endings or special things of a game that would otherwise require plenty of work to get back to, its not as good as the savegame, but in case your savegame went missing minutes before the end of the game a lot less painful.
Some games are wonderful for backup of saves. There's an easy-to-find subfolder called "SaveGames" or "SaveData" or whatever. Others have it buried in a directory structure five levels deep past the game root, in an obscurely named folder and file like "C:\Program Files\Electronic Farts\Control and Overcome\gd\sd\sg0001\sg.dat", while others save in "My Documents\Leisure Suit Harry - Spoon Tang\Savedata\Save001.dat." The first is obviously really confusing and annoying. The second isn't too bad, except that in cases where I have the game installed on a particular drive (such as a USB portable) it gets irritating when the save data doesn't accompany it. So far, the best is something like "C:\Program Files\IceStorm\Planet of BattleCrap\SaveGames\Save001.dat"
All the data goes with me when I install to USB (so if I use the exact same path on two PC's, I can flip between the laptop and desktop without changes, etc).
The bottom line is we are not earning our salary wage after we go home. I don't think about how much money I'm not earning as I sleep, thinking if I went into work at night I could be a billionaire. Either they should adjust the mean salary down to a 24/7/365 distribution of dollars/hour or accept the fact that what you do on your own time is a completely subjective cost. I had similar logic in college, after some estimations of cost I came on the number of $24 for one hour of class. This is how much I was paying to be there. So the next obvious step was since my $24 was already spent to determine how much worth the hour of class actually was. Usually somewhere less than $5 unless it was a review for a test. In the end my attendance plummeted. It's hard to look at such a short-sighted metric as the degree has had far greater return than the cost. More importantly, it was a cost already spent, I mistakenly assumed that the actual time I was spending there was a hidden cost above the $24. Really unless I worked instead of going to class I could only lose more money. In terms of a saved game, unless you're planning on selling it to a friend who can't get past a level, there's limited earning potential and only a subjective worth to the player, by no means can this be salary based. I would pay loads of money for a save after beating really annoying parts of certain games that are otherwise good, but typically I have no problem restarting anything that's worth a replay (hopefully every game). My thought is that I really care about 2 saves right now, out of all the games I've ever played. If saves on the whole were even equal value to the game and we somehow had to pay for the save's worth I just couldn't see myself paying twice for all the games I've bought. The save file is important, but I look at them as temporary entities that you eventually throw away. It's like asking if a 3-Day DRM song is worth more than the stereo you bought to play it. Let me know what I'm missing or how one could justify this value across a non-subjective basis. I don't think cost value works quite like earning potential (which is an agreed cost to your employer).
However, I put countless hours into F-Zero GX (which you can't back up the save file), and I would be very distraught if it got corrupted because the game is So blissfully, delightfully, mind numbingly fucking hard at times (most of the time) that having to do it all again just to get back to where I was would be crushing. There are other games that have a definitive "Value cycle" as the game save in the beginning isn't very valuable, gets more valuable in the middle, becomes Extremely valuable as you approach the end, then goes back to little/ no value after you beat the game.
Even then the value changes based on the game length. If I lost my "almost at the end" save file in Zelda I would be much more upset about it than if I lost my save file for say... Max Payne.
I saved after stealing every single ion frigate in the sphere at the Bridge of Sighs.
Mission: Thunderbolt is an old Macintosh dungeon digger from the mid-90s. It's a great game, with tons of gameplay elements and randomly generated levels so each game is different. One of the interesting parts of the game is that they made a sequel, Mission: Firebolt, and if you won Mission: Thunderbolt (which was a pretty impressive task, frankly) you could save your game for use in the sequel. I saved that game for at least 5 years waiting to plug the character into the sequel, but never did.
Comment of the year
Let me rephrase that right back at you, using "novel" instead of "game", and maybe you'll realize just how silly it sounds: "Did we forget novels are for fun, not for work? [...] If you lose the bookmark, then the novel should still be fun if you read it again. If not, you stop reading. Not like you're being forced to.
Seriously. If you've read half a novel, would you rather read the next part, or go back to reading the first half again?
Yes, a good novel should be fun to re-read, eventually, but at some point you just want to see how it ends, not to read the first chapter again.
Way I see it, the same applies to games.
Also, what if a sequel or expansion pack came out, and I want to take my old characters to the new world? Do I have to re-play the first game just for that, before even unpacking the _new_ game I just bought? That's a bit like saying that if you've bought "Life, the Universe and Everything", you should first have to re-read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" before even opening it. Sure, they're fun books to re-read, but which would you rather do first?
Now some games allow you to re-create an almost exact copy of your old char. E.g., unless you were playing a Neverwinter Nine or Shadow Thief Of Amn, you can re-create your old NWN2 character almost verbatim in Mask Of The Betrayer. Although, even there, what if you _did_ play a NW9 or Shadow Thief?
But other stuff isn't half as easy to reproduce.
For example, take Paradox's series of grand strategy games. It think that at least theoretically, you could play Crusader Kings (medieval strategy) to the end date, then export that map and continue playing that country in Europa Universalis 2 (late medieval / renaissance strategy) until the 19'th century, then export it and continue playing it in Victoria Revolutions (19'th to 20'th century strategy), then export it and continue playing it in Hearts Of Iron Doomsday (WW2 strategy.) That's stuff that would take weeks to reproduce if you wanted to start all over again from Hastings without a saved game.
Now I'm not saying you _should_ do that, because honestly, history will be severely off the track in that case. But what if you do want to do just that? There are people who've achieved highly improbably states, like rebuilding the Byzantine empire starting from Byzantium surrounded by the turks. If I had a saved game like that, I'd _definitely_ want to see how it does in another era. E.g., who would the Byzantines ally with in WW1? Would they fare any better than the Ottomans at the end of it? It's just, you know, curiosity.
Should someone have to replay everything from the 1400's just to get back to that state? Would they even get the same result again? To hammer some more on that Byzantine Empire example, that's stuff that's invariably a pretty improbable gamble. While gamer skill was most certainly involved, there were invariably a lot of other highly improbable events that made that possible, such as someone else keeping the Turks busy at exactly the right moment.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've kept ALL of my Diablo 2 characters (non Battle.Net) since it came out, and I still play that game for a few weeks at a time annually. Recently I've been thinking about making a batch file to backup the games every time I run the program, especially reading the comment above talking about corrupted character files. One of the best games EVER, and I do mean ever, I've probably put thousands of hours into that game. worth every minute.
This is exactly the realization that drives MMORPGs. Blizzard doesn't care if you distribute WoW. NCSoft also has a link to download the Guild Wars client off their website. The real money here is of course in the characters themselves. (i.e., the save file) When you buy WoW, all you really buy is a code that you then link to an account, and can use to access your save file from anywhere at any time. Can you imagine what Blizzard would have to go through if they lost a server or cluster or whatever with some players' accounts on them? Chaos! A few months ago, one of my friends quit playing WoW. He posted his 70 on eBay just to explore the possibility of selling it. In the brief period of time before his post got taken down, he got an offer on it for a few hundred dollars. He thought this was a great deal -- a couple HUNDRED dollars, just for playing a game! But then he looked his /played time (like, 70 days or so, I think) and compared that to the offer, and realized the guy was offering to compensate him at like, $0.30 / hour or something like that. He didn't sell.
having never ended any game I got a slouch of savegames so yeah in a way they are important to me. Until of course I talk about 2 year old savegames I dont even remember anymore. I mean if I don't feel still connected to the character in that safegame I might just erase them!
To bad I got a habit of not ending my games but yeah I stopped playing games on the pc so! Console all the way now! Some old games like VtM: Bloodlines draw me though, the character development. Ah I am going so damned offtopic!
Codefile Defected to another Hexadimal Range refresh your CHAOSTACK.NLM file with a new copy
You did reach the end. You died. Many games simply get progressively harder until you simply can't continue and die. In that regard, it's a lot like life.
Death was never the end when you had an elementary school that let out early, a nearby arcade, and 8 quarters (that was given to you as "lunch money" that morning)...
The hardest thing about getting older is that your reflexes are never as good as they were when you were younger. I love to torment teenagers with that one, because it's one of the problems with age that they can clearly understand. hehe.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
A lot of games, including RPGs, have a New Game+ feature where you can restart with various bonuses (all your items, levels, power-ups, etc.). Examples off the top of my head: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy X-2, Vagrant Story, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus. And most of those have stackable benefits. So I would be pretty distraught if I lost my Vagrant Story save with all Damascus Armor and multiple Rhomphaias (who remembers any of this?), or my original Chrono Trigger save (I mean ORIGINAL) with most character stats maxed out after tens of playthroughs.
I have both the DexDrive for PSX and Sharkport for PS2, and I've made use of both. To be honest, I've probably used them more as a way to hold onto old saves when I need more room on my memory card than anything, especially with the old PSX 15 slot cards. It's nice for silly things like having saves right before all of the major FMVs in FF8. Of course, there's no backing up my old SNES games, so if that battery ever dies in my Chrono Trigger cart, I'm screwed.
Not really a save game, but...
All the real important relevant data is saved on the servers but there's usually a preferences file saved locally which can control numerous things and can take hours to replace if lost due to a re-install or HD crash. Most people tweek their hotbars, chat windows, etc very often. Restarting from scratch is a real pain, especially if inventories full of look-alike backpacks get shuffled.
I back mine up.
This is one of those areas where computer game software is a pain in the neck. On Windows, I have yet to install a game that didn't put the save files in with the game files. Hence, you must run as admin and the game save files don't backup. I remember complaining about this 5 years ago when XP came-out and nothing has changed.
Last month I fired up Super Smash Bros. Melee on my Wii only to find out that my gamecube memory card was corrupt. For a game like that, the save file is irreplaceable. The game tracked tons of stats and has collectible trophies. Some trophies required hundreds of hours of playtime.
I also lost dozens of saved time trial records and ghosts from Mario Kart Double Dash. Compound this with the near impossibility of finding a large capacity gamecumbe memory card new and I'm in a crap situation. Every console I have will now be backed up in one way or another, whether it's via multiple memory cards or to PC.
Reminds me of when Blizzard banned an account with a level 60 mage and a level 54 priest from WoW because a "friend" of mine did a minor stupidity (pre-expansion times, 60 was the maximum level). I didn't really care about the price of the WoW subscription or cd-keys, but I wanted my character back and never managed to recover it. I never really came back to WoW after the incident, as I refuse to level up another char after loosing 2 high-level chars, especially my mage which didn't really have high-end gear but had some cool items and was already level 60.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
I still have floppy discs with my (old-school) Diablo characters saved to them. I loved the hell out of that game and used to bring a 3.5" with me to play on LAN with friends. It's a shame that storing characters offline made it so easy for cheaters to dupe and hack them for online play.
What's the last online multiplayer game you played where you really "owned" your character, instead of leasing the bits stored on someone else's server?
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Some games, like Nethack, don't. They work on the honor system.
Most games, I could probably care less. However, I'd probably do physical harm to myself and others if I lost my career player in MLB: The Show. I've played through 7 seasons, and gone through a lot to get a secure spot on a major league roster. Not to mention, the bragging rights I've earned playing friends in the Rivalry mode. In a game like baseball, it's nice to have electronic statistics that act as proof that I'm better at the game than my friends, and that is definitely more valuable than the cost of any game. That's the whole purpose of actually playing the game :)
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
> The article explores the various ways save-games can be backed up, and calculates
> how much the average saved game is worth based on your age and income.
Do they correlate it with laziness?
I'll save ya some time, and, apparently, money: Congratulations! You win your game, with infinite points, infinite gear, infinite gold, and before you even touch the controller, all the bad guys immediately die of fright.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This goes to show my age but this happened when I was around 7 or 8 and Nintendo had just come out. My bro and I were at the neighbor kid's house watching him play Super Mario. The kid made it to the last level with fireballs and got to the swimming area. He hated the swimming part so he gave the controller to by brother. My brother got through it but lost the fireballs. As soon as he lost the fireballs this kid started crying and pounding on the floor. This didn't just last for a second but the kid was literally bawling for so long that his mom finally told us we should leave. I can't even imagine what he would have done today had he been 40 hours into a game and had it erased.
OK, hypothesize: in any match you are playing against another person, let the referee arbitrarily re-set your score to zero.
Why should you be upset? You're playing the game for FUN, right? And you can continue to play; in fact, depending on the game, if you were winning, your 'gameplay' experience has just been enhanced since you'll probably get to play longer.
People play games and get entertainment about a lot of facets of games; to believe the 'fun' exists solely in the experience is naive at best.
-Styopa
Just rename the file to match the name of a popular pornographic actress and upload it to a filesharing network. Your saved games will be around longer than you.
Ok, I probably should know this, but I have a Super Mario 64 cartridge with all 120 stars. How do I back up the save game?
As a long time RPG player, I can truthfully say that my saved games are like first-borns.
If a tragedy occurs and I lose one, It's hard but I'll get over it and have another.
Remembering to name it after it's elder brother.
Maybe so you'll realize that $20 isn't all that much to pay to register that shareware game you are playing instead of cracking it. This generation has a great difficulty placing a value on anything; thinking that a $60 is outrageously expensive, but a $1000 shirt is not.
I'd been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for a couple of months when the hard drive it was installed to went corrupt and lost all file information. The data was still there but all the structure of the files on the disk was gone.
I spent several nights that week with various disk recovery programs trying to get my saves back. In the end what worked was one program which allowed me to view the disk as one massive stream of characters, and a fresh GTA:SA install on a second machine so I could search for strings likely to be in my savegames. I was able to locate the probable beginning and end of my save file and copy/paste it into notepad. I was much relieved when it worked!
Don't forget nose hair.
On the sega genesis, Sonic3k (Sonic 3 cartridge attached to Sonic and Knuckles cartridge) had save slots within the game which would erase everytime you turned off your genesis. I still have the save file from years ago when I saved the game on the PC emulator after finishing the game with all three characters, and collecting all 14 emeralds (from both games) to get access to not just super, Hyper Sonic, Hyper Knuckles, and Hyper Tails. Other then that I might still have Zeliard save file somewhere. Never finished that game, ever.
I have an old PS2 memory card with my FFVII saves on em.
It's stored in a little anti static bag, in my safe.
I'm not kidding. It's just one of those things I do NOT want to loose.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Life sucks too.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Is that your Oblivion save-game file and my Oblivion save-game file are probably pretty similar.
It's not like Morrowind where there were dozens upon dozens of faction combinations, and things *actually* worth stealing. (We could have a whole conversation about what the point of being a thief is in a world full of 'levelled loot' and hilariously powerful 'unlock spells', but that's another post). In Oblivion there really aren't all that many ways you can play it. And the differences between the character types are amazingly minimal. (Argonians can now wear boots! And they can still breathe underwater, but who cares when there's nothing underwater anyway?). Oblivion has 4 guilds, and one main plotline. For all the illusion of 'uniqueness', your character probably isn't.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The study seems like some interesting work, but really quite pointless otherwise. They're approaching the subject in entirely the wrong way
I actually just started this recently. My 360 gave me a red ring and after some net searching, I found out it was a HDD error. I've never heard anyone else mention this so I was a bit wary, but I kind of brushed it off. Then a month-ish later, it happened again, so I decided to see if EB Games had any used memory cards. They had a 64MB one for $20, so I picked that up and backed up any save data that could be backed up (DoA4 wouldn't let me copy the saved data).
:P.
Now the only problem that comes from something like this is remembering to continue to back up data. A mirror setup (a la RAID1) isn't bad, but that's done via hardware... not peopleware
A couple of years ago... When Diablo 2 was still a new game, I had a level 79 character on there that took me many months to build up. I ended up having to move in to an apartment with no internet for a while, and got married around that time too... My account got expired. Blizzard and other MMORPG folks should have to pay people the Dollar Amount their characters are worth in real dollars before they hit that delete button, or change their rules and just store the characters longer. Not all of us can log in every 90 days or however long it is before deletion... This is especially true with more RCE games (Real Cash Economy games) like Entropia.
Though I don't disagree that most save files will end up inherently similar (especially early on, and late in the game), I would like to point out that one of the most useful items I acquired in Oblivion was the Fin Gleam Helmet which could only be found by exploring underwater.
I dunno about you guys but when i buy a game I play it and finish it (or quit playing because it sucks) and then on to the next one. The rate they are pumping out games now days, I see no reason to worry about past saved games.
But on the other hand if I were in the middle of a game such as Oblivion and I have finished all of the guilds perhaps I may back up the saved game but once i finish playing it doesnt matter anymore.