Most devastating loss of a save file

[King of Asgaard]

little brothers overwrite your save files.

I'm guilty of this.
A few years ago, I ACCIDENTALLY deleted my brother's FFX save file. Over a hundred hours, all aeons, celestial weapons, Al Bhed letter spheres all gone into the Ether. I've never forgiven myself, even though my brother has.

As for most devastating save loss for me, a little while ago, my PS3 had to be traded in because it was overheating in ten minutes. No biggie, until it came time to transfer my data to my laptop for safekeeping. For whatever blisteringly idiotic reasons, a few saves have copy protection, meaning they cannot be copied to anything other than the cloud thing available to PS Plus subscribers only. This wasn't a big deal, other than one save. Dark Souls. Let's just say that, over 300 hours split across 8 characters, I was really upset.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Soul Calibur 3. I wasn't aware that the game had an issue with save files. I unlocked 80% of the stuff in that game. And then poof! Save file corrupted. Apparently in order not to have your save file corrupted, Soul Calibur 3 save file has to be the first one on your memory card. As I was obsessed with the game, I started all over again. Eventually I managed to unlock everything.

 

[MrShowerHead]

Recently? My brother tried to fix our Xbox, had some FPS drop issues on most games, he somehow managed to delete a single save file. What was that file? Only my NG+ Dark Souls char, around lvl 101. Not that big of a loss, but still... That was my original character, my first one.

Oh well, not that big of a deal, already pre-purchased the PC version on Steam, released next Thursday

 

[Snowblindblitz]

My PS3 had a hard drive error last week. Lost everything. MTG 2012 and other downloadable games, and plus, the worse for me:

I had just gotten Dark Souls, and was 40 hours in. Life hated me.

Plus some 60 hour or so Skyrim saves.

 

[Thee Lost One]

Erg. actually Lost Game Saves? Monster Rancher 2 is the primary, Legend of Legaia was the secondary, both on the same card. >.<

Monster Rancher 2 had the largest barn, all but 4 monster breeds unlocked, and I'd raised 19 FIRST generation monsters from Disc birth to S league, including an Arrowhead/Suezo, Blue Pheonix, Metal Slime, and a Hangar/Dragon. I had the events to unlock Mock set up for my next monster's death, and was working on trying to unlock a Beaclon.

Legend Of Legaia: I don't know how many of you have played this one, but i had over 400 hours invested in it, all my spells/seeru leveled up to max, all the best armors and items, Ra-Seeru at the highest forms, hidden bosses bested, level capped, stats nearly maxed, the arena dominated countless times...the rarest fucking drops found >.< augh.

Those two were lost due to me having the memory card in my ps2 when I tried one of Sony's demo discs back in 2005 i think.

I NEARLY lost a Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne save file with other 1600 hours of play time, every magatama found and leveled, nearly every demon crafted/recruited, Demon ending set up, rare items in hand all prepped to face the final bosses.... and some jackass tried to steal my games and memory cards while I was on my way to my friends to make the final dungeon a party event. He quickly learned that the flesh on a humans face does not react well to being forcibly ground against a blocks worth of asphalt >.> thankfully my saves were fine and fun was had after that.

 

[Sajuuk_Khar]

Harvest Moon 64 (on emulator), I was a year and a half into the game when my computer was stolen.

Red Alert, I still played it on the Win 95 machine my family has had since I was a kid, it was thrown out with the only copies of my second to last level saves (Both factions) on it.

 

[Mordekaien]

- Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. It imprisoned me in Chinatown.

This, so much this. I can't count all those times this game has made me scream in frustration due to it's bugs, glitches and whatnot.
The worst was when the game randomly dropped me through ground near the ending.
SO. MUCH. RAGE.

 

[CommanderL]

Oh let's see. My son deleted my profile on my xbox several years ago deleting every save file in the process. I would say about 30+ games. The ones that irked me the most were my Resonance of Fate save, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 1, Tales of Vesperia, Lost Odyssey, Star Ocean and Fallout 3. I was not a happy camper. As a matter of fact I went and sold all of my games shortly thereafter in a fit of rage lol.

Same thing happen to me Some guy was being a dick so I told to get out of my house he took my Xbox hard drive and wiped it I lost so much I sold all my games the next day and spent a week in a sad state

 

[cgmetallica1981]

I am extremely careful so nothing's ever happened except in Resident Evil 5, there was a glitch or something after completing the game where everything was reset, you had to start from the beginning, your save file was overwritten and there was nothing you could do about it. I just sold the game after that happened to me.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Somehow, when I was playing a game (can't remember which), it crashed. I powered the console back on to find the disc drive had crapped out. Fortunately, I was able to copy the majority of my save files onto an SD card. Unfortunately, Brawl, for whatever reason, wouldn't. Instead of sending the console in for repairs, my parents thought it'd be a great idea to just buy a new one. I'd completed the game 100% before, and now I had to do it all. Over. AGAIN. Fan-fucking-tastic.

All Wii game save files for games that have an online component are locked to the console and can't be copied by the built-in file manager, which is a huge pain in the ass, especially when it's a game that doesn't even let you play online, just one that has an online high score list or something useless like that. The only way to move them without having Nintendo do it for you is to mod the console and either use a backup tool or dump the entire contents of the built-in flash memory. And then of course that's the only way to copy them back on again too. Like I was saying, huge pain in the ass, and all because they don't want people editing their save files to cheat (which they can do easily anyway, because it takes about five minutes to soft-mod the thing and dump everything to an SD card).

 

[Mauler]

OOh my computers harddrive "died" just last week and i lost all my Mass Effect saves whith MY Sheppard... I groomed him for all those years and now he's dead... Also my dragon age(both of 'em), but that is not as tragick as my SHEPPARD whose deeds are lost to humanity...

 

[Sandjube]

Saints row 3. I was like 70% through it, and I had to clear up some room for some more. I can't be bothered typing it all, but I basically ended up deleting all the files that weren't like, at the beginning of the game.

I haven't played a story mission in it since.

 

[Yopaz]

Batman Arkham City. I had completed all Riddler challenges, all campaigns and had most Riddler trophies. However I did not count on Games For Windows live to ignore my save file. The save file was there, Steam could access it, but Games For Windows Live wouldn't let me access it. Pissed me off and made me join the bandwagon of hate towards Games For Windows Live.

 

[Zio_IV]

I've actually got an interesting take on this.

I recently fired up Steel Battalion on my Xbox for the first time in 8 years, only to find that my save file was corrupted. This includes the in-game list of save files that were all deleted, since when you die in SB, it removes that file from the hard drive. I had beaten that game on all 6 difficulties, unlocked everything, but it was losing that list that depressed me. That list of dead "me's" was living proof of how much I struggled with this monster of a game.

Strange that my worst case of "losing a save file" was losing a list of lost save files.

 

[surg3n]

I've had some bad times with save files, like that Borderlands 360 bug, damn that was annoying because I was just getting into the game, then had to start from scratch. I started rotating my storage locations after that.

But, the worst save file rape ever was done to me by my own flesh and blood. I was on the very last boss on Alundra on the Playstation, now Alundra is a tricky game, it's a good 50 hours of gameplay, and I worked bloody hard to get that far. It was taking me a while to figure out that last boss, then one day I find that my save file has been deleted, by my 6 year old son... back when memory cards only had like 1mb of space. Anyway, I start from scratch, I want to finish the game, going so far then being robbed of my progress would just make my achievement even more epic... so I play it all the way to the last boss again. Can you guess what happens?

Save file deleted again!

That was worse than the time I came home to find my girlfriends puppy had destroyed about 40 Dreamcast games, half of them not even mine, I had borrowed them from my boss!

 

[Soxafloppin]

My Pokemon save file when I was a kid....My Alakazam....My beautiful Alakazam

Also I was playing through NFS: Most Wanted and After you move up the blacklist I wanted every single blacklist car in my collection so after every beating every blacklist member I would turn the system off before saving, then when I didn't win the SLR I mistakenly turned it off while it was saving and corrupted the save

 

[Voulan]

Honorable mentions go towards my old Pokemon saves, before the internal battery ran dry. My favourite Pokemon teams, lost to history.

One beloved day I decided to start a silly character in Oblivion, and saved over my 300+ hour main character. I went and remade them probably a few months later, but I couldn't touch the game 'til then.

Just recently my PS3 actually died (after a 4 year run, it could no longer read any disks) so I got a new one two weeks ago. After some kerfuffle getting a hard drive and getting it to actually work, I managed to transfer my beloved Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout saves, among others. Unfortunately, some games don't allow you to copy them over due to copyright or something, so some games I had to restart.

As long as Skyrim is okay. My god.