First save point???

[NS Plover]

So I'm using windows 11 - and I start the game - watch the Looong intro - talk to Kurt completely - do the thing to leave the room - and I still have no save???

Windows 11 - is it bugged?? Are there save points? I even did the truth test with the doctor and talked completely to the the old guys doing chess - look at load and NO save.

Is it bugged or do they expect you to play for ages with no save??

I have three achievements and trading cards - and no save that I can load??

[Cataleya22 (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ)]

Its been a while, but as far as i remember, you have to do the action for saving yourself.

[NS Plover]

Sorry - no - there isn't any save option anywhere - and leaving the game *does not* give you one (or even a warning). I have seen the long super slow intro scenes too many times without a save anywhere present (windows 11). After that - finish the door puzzle - leave to the next room - no autosave?? WTF?

[Cataleya22 (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ)]

You're right, i had forgotten that it has autosaves. However they are a little peculiar, they will be made only at certain important happenings in the game. I have just installed the game on my windows 11 to check. I got a save when i got the replacement for the elevator key. You can see the wheels turning in the right upper corner, but its briefly, so it can be missed. By going to the menu i was able to see that the load button was available with the name and moment. So i guess we can rule out its not working (bugged), or there is no permission on disk to save them.

Important to notice is that there is no steam cloud save. Therefore i recommend to make copies of the savefile and put them in a safe place. I know of people that experienced a bug somewhere in the game, and that got saved, making it impossible to go on, except for a total restart. But by replacing the savefile with the one you have, you can go on, depending on where the last save was made. I should say, keep every save file seperate for that matter, just in case.
I copied this from another post

ok so the one and only save is located here.

C:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\LocalLow\Microids\Syberia3

The AppData will be hidden so make sure you enable show hidden folders in folder options

There should be a folder named Options and a file.

That file is your save, it's overwritten every time the game saves.

In the top right corner you will see a set of gears when it's saving.

It will only save after you load to a new area and/or only after you advance the story in any way

All you need to do is copy that file somewhere safe when you want to manually save or do a back up.

If you ever need to load it again, just delete your current save (or copy it somewhere safe too) and copy the old save back. Then just start the game

Hope this helps

[NS Plover]

Wow that is a long time for the first save!!

[Cataleya22 (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ)]

Yes, i'm afraid the save points will be somewhat random, and can't be changed. The devs have not made adjustments for that later on. So dont expect that it will be changed.
Its a nuisance for sure if you need to stop but there's no save yet, you should keep the game open to continue later as it were. So keep an eye out for the saving icon. And then make a copy of it, just to be sure if the save file later on might get bugged. I myself didn't experience that, but a friend of mine did unfortunately.
But its still a great game to be played.

As a sidenote, i believe the author mr. Sokal did have disagreements with the devs how the game mechanics turned out. Unfortunately he has passed away a while ago. Haven't tried the newer installment yet, because of backlog, so don't even know if he had more input in that one.

[NS Plover]

I think I had a corrupt save file from the get-go on windows 11. And I tried making new ones by deleting the Syberia 3 folder and trying again - I even reinstalled - same problem.

Anyway I started up my old windows 10 machine - installed it there (so slow) and got a save file after taking the test from the doctor (before getting my clothes from the cabinet). I copied this off and took it to my windows 11 machine, renamed my Syberia3 directory under appdata\locallow\microids and copied in the one from my windows 10 machine. Problem gone and I'm regularly getting autosaves.

Possibly my problem was related to some of the other complaints about corrupt save games - except mine started off corrupt?

[NS Plover]

Originally posted by Cataleya22 (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ):

Yes, i'm afraid the save points will be somewhat random, and can't be changed. The devs have not made adjustments for that later on. So dont expect that it will be changed.
Its a nuisance for sure if you need to stop but there's no save yet, you should keep the game open to continue later as it were. So keep an eye out for the saving icon. And then make a copy of it, just to be sure if the save file later on might get bugged. I myself didn't experience that, but a friend of mine did unfortunately.
But its still a great game to be played.

As a sidenote, i believe the author mr. Sokal did have disagreements with the devs how the game mechanics turned out. Unfortunately he has passed away a while ago. Haven't tried the newer installment yet, because of backlog, so don't even know if he had more input in that one.

I really enjoyed Syberia: The World Before - the art, the music, the story, the diaries that often tell you additional info (Kate's diary was actually the diary of that detective that is following her). It does have a single autosave but if you have cloud save turned off - you can do manual copies. When you go back to the main menu it tells you when your last save was and lets you cancel if it was too long ago. The cut scenes are beautiful and slow and you can't skip them...

It was what made me go back and buy the older games on Steam...

There is one section where Kate is a prisoner in a mining cave where she is not in character - otherwise it is very much in character.

And Oscar is back - but not in his usual form...

[Cataleya22 (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ)]

A corrupt save file is certainly possible, it has happened before, just not that quick. That's why the precaution for copying it.

But good to hear you got it working.
It might be that windows 11 is messing a bit, since my savepoint was much later. And the game is older.

Good to hear the world before is likewise in the atmosphere that's being created. I liked the prologue too. Graphical it's different and better. But nevertheless I loved the first 2 installs for the great storyline and how it was all presented.
Thanks for the tip on saving from the newest install as well

[rebob777]

There seem to be few saves early in the game but you can, at strategic times, hit escape (you can't be in a dialog or cut scene) and quit, Change the save number (e.g. 1--*** to 2--*** and save it in a sub-folder. e.g.:

(11--UI_Loader_Zone_Monde01_CampYoukol02_Title--133251238472877093--UI_Loader_Zone_Monde01_CampYoukol02_Summary).

I haven't had any problem restarting the game with the renumbered save position files. It seems that 2 digit substitutions are OK.

If the time stamp is about the time you hit ESC then when you restart and continue, it will start at or near where you stopped. I will start wherever you were at the time indicated by the time stamp.

Later on, I got black screens with a running ostrich at the lower right. If you stop the program, ESC, immediately after the black screen, the save will point to that position. Re-number it and save it (check the time stamp).

When you restart, you can load instead of continue and you'll see a thumbnail picture of where the game will start.

With position files numbered in sequence saves you can go back to a known position by copying it back and either deleting the current position (which you have renumbered and saved), You can restart a position over and over again.

Remember that the start position data gets overwritten after a while and a new time stamp is applied but the save name doesn't change, so if you want to restart you should get that named save segment from your saved position folder to get the right content and time stamp.

I'm making a walkthrough video and I had to replay some segments several times to get them right (like the coal tower problem or starting the ice breaker problem).

So far I have 16 starting positions up to Baranour. The points range from 3 minutes to 30 minutes apart. The longer ones have a lot of routine stuff and maybe one difficult area.

I know there are already several video walkthroughs but I'm having fun going through the process of getting it as right as possible with minimal wanderings. I still don't have all of the achievements though for Syberia 3 (and I may never get them).

I do have all of the achievements for SyberiaTWB and made a 27 segment walkthrough for it. The save segments for SyberiaTWB are easier to deal with but it's the same principle--stop the game and save that position renamed with descriptive text. It's single save position is save.bin so it's easy to rename the save segments.

Syberia 3's names are difficult to rename so you need to maintain a txt file to correlate and describe the save positions.

I hope these ramblings can help someone enjoy playing/replaying Syberia 3 and then, perhaps, SyberiaTWB.

[NS Plover]

That's too complicated for me. I just copy and paste the whole Siberia3 directory and then rename to to Siberia3.somenamethatwilltellmewhereIwas. To go back to an older one I rename the Siberia3 directory to something else and copy the one I want to replace it with to the right location and rename it to Siberia3...

[NS Plover]

I also have all the achievements for SyberiaTWB and used the complete directory copy method with great success. There were one or two cases where I tried just going back to a previous save segment and it didn't reset me completely to where I should have been. In one case it was missing secondary objectives that should have been at the point I was taken back to, and I think Loyal versus Betrayed also has something that is not stored in the save...

Edited to add- the specific problem - as Kate going up to the mountain retreat the first time. My manual save was a long time back. Normally going up this trail - there are secondary objectives. When I stopped the game because of a mistake and just replaced the save segment - I was back to way before - BUT I did not get my secondary objectives back ever - so if I'm going for 100% achievements - I think I can't trust this to give it to me. Copying the entire save directory to a backup is more reliable... Just Sayin'

[rebob777]

Regarding restarts and secondary objectives: When a secondary objective depends upon events happening at different times, the player must continuously play from the first event to the second event because the memory for the event is carried forward in the segment information. So if you missed the first event and played to the second you can't just save your second position and go back and replay the segment with the first event and execute the first part of the secondary objective, stop, and then replay the segment with the second part because the second part still contains the information that the first part was not executed.

In other words, the secondary event information is carried from segment to segment. It is not stored in some central place so that it could be known when you skip forward to a later previously saved segment.

You can stop and restart from the last stored segment and the information will be carried forward. For example, in SyberiaTWB, the Didn't Miss Anything isn't achieved until near the very end so that would seem to require continuous play until then. Again you can stop and continue with the last saved segment.

So, if you are going for achievements, when you stop, save the position in a save location so that all the save info is continuous. Then you can go and start from continuously accumulated set of information but remember that later saved start information should be deleted or moved somewhere else and new positions with continuous information will be maintained.

If you are only interested in replaying a segment then you need not be concerned with continuously correct segment information. Just enjoy the game play.

I think this event saving principle applies to both Syberia 3 and SyberiaTWB.

[NS Plover]

To better explain what I was doing - I thought I had messed up something and I just wanted to back up completely to an earlier point and play through (not bounce back and forth). I had a full directory save, but it was over an hour playtime before and I wanted to see if the segment method worked.

I was playing as Kate and was at the point where you are doing the hike to get to the mountain retreat. One of the secondary objectives there is to admire the view, which I had completed before I figured I had messed something else up. When I tried using the segment method - it took me back to the point Kate arrived at the station before starting the hike - but during the hike, it never showed me the secondary objective to admire the view - even though I repeated all the same steps (and examined every hot spot).

I do not know if I would still get the achievement for completing secondary objectives if I continued from there or not - because I stopped renamed the SiberiaTWB directory and replaced it with my backup one and replayed everything up to the point (and didn't have any problem with the admire the view secondary objective being there).

Mileage may vary with the segment method - just sayin'...

[rebob777]

You're right. There are some things we may never know about these games! Glad you found a work around though.