My Initial Thoughts on the "Mein Leben" Difficulty

[AddictedxGamer]

For those of you who aren't aware, the "Mein Leben" difficulty unlocks after you beat the game, no matter what difficulty you chose. Once unlocked, you can choose to put your skills to the ultimate test.

In the "Mein Leben" difficulty, you're required to beat the entire storyline in one sitting, without dying. There is no saving of any kind, and if you die, you have to start from the beginning again.

Now, here's where I have an issue with this; there's an achievement for this. I've got mixed feelings here. Yes, I think any player who accomplishes this enormous feat should be rewarded with an achievement to show for it, but for perfectionists like myself who strive to unlock every single achievement, it's very frustrating.

Why? Because the way this difficulty has been executed is severely flawed, in my opinion. I get that you can't create manual saves or have autosaves to fall back on if you die. But, there aren't even any saves generated in between chapters!

Why is that an issue? Bugs. Bugs and crashes. That's why. This game is flawed to its core, and in my time playing it, has crashed to the desktop on SEVERAL occasions. What, happens if I get half or even 3/4 of the way through this and the game decides to crash? I've got no saves at all to at least get back to the start of the last chapter I started.

I don't know what to think about this difficulty and its achievement other than that it seems poorly executed, and like it's going to be the bane of my existence, because I know I have to try to unlock the achievement...

Why would you guys do this this way, Bethesda / Machine Games? Especially when it's no secret that your game consistently crashes for well over 50% of the PC Gaming Community? Shouldn't there be a patch that either fixes the crashes, changes the difficulty to create chapter saves, or both?

[Guydodge]

over 50% lol where'd you get your numbers from ?.....just curious

[SteveHard]

Maybe if you have got an enough powerful machine you can do this achievement running the game in a VM. Suspend and/or create snapshot.

[Gordon Freeman]

Originally posted by AddictedxGamer:

For those of you who aren't aware, the "Mein Leben" difficulty unlocks after you beat the game, no matter what difficulty you chose. Once unlocked, you can choose to put your skills to the ultimate test.

In the "Mein Leben" difficulty, you're required to beat the entire storyline in one sitting, without dying. There is no saving of any kind, and if you die, you have to start from the beginning again.

Now, here's where I have an issue with this; there's an achievement for this. I've got mixed feelings here. Yes, I think any player who accomplishes this enormous feat should be rewarded with an achievement to show for it, but for perfectionists like myself who strive to unlock every single achievement, it's very frustrating.

Why? Because the way this difficulty has been executed is severely flawed, in my opinion. I get that you can't create manual saves or have autosaves to fall back on if you die. But, there aren't even any saves generated in between chapters!

Why is that an issue? Bugs. Bugs and crashes. That's why. This game is flawed to its core, and in my time playing it, has crashed to the desktop on SEVERAL occasions. What, happens if I get half or even 3/4 of the way through this and the game decides to crash? I've got no saves at all to at least get back to the start of the last chapter I started.

I don't know what to think about this difficulty and its achievement other than that it seems poorly executed, and like it's going to be the bane of my existence, because I know I have to try to unlock the achievement...

Why would you guys do this this way, Bethesda / Machine Games? Especially when it's no secret that your game consistently crashes for well over 50% of the PC Gaming Community? Shouldn't there be a patch that either fixes the crashes, changes the difficulty to create chapter saves, or both?

My game has never crashed

[Abyssrocker]

^ aren't you special. Probably didn't need to quote the entire OP for that.

I never thought about the crashing part, but yeah, that's a major issue with this mode for those who do want to try it.

I've had freezes for inexplicable reasonsz the most recent being in the middle of the Riverside bunker. That would have been enough to break some people's souls if they got that far on Mein Leben.

Or even sooner than that, I had the game ctd during the very last cutscene, something I fixed by verifying the game files, but it's an issue you wouldn't have known about literally until the very end of the game.

[AddictedxGamer]

Originally posted by Guydodge:

over 50% lol where'd you get your numbers from ?.....just curious

I thought I stated that those numbers were my estimate, but it was late at night, and I must have forgotten to. Regardless, I based my numbers off of the number of people I see posting about crashes here in the Steam Forums for this game, as well as on Reddit, and the actual Bethesda Forums for this game. There are A LOT of players plagued by unpredictable and seemingly undiagnosable crashes and freezes.

Originally posted by SteveHard:

Maybe if you have got an enough powerful machine you can do this achievement running the game in a VM. Suspend and/or create snapshot.

Would that really work though? I feel like it wouldn't work considering that I can't even Alt+Tab this game without it crashing.

Originally posted by Gordon Freeman:

My game has never crashed

You're one of the lucky ones then. I've experienced countless crashes, ranging from in the middle of cutscenes, to opening the journal to view a collectible, to the most recent; a crash while loading an autosave in the Gunslinger Joe DLC which corrupted my saves for said DLC. The saves cause a "Crash Dump Error" related crash when trying to load them. I have to start the DLC from the beginning, and I was literally RIGHT at the end of the first chapter in that DLC.

Originally posted by LivingDeadDraugr:

I never thought about the crashing part, but yeah, that's a major issue with this mode for those who do want to try it.

I've had freezes for inexplicable reasonsz the most recent being in the middle of the Riverside bunker. That would have been enough to break some people's souls if they got that far on Mein Leben.

Or even sooner than that, I had the game ctd during the very last cutscene, something I fixed by verifying the game files, but it's an issue you wouldn't have known about literally until the very end of the game.

Exactly. This is something that a lot of other people feel the same way about when it comes to this difficulty mode and the achievement for it. I've looked through threads here on Steam, threads over on Reddit, and even threads on the Bethesda Forums; a lot of people have mentioned the plague that is this game's instability as the reason they don't support there being an achievement for this difficulty mode.

Like I said in my original post, I have mixed feelings. If I manage to complete this difficulty mode, I damn sure would like to have an achievement to show for it. But, at the same time, if I try like hell to complete it and can't because of the game crashing and freezing, then I'll be absolutely miffed about having to look at that achievement keeping me from completing the game to 100%. If I simply can't do it because I keep dying, then I wouldn't care about it still being locked. But if it stays locked because the game keeps crashing... not cool.

[SteveHard]

Originally posted by AddictedxGamer:

Originally posted by SteveHard:

Maybe if you have got an enough powerful machine you can do this achievement running the game in a VM. Suspend and/or create snapshot.

Would that really work though? I feel like it wouldn't work considering that I can't even Alt+Tab this game without it crashing.

In theory yes. You would not even have to Atl + Tab from the game.

I must add that on my system the game runs just fine, did not experienced any crash ever, so I do not see why it would not run in a VM properly.

[Samael]

A few hundred posts compared to the 300k+ copies sold. Not even 1%. More like .1% of the people.

Only a very small portion of the people had problems with this game and there are people in this forum who help people with that.

[AddictedxGamer]

Originally posted by SteveHard:

In theory yes. You would not even have to Atl + Tab from the game.

I must add that on my system the game runs just fine, did not experienced any crash ever, so I do not see why it would not run in a VM properly.

What do you mean by "VM?"

Originally posted by Samael:

A few hundred posts compared to the 300k+ copies sold. Not even 1%. More like .1% of the people.

Only a very small portion of the people had problems with this game and there are people in this forum who help people with that.

Like I said, I was making an estimate. Math was never my best subject, so it's no surprise that I was wrong, but the point still stands. There ARE people that experience instability with this game, myself included. For those people, how is the design behind this difficulty mode and the associated achievement for it, fair? The game literally JUST froze on me while I was watching a cutscene before seeing that there were new comments on this post.

I've looked at a lot of the supposed solutions for these crashes, and none of them have been of any help to me personally; I still experience crashes and freezes.

EDIT: Oh, jesus christ. This game is so broken. After that freeze I just experienced, I'm getting the "Achievements have been disabled" because of something about DevMode. I had this happen to me before after the game went bonkers during a cutscene like it just did, and the fix was to add a line to disable DevMode to the Launch Options.

Thing is; the line is still there in the Launch Options... I don't even know what the hell DevMode is, or how to even enable it! Why the game insists of giving me a hard time after it crashes / freezes is beyond me, but it's annoying like no tomorrow. Now I don't know how I'm going to get it working again.

[Abyssrocker]

I had that happen too after a crash corrupted my save, and in fact my entire profile. Nothing would prevent the console enabled message, even going to a save before the crssh; turns out I couldn't even earn perks after that crash, with the only solution being, and oh I hate to say it, starting over on a brand new profile.

Yeah, not so fun, especially on Death Incarnate ha ha!

I don't think that the game being so unpredictably buggy would be so bad on its own; it's just that they then made it a complete scheiße show to deal with any aftermath.

No way to revert the console mode, no recovery for perks being stuck, and even the crash dumps have errors.

My last playthrough had me copying my entire save folder after every exit just to have some form of backup in case a random freeze somehow broke the entire profile.

[AddictedxGamer]

Originally posted by LivingDeadDraugr:

I had that happen too after a crash corrupted my save, and in fact my entire profile. Nothing would prevent the console enabled message, even going to a save before the crssh; turns out I couldn't even earn perks after that crash, with the only solution being, and oh I hate to say it, starting over on a brand new profile.

Yeah, not so fun, especially on Death Incarnate ha ha!

I don't think that the game being so unpredictably buggy would be so bad on its own; it's just that they then made it a complete scheiße show to deal with any aftermath.

No way to revert the console mode, no recovery for perks being stuck, and even the crash dumps have errors.

My last playthrough had me copying my entire save folder after every exit just to have some form of backup in case a random freeze somehow broke the entire profile.

And therein lies my problem with the Mein Leben difficulty and the associated achievement for it. You can't even tell the Technical Support over at Machine Games / Bethesda exactly what the problem is, because when the game crashes out, it doesn't even properly write the Crash Dump Log! How are they supposed to tell you what caused the crash, and how to fix it, if the log file isn't complete because even THAT part of the software is bugged at its core?!

Why in the hell would I want to even TRY this difficulty mode given all of the crashes I'm plagued with?!

And I know that it sure as hell isn't my system not being powerful enough, as I think someone else mentioned here in this thread... I'm running WELL beyond the minimum and recommended hardware specs for this game.

i7-7700K
GTX 1070
16GB DDR4
960GB SSD
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

[CzechKronner]

I almost made it, died just before the end by making a stupid mistake. So it's definitely doable and I'll try it again in a few days. I never had any crashes so I am not worried about that part. That said, I think they should have done what DOOM 2016 did with its Ultra-Nightmare mode (game is saved between missions).

[AddictedxGamer]

Originally posted by CzechKronner:

I almost made it, died just before the end by making a stupid mistake. So it's definitely doable and I'll try it again in a few days. I never had any crashes so I am not worried about that part. That said, I think they should have done what DOOM 2016 did with its Ultra-Nightmare mode (game is saved between missions).

Yeah, but for those of us with crashes all the time, it's hard to even fathom attempting it. :(

And I've stated numerous times that I feel they should add that into it; saving between chapters / missions.

[SteveHard]

Originally posted by AddictedxGamer:

Originally posted by SteveHard:

In theory yes. You would not even have to Atl + Tab from the game.

I must add that on my system the game runs just fine, did not experienced any crash ever, so I do not see why it would not run in a VM properly.

What do you mean by "VM?"

It stands for "Virtual Machine".

[Balloon Dog]

My main problem is sitting through the abusive father sequmce every time i fail. Its like 5-10 mins with no skill attached. Would be nice if they just plopped you in the wheelchair.

[Sir_0v3rk1ll]

I think the level before Mein Leben is a bit to hard to enjoy. I played doom on the one before the hardest level and I truely enjoyed it. whats the point of making it so hard, dying with one bullet if you have F5 to save when ever you want. then it becomes an F5 pressin fest. I have more memories of pressing F5 playing this game than anything. Dont make the game easy but make it fun to go thru it in hard without saving so much. The moment you have save every time cause you keep dying so much is a sign that you pushed it too far and this is coing from a 40 year old fps gamer.