Game not saving?

[guivers1]

I'm playing Croft Manor, and I've replayed a bunch of times, sometimes my games save, sometimes they don't. Is this a common glitch? Am I doing something wrong? I'm new to Steam, so not sure if I'm missing something. I don't seem to have the option to manual save, and checkpoint saves aren't working.

[Arfur Brain]

Try changing to a new profile. I had the same problems using the Default Profile but since changing I'm seeing it save every time.

[guivers1]

Thanks, I did try that, but still not saving. And so far no response to my ticket. :(

[Arfur Brain]

Hmm, it seems that if you create a new profile, run and abort Croft Manor, flip back to the profile you're playing under and then run the game then it saves okay. But I'm having to do this every time.
Now I've moved onto Peru and although there is now a SAVE option in the menu I'm finding it's still not reliable. Just lost an hour of play.

[Kargor]

I don't know whether or not there is a problem, but you have to understand how the "save" works. Which I'm not entirely sure about myself, though.

Basically, the game has a checkpoint system -- when you hit a checkpoint you get a message displayed to that effect. Checkpoints only activate if the previous checkpoint was a different one.
Egypt seems to generally look you out from previous rooms (I'm still early in the first map there, though. Maybe it's more like before further in), but for previous levels I sometimes went back a bit further just to trigger another checkpoint, in the hope that it would do somethiing useful.

On other occasions, where you have to retry things over and over again (can you spell "annoying game design"?), one might have to be careful to avoid checkpoints. Like when I was in a room where I had to hit a switch to make the relic appear, then make an almost perfect run to the relic before it disappeared again -- there was a checkpoint right at the switch, and another one close to the path I had to run on. I made a manual save at the switch, but by avoiding that other checkpoint I could just die to retry instead of having to reload.

Every once in a while, a checkpoint is linked with a specific action -- for example, I was in a water-puzzle room at some point, and whenever I changed the water level it would give me a checkpoint.

An exception to this are artifacts and relics -- these aren't included in the checkpoints. When you find one you'll keep it even if you die and return to a previous checkpoint.

A "manual save" is basically a copy of the last checkpoint; it does NOT save your current state. For myself, I simply make or update manual saves after hitting a checkpoint. This also means that if you kept searching a room for clues of what to do, possibly hitting switches and finding stuff, without getting far enough to trigger another checkpoint, that progress will be lost when you exit or die.

[Arfur Brain]

Thanks Kargor for the explanation. I hadn't appreciated the fact that a manual save is just a consolidation of the last checkpoint and it does explain why some stuff isn't being saved. I now suspect my lost hour of play was me hovering between checkpoints.Ah well.

[guivers1]

That explains the Croft Manor issue for me, in that they aren't new checkpoints, but I don't even have a manual save option - ie., if I go to the pause screen, there is no "Save" option showing. Weird. Response to my ticket says I have to go back to the game developer. I started Legend in the meantime, so maybe I'll try again once I'm done that.

[Kargor]

Originally posted by Arfur Brain:

Thanks Kargor for the explanation. I hadn't appreciated the fact that a manual save is just a consolidation of the last checkpoint and it does explain why some stuff isn't being saved. I now suspect my lost hour of play was me hovering between checkpoints.Ah well.

Hovering between checkpoints, in my understanding, shouldn't make you loose anything. Checkpoints will "activate" if the previous one was a different one, so if you walk back and forth between two checkpoints they should keep activating. At least that's what has happened for me, all the time when I did it, and I'm still assuming the "*pling* Checkpoint..." display popping up means it also saves the current state of the game. That is, however, something I'm not at all sure about yet -- so far, however, my coming back into the game or reloading or getting killed has always lead to a game state that seemed to be ok.

The game also seems to have a good number of checkpoints; I've rarely gotten into a "I really could use a checkpoint about now" situation because every couple of steps I hit a new checkpoint anyway. In fact, even though Egypt (so far) has started to add a lot more "locked out of previous rooms" situations than I had encountered before, I'm still hoping they don't ramp up difficulty by reducing the number of checkpoints or putting them into stupid places.

[blarth]

Originally posted by Arfur Brain:

Try changing to a new profile. I had the same problems using the Default Profile but since changing I'm seeing it save every time.

Thanks for the tip. Things are working correctly now.

[Ninj]

Changing profile worked too :) Thank you.

To steam developers: mass-testing a game before to edit it is not optional, you know?

[HellbillyDeluxe]

Damn, I totally forgot about this issue! When the game first came out back in the day, people were having the same issue, but luckily, I was unaffected. Last year or so, I bought TRA again on Steam, but haven't started playing it until yesterday. I've played for about 2 hours and saved before leaving the game yesterday.

Today, I wanted to continue playing it, but thanks to this bug, all my saves are gone. I've created a new profile now and see if that works...


EDIT:

I've found a solution:

- Create a new profile and exit the game
- Go to C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Eidos\Tomb Raider - Anniversary
- Copy the content from the old profile to the new profile
- Start a new game with your new profile
- Once in-game, open up the options menu and you should see your savegames.
- Load your latest savegame and - just in case - save again, using a new savegame.

Long story short, I didn't lose my progress and can play the game normally now.

[Mormuminulukinjkuniypl]

Thank you! You are the BEST!

[CJM]

I just had to start a new game, and then I could load a save.
Lost some unsaved progress when it didn't resume from my last checkpoint.

[Mormuminulukinjkuniypl]

lol i have the same