hi folks

having a problem where it won't let me load a saved game - either quicksave or autosave - just crashes to desktop

I'm playing on PC (5th anniversary addition) and have just handed over all the ingredients for the vampire cure, and having searched around the net a bit understand there are some known issues around this bit

but I can't find any solutions

is there anything I can do to get around this - I can load a game I saved under another name (i.e. not quick or autosave) over 20 levels ago so I assume it must be something to do with the saved game

Anyone point me in the right direction here - any help appreciated

thanks

You could try backing up your saved files (dont know if possible) and re-installing?

the game works - I can load an old saved game - it just won't load a recent save

First, since you're on PC, are you using any mods and have you changed mods recently? This can happen when a mod in your mod list has a dependency it cannot find.

If you aren't using mods you have a corrupted quicksave. Never quicksave and never load from a quicksave. Quicksaves tend to become corrupted. It was this way in Morrowind and it is this way in Oblivion (I don't know if it is still this way in Skyrim).

I have one mod - which basically adds a couple of crates to the pirate ship so I can use it as a base

but I haven't changed it between the game that will load (over 20 levels old) and the game I can't load now. I've tried loading with and without the mod in the list and it won't work in either case.

I can't load quicksave or autosave. I'm guessing the official bethesda advice isn't 'never use quicksave' but I'll bare that in mind if I ever get this working again.

again, thanks for any help on this guys

I'm not sure what you mean by "official Bethesda advice."

Quicksaves can become corrupt. This is a fact. It was a fact in Morrowind and it's a fact in Oblivion. It does not matter what Bethesda says about it (they have said nothing, as they have said nothing about so many other glitches in their products). It is a fact of life that we who use their products have to live with and take into account.

The problem is that - unlike a full save - a quicksave does not preserve all the data in your game. The game engine makes an intelligent guess about what data is worth saving and what isn't. Most of the time it guesses correctly. But you are throwing dice every time you quicksave. There is a chance that the game will guess wrong. If it does, that quicksave is corrupt.

This problem is not present with full saves. Full saves preserve all the data in your game. They rarely become corrupt on their own.

all I meant Pseron is that there should be a 'better' solution than "don't use this feature as recommended by the games creaters", not that what you said was incorrect.

Although, at the end of the day - it's just writing data to a disk, and reading it from a disk - it shouldn't be crashing whether it's saving the full amount of data or not, unless the disk is itself faulty - which to the best of my knowledge it's not.

but it won't load the autosave either - this isn't a quick save issue.

as a matter of interest, does anyone know where the save games are stored - I can't find them under the program directory or under the application data area?

Try Documents-> My Games-> Oblivion-> Saves

You should have an autosave.bak

Cut that to desktop, back-up the autosave to another directory, rename the autosave.bak to autosave.ess and replace into your save folder. See if you can't load that.

thanks for that miles .... it so should have worked ...

... but it didn't

still crashing on me ... I guess it's done a couple of auto saves after doing whatever it's done that's making it crash

I guess I wasn't being clear enough. All saves except full saves are prone to possible coruption over time. Auto saves are no different than quick saves in this regard. Most of us disable auto saves. The only safe save is a full save.

re saves V quicksaves .... having just done one of each simultaniously from a new game - they come out at the same size, so my guess is the only thing that's different is that you only have to press one key to perform a quicksave

have you got any reason for believing they're different Pseron - can't imagine why anyone would program them to be

I know it’s dangerous to do, but for years I’ve use Quicksave every time I do something or after five or ten minutes if I’m just wandering around. (For crash recovery.) I get bit about every 200 hours or so and have to go back to the last full save and loose an hour or two. The last time something like this happened was just the other day, but the quicksave file wasn’t totally corrupted, because when I reverted back to it after I killed a good guy, it just reset my game hours from 1191 to zero. Didn’t notice that until much later, so I continued on with the new time. I do make full saves when my character returns from an excursion, or if she’s done something really important that she doesn’t want to do over again. I only revert to a quick save if there is a crash (about every two or three weeks), or kill someone I shouldn’t have with my long range archery. For what it’s worth, I’ve also had full saves that were corrupt.

I have gotten out of full save problems a couple of times by uninstalling then reinstalling the Oblivion game files, then reinstalling a backup copy of my Data folder with all my mods. Same thing in FO3. At least on my machine, it seems the game gets scrambled every once in a while.

@OP The same trick can be done for quicksave.bak if you haven't already written over it. quicksave.bak is always the second last quicksave you made and quicksave.ess is the last quicksave you made.

Take it or leave it, Pseron is giving you some good advice. Any Oblivion veteran or long time BGS gamer knows to backup their saves when it comes to Bethesda games. I usually keep 3 saves (quicksave, savefile1 & savefile2 - which are full saves) which has done me fairly well. And then like Tmar, I go an backup those saves to another folder every once in a while.

Best practices programming doesn't guarantee that some people don't screw up once in a while, just reduces the amount of screw ups (just google Oblivion's A-bomb & vampire face aging glitches for PC and vampire cure quest glitch for the PS3 ) . I too think that quicksave is a streamlined save option and doesn't do it as thoroughly as full save. If quicksave used the exact same lines of code that full save did, then it wouldn't be quicksave, plus it's not guaranteed that the programmers didn't do a minor goof up on file I/O streams with regard to quicksave.

My experience is that Quicksaves are fine if you're Quickloading from them, meaning that you're probably reloading from within the same cell. I use them all the time for characters who "need" a particular sigil stone, and have never had a problem that way. I would never rely on them for saving a play session.

I have recovered from occasional crashes that occur at cell boundaries, using the Autosaves. I would never rely on them, though, since they can be corrupted if the crash occurs when the Autosave is writing to disk.

As a rule, I always make a completely new Save whenever my character levels, and before starting any new quest. I use the console SAVE command, which allows my to name my files as I see fit, and also allows a handy text file to be saved with the game file; just add a 1 as a parameter to the command, for example SAVE Etta12KOTN 1

I turn off the autosave in Oblivion like I did in Morrowind. I don't see any point in saving every time I go through a door or change cells. (especially when I am making the round of shops in town) I also hardly use quicksaves because they can become corrupt. I always use my first rule for playing ES games or any rpg "Save often and in different slots". It is not really a good idea to overwrite saves in Bethesda games because they can easily become corrupt for some reason.

It's interesting. I've only once had a save that was corrupted, and I often overwrite them (although I do create new ones frequently, as mentioned above.) And I've had a LOT of characters, so it's a lot of saves. Hundreds of saves.

One thing that I do: I always wait, when saving, for disk activity to finish, before I do anything in the game. My character does not move until that little blue HD light finishes blinking. The last thing you want to do is to trigger an error of some kind, just as the game is writing to disk. When quitting the game, I save, and then wait patiently for the disk write to finish. I don't know if this practice is the reason I don't suffer corruption, but I'm not going to change.

I have had corrupted autosaves, but I've also had situations where an autosave has rescued me from a crash. So I leave them on, on the theory that they do more good than harm.