I have a vault of 130 dwellers, with 25 rooms. This took me several days to build up. Whenever I load my game, it allows me to play for about 1 minute and then crashes (to the desktop - the game just closes). This happens EVERY TIME that I load my game.

I am using a new Nvidia Shield (which is a gaming tablet), so there shouldn't be any issues with the device being able to run the game.

This is a HUGE problem. There are players paying money in order to advance their vault ... but when a save game crashes, and there is no way to fix the corrupted file, or restore an old save game, then your product has some serious flaws. Why spend $15 on a game that will just stop working in a few days? You are going to lose alot of players until these situations are resolved (and you add some cloud-based save feature, or a way to backup games locally).

Note about my time: it's been over 12 hours ... and most of my explorers are dying off. This is very disappointing. I feel like your company didn't give me hours of enjoyable experience (as I would expect from Bethesda), but robbed me of my time and energy.

Yup. Cloud saves or local backup would solve the problem, sure.

But the reasonthere's no cloud saving is there is no Fallout Shelter servers anywere. The game is totally local, it;s a standalone, and not a client that connects anywhere. Or at least not for account/save data, because looking at game files i can see there are 'events' being downloaded.

Local backup seems like a great solution though, but I think it will not get implementedd because if you will get snapshots of the .sav files you can potentially see how they change and reverse-engineer the file structure easier.

Truth be told there's not really an easy way to solve this without investing some additional resources into this game, and since this is a F4 tie-in I dont think there are plans to do anything related to Sheltere after F4 hits the shelfs.

As much as this is a marketing piece for Fallout 4, I also think it's Bethesda's attempt at moving into the mobile app market. It is a huge industry and alot of money is being made - especially with the "free-to-play" model that they are using. This model fails if the game can't last past a certain point (why invest money in "perks" if they just get lost?)

Saving locally has it's issues ... but with no alternative solutions, they are going to have alot of angry consumers. If the save game is complicated enough, "reverse engineering" wont be much of an issue. There will be a few that could figure it out, but the masses would just play it as it is (and still earn Bethesda a good amount of income). And, if this game really is a marketing piece, making money shouldn't be their goal anyway - it should be to make the best app, that will drive consumers to buy Fallout 4.

Well, while I sincerely hope you are right I just can't believe that it's actual anticipation more than it is just wishful thinking. This app is polished on the asset level but the moment I heard Todd Howard at E3 sayind there are no accounts to log on and no servers I thought to myself 'thats an issue' because hpw on earth do yoy want to sell upgrades to an accout if there aint one. Maybe theyll do something smart about that I thought, but no. The smart thomg they did was investing in lawyers to make sure the EULA is rock solid and that they will not have to return a dime. Problem is, as always, customer satisfaction. I don't *really* want my money back. It was ok for me to spend them anyway. What I want is getting my Vault back, because Marion Turner was about to get back from exploration and Alice Lewis, first child born in vault 404, was almost level 20. And that's what Bethesda can't provide and that's where a lot if frustration and burnout will happen to the point where it can actually be measured in dollars/cust omers lost.

Complete agree again. I feel like they stole a little piece of me when my vault was lost.

First, and I can't stress this enough, play FO3 or FONV and you'll know to make a hard-save at least once a day.

Second, the backupping isn't that difficult, I'd only wish it was an option in-game

Third, my first vault I got a Mr Handy for (1.09 euro) and it crashed last week. Email to Bethesda and they were kind enough to send me through to Google services. Filled out a form and within 2 hours the money was back in my Paypal account...

Very good service if you ask me, considering my old savegame (could play 45 seconds before crashing) might still be fixed by future updates, hence providing me with not only a descently equipped vault, but also a free Mr Handy. In the meantime I can purchase one for another vault, so yea... bad news and good news

Yeah - since my last post I heard a lot about people getting their refunds, so I guess it's ok. If they help those refunds back it'd ba a no-go for the game.