After thirty three hours of gameplay, and some major advancements in the story, I updated my copy of Fallout 4. I am playing it on an Alienware alpha, and the technical problems in this game have been sizable, but not enough for me to put the game down. After updating today, I found that all of my saves are gone. Every single one of them. After exploring the directory to try and find those saves, I am left unsatisfied. I am still smarting from the last major Bethesda release that fucked me, Skyrim on the PS3. Now this. I understand why people want to give these games a pass, or at least criticize them from the perspective that Bethesda does things that no one else does. But man I am getting sick and tired of getting screwed by these games.

I'm sorry to read that.

I've never experienced any game breaking issues with this game on PC- having played well over 100 hours now and done almost everything in the game (about 90%).

The worst problem I've had is flying Yao Guai. Well, that's not really the same kind of problem, but it's still a problem.

I feel you. The game was literally unplayable for me the first hour I played. Like my first boot the main menu wouldn't read my inputs at all. Among other things.

Bethesda plz fix games.

I can't help but hear Jeff saying "Shouldn't we want something better!?"

Oh man.....that would suck.... :(

I don't think i would be able to pick a game back up if that happened to me.

On PS4 I had my character lose his ability to speak, including just removing any subtitles. I had no way of knowing what he was saying. Ended up having to reload a save from 10 hours back.

Ive always played their games on PC. Guess Ive been lucky. Cant think of ever running into a technical issue that was a major problem. Least not since before Morrowind. Though I guess fast travel did break on me in F4. Had to google the issue to find a console command to reset it.

I must be lucky. Aside from infrequent crashes and minor weird bugs, I've never had a major gamebreaking problem with a Bethesda game. Worth noting that Fallout 4 is the first one I played without playing the Xbox version first.

@sleeperman said:

• What folder(s) did you check?
• Did you have Steam cloud save enabled?
• You aren't logged into your PC as a different Windows user or anything like that?

First thing I'd check as well. You might be able to download them again.

Also found this thread with other Alienware Alpha users who have had save problems. One user responds:

I found it! I found where they were!! Only took about 24 hours of searching to find 6 hours of playtime but I did it! Haha. C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Documents\My Games\Fallout4\Saves\ . I really hope this can help those who had the same problems.

It's not the normal documents folder, if you look at the path you'll see its in the windows system32 which is not a common place.

Dude. I'm not sure how many times they have to screw up....but man you should just expect it form them at this point,. Its inexcusable and its actually un-necessary given the cash they get on each release. They could hire people to do better, set up more testing form outside companies and ensure their releases work - but they don't because they do not care.

They are just NOT good at their jobs and have zero incentive to be better when people buy their games in droves. I'm not angry about it. That is just the fact, no matter how much people love their games or say they have aje ne sais quoi -their games arrive broken consistently.

Did you have a controller plugged in at the time? Even if it is wireless and just the dongle is plugged in that can mess with a game's input. It happened to me with Fallout 4 and other games.

@ssully: Are you on Windows 10 by any chance? A friend of mine was having similar issues with his wireless dongle being plugged in even though no controllers were turned on, but I didn't have any problems on 8.1 x64. Well, there were plenty of problems but not that particular one.

@mike: Sure am. It was a steam controller specifically. I just unplug the little dongle now whenever I am not using the controller.

I love Bethesda games but I seem to remember every game they release has save issues

I don't think there's any game deserves a pass for losing all your progress. That's never happened to me with a Bethesda game but I def overlook a lot for the experience. Sorry to hear that, that's a real bummer =(

I'm kinda over fallout. Just ain't doin it for me. 30 hours in

@ssully: It was an issue with remains of my old DS3 drivers. So yeah, close enough.

I feel ya too. Game crashes constantly for me. Two side missions crash at the exact same points every time. Then, shortly after those happening, my game started crashing every time I died.

I haven't played since the new patch came out so I'm hoping that fixes it for me. Sad to hear the patch actually screwed ur game up.

@wraithtek: thanks for linking that. I'll see if they are there.

@handlas said:

Yeah, there is a certain area that crashes as soon as you enter. If you search for the mission name you will find a lot of people are having the same issue. There are console commands that allow you to bypass those parts. :/

I had a similar issue on Xbox. In dialog, the characters would stare at each other in silence and then the dialog options would just appear with no context (made worse by the horrible abbreviations used for those options in the first place).

It seems like everyone is tired of the old "bethesda jank," add me to that list of people. It's not cute or funny anymore, it's just kinda lame now. Next game will hopefully be an improvement. I know it must be hard to make a game like this work, but I don't think hoping for a little bit better is too much to ask for. 70 hours in and I'm still a huge fan of these games though.

My character permanently has the cheek stitches scar and I can't get rid of it for some reason, but other than that it's fine. The compass flickers but that's a driver issue.

@wraithtek: it fucking worked. I have no idea why the hell that happened, but I feel better. Thanks for the help.

I have to be honest if my Fallout 4/Skyrim/Oblivion saves got wiped while I was actively playing I don't think I would even begin to think about restarting.

The day is saved.

Don't know what bombcast episode it was, but Dave lang summed up the technical problems these games have really well. There isn't enough hours in the day for a game like this to be properly bug tested, there's just too many variables at play that make it infeasible. They do their best, but it can never be enough, even with a small army of people.

So, would you rather these games get made in a buggy state, or not made at all?

Edit: glad to see you recovered your saves!

Wow, glad it's working!

I noticed that the posts in that thread were from nearly a month ago, long before the recent Fallout update. Was wondering what would have caused this. A little searching turned up this reddit thread, suggesting that playing a game in both Console and Desktop mode can lead to Steam saves in different locations, due to how it runs Big Picture Mode. I'm not familiar with Alienware, so didn't know this was a thing.

Glad this has been resolved. I'm going to rename this thread to make the solution easier to find in case anyone else out there is having similar problems. x

@sweep: might want to remove the fixed on this one. Now only some of the saves are gone, namely everything after ten hours in. And I cannot find them because they are not in the original spot where I found them. Now I am officially done with this game.

Edit: Did nothing and now they are suddenly back. This game is so busted.

@sleeperman: Haha OK I updated it. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Playing after the update seems to have fixed all of my crashes. I'm so happy!