When does lost progress force you to stop playing?

The talk of Dead Space 3 having poor checkpoints and my own recent experience of losing an hour of play time in Blue Dragon, I'm wondering at what point should I put the controller down and just walk away? Is an hour out of a 30+ hour game really worth replaying, especially with other games needing to be played?

So when would you just stop playing? Would it have to be a bug that lost a portion of your save or is it just about the amount of progress lost that effects you the most?

Jumping on the idea of lost hours of play in Blue Dragon, I spent about three hours breaking barriers until the game froze, corrupted my only save file and made me lose everything. Yeah, usually a good spot to stop after that. xD

it really depends on how much I'm liking a game, and what kind of game it is. I ended up having to go back 10 hours in persona 4, but it only took me like 4 hours because I skipped the dialog and knew where to go.

Besides I'm not usually trying to get through games as fast as I can just to play the next game coming out.

That's a really tough question. Usually losing an hour from an interesting game with a lot of quests like Far Cry 3 or Skyrim doesn't shake me, but losing an hour of a linear generic game like The Darkness 2 totally made me ditch it.

I've been able to soldier through almost any game, but I think White Day finally did me in just recently. It's a pretty old korean horror game for PC. Its save game works through items. You need to find pens in the environment, then use it on a notepad to save the game. Pens are single use items, and if you run out of pens, you can't save the game anymore until you find another pen. I got to a point where I stupidly used all my pens before a long series of really difficult puzzles and enemies, and there are no more pens anywhere in the area I have access to. So I gave up on it.

Granted it's a pretty dated game/save system, and it's got that nice unforgiving old school feel to how it works. But my experience was just too tedious.

I think the longest I've ever been willing to replay something was an hour.

It depends on the game, but if I lose an hour's progress on any game I'm putting it down for a few days. I've said this before - I'm the kind of guy who maps Quick Save to an easily reachable button (usually G or V) and I start to get twitchy if five minutes goes by without me saving somehow. I simply don't like replaying what I've already played; if I've already proven that I can get by an area, why do I have to prove it again if I fail the next little encounter.

A good game I'll always come back to - the amount of progress lost only changes how long it sits until I do. Average or bad games I abandon if progress lost is more than 20 - 30 minutes. It's thankfully not too common a thing, though.

@morkaithewolf: Oh man that doesn't bode well for me to keep playing lol Something similar happened to me while playing a baseball game earlier last year, lost 40+ hours of gameplay. Worst feeling ever.

@techhits: Yeah I think if I skip some of the exploring I did I could catch up in half the time. Just the idea of having to redo it all irks me so much.

It's such a demotivating experience, the idea of have to do everything over again. Somewhere between 1 and 2 hours lost is usually where the line is for me. The most extreme case of lost progress for me was a corrupted PS1 memory card. I lost 30+ hours playtime on Breath of Fire 3. Only years later did I get back to it.

For me it depends on the type of game and what i was doing but would cut it off around 60 mins of gameplay and unskippable things. Worst case i had was not copying my baldur's gate 2 saves lost like 50 hours, Didn't go back for years.

@finaldasa: Worst part is that it was a new game plus run so I lost everything up until that point. I have no interest ever touching that game again. It just stares at me from my shelf...teasing me like a jerk!

I played Persona 3 for 40 hours on the PS3 before my save got corrupted and I lost everything. I left it about a year and a half before I went back and thoroughly enjoyed the game.

This thread reminded me of a recent Happy Console Gamer video on the very subject.

I think 1 hour of re-play isn't that bad. I don't even want to count the number of hours of re-do's I've had to endure in rpg's because I've forgotten to save and then proceeded to get myself fucked (Skyrim springs to mind). But that usually warrants a day's hissy fit break.

Lost my damn save file for Assassin's Creed 3 when I was like three quarters through the game. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, really.

It depends entirely on the game. I remember losing an entire save to a faulty memory card from the game Final Fantasy Tactics. That game has so much grinding potential that you could easily lose 3 hours of progress per play session in a game that takes most players, especially if they're looking for secrets, well over 80 hours of total play. That's the only time I quit a game!

The checkpointing in DS3 and even a game like Amnesia is baby-tier. aka: Modernized game design.

I was playing Lost Odyssey and lost a couple of hours, put the game down for a week before I was ready to start it up again.

I was around 4-5 hours into Resonance of Fate and had just begun to understand the combat system, when the game suddenly got the idea that my profile had been signed out and dumped me back at the main menu. Of course, this being a JRPG, there are no checkpoints and my last save was made 3 hours ago. I got so pissed off I returned the game the following day and never looked back.

Half an hour for a game I don't really enjoy. 3-5 hours for a game I do really enjoy.

When several hours are lost, I'll stop playing. It is clearly my fault but I'm not gonna replay several hours of what I just did, just do that at a later date.

It's down to how much I like a game when the unfortunate situation of losing chunks of progress is concerned. I will redo a few hours of a game I like, though I'll probably skip through parts to reduce the time it takes, but when I'm not loving a game any sort of lost progress can be the final nail in the coffin. I could easily use lost progress as an excuse to give up on a game I'm not thrilled by in all honesty. I've always been good at making sure I've hit a proper checkpoint/saved recently and I tend to keep multiple copies of save files though so it rarely happens to me.

I've always replayed through lost progress. I stop playing games I hate no matter what but what's worth doing once is worth doing again.

Bitching about an hour of lost progress?!? I lost my save EVERYTIME they released a new episode of TWD. Could have been one of my favourite games of 2012 but they couldn't fix that bug.

If it's about 3-5 hours progress I might stop playing. I'd maybe just take a break though.

The only game I can think of was the Star Ocean game for the 360. The save points were ridiculously far apart, combined with a freeze bug that SE never bothered to try and fix, meant that after 2 incidents of me losing an hour+ of progress, I stopped. It's too bad because I thought that the combat in that game was great

These days, an hourish or more of lost progress will make me quit. Yeah, I've turned into a bitch, what of it?

It depends on the game, really. If I'm really into it I can lose an hour or so of progress, no big deal. If I don't like a game than I can't lose more than 15 minutes or so.

The weird thing is, when you do decide to replay a portion it's usually not a big deal and you might actually enjoy it, and it probably goes way faster than it did the first time. It's just the notion of having to do replay a bit that usually breaks me (us?).

Echoing what others have said - it depends on the game. I think the most I've ever replayed due to lost progress was with Fallout New Vegas.

When Fallout New Vegas came out, I had a bug where my companion disappeared, but I could not retrieve it or hire a new companion. So I restarted it, around 6 hours into it.

About 8 hours into a new playthrough, my save was corrupted. I've never looked back.

Because of a bad flash drive I lost my 40+ hr save from Resonance of Fate. I just watched the ending movies cause as much as I liked that game I played it doing every side mission and keeping on top of the arena. There's just no way I can redo all those chapters again.

I was played Tomb Raider Underworld and lost a chuck of my progress inexplicably. I was not enjoying the game much anyway so it kind of did me a favor.

Well if your not feeling the game i can understand that being the braking point. But if you like the game i don't think its all that bad, I'm still recovering from the 90+ hour file i lost in dark souls.

I'm usually done for the moment whenever I lose significant progress. I might come back in a few days, but odds are I've moved on by then.

Final Fantasy X. About halfway through the game, completing all the optional stuff (probably including the lightning dodging, I don't remember) and my memory card gave up the ghost. I never really got back into that game.

@ravenlight: If you did all the optional shit you were way further than halfway. Probably an hour from the end.

I don't have a set interval of lost progress that makes me quit. I lost 30h of Dark Souls, but I just replayed up to that point in half that because it was fun the second time as well as taking less time. On the flip side I can drop a rpg after losing 3h because its just a pain to catch up.

I think that is generally key, if I can make it somehow go faster than last time, or if the playing up to that is enjoyable. Then I don't mind losing progress as much. Long cutscene or dialogueheavy parts are instant drops.

My xbox hard drive died on me when I was on the third disk of Lost Odyssey never gone back to it.

It all depends on how much I like the game as well as how long the game supposedly is. If it's a 50 hour RPG then I guess losing an hour or so would still be ok.

I'll take a break if it's significant (2+ hours), but I won't just stop.

There was this unfixable bug in New Vegas that lost my save every time I stepped into Vegas. I found a way around it until another bug corrupted my 10+ hour game. It is still on my shelf collecting dust.

I remember growing up and not having a memory card for the N64 would mean not ever getting around to finishing most of my game rentals. Thankfully it was mostly cheap/crappy games that didn't have internal saves.

Other then that...I think it was a couple PSX RPG saves that I either lost or deleted for space and could never bring myself to wrap them up.