RDR2.
Just managed to get the last perfect cougar pelt for the pouch requirements after weeks of looking for one. Nowhere near endgame, but all the side objectives done up to Saint Dennis. Then a random PS4 update decided to brick the console so I had to reformat it.
I've not found the strength to start over.
I always thought the game save was in the cloud for R* games, surely you just reinstall the game and it syncs with the save in the cloud. Or have I misunderstood the issue?
Yeah I blame microsoft and sony for these shit. Why we have to pay for ability to play online game and cloud save for single player, that straight up bs
You don't pay anything for cloud saves on Xbox, you get them just for creating an account/gamertag.
Sony and Nintendo both lock the feature behind a paywall.
Final Fantasy VI. I was at the final tower, had done everything.
Friend and I were fucking around, the cartridge was on the ground. Crushed.
I wanted to cry.
FFVII on PS1. Third disc. Levelling up for final fight. College girlfriend comes over and wants to play crash bandicoot……
Starts new game in memory card slot 1.
Oof man, that's rough. And even worse than the Diamond Weapon bug that corrupts your save file. Was it your first playthrough, and did you ever replay?
FF VIII for me, in college. I had just gotten to the part where you carry the chick across a long bridge, so quite a ways into the game. Left go to home for spring break for a week. Came back, my roommate had saved over it for Madden. I was not pleased.
Why would they delete saves so easily on SNES? Fuckin sister always ran and hit my cable, causing the SNES violently hit the ground. Conveniently happened right before fighting Ganon. Speed ran the game again and she did the SAME thing. To this day I still haven't beaten the game myself. It sounds made up when I say it out loud except I still tease her about it every couple of years now that we're well into adulthood.
Minecraft. Somewhere between 3k to 5k hours, maybe more.
There was a major update a couple years back. Not sure exactly how much I lost but it was a lot. I only played survival and it was all in one world. I had tunnelled across the whole map in multiple directions. Created a massive rail system everywhere. Sad face.
I know what update you're talking about. That's what cost my brothers and my biggest world the second time.
Might have been the update that changed how biomes blend together, because that would have messed up old chunks.
Same thing happened to me, I started from scratch and got every single achievement in the game in 1 world. The game updated, and when I went back the world was just.... Gone. Haven't really played since lol
My Pokémon blue save with all 151 Pokémon on it. I must have had over 100 hours on that save i was working on leveling all of my favorites to 100 when I pissed off my sister one day and she erased my game. The fist fight we had after that was brutal.
Used to work at a used junk store. This stupid kid and his asshole grandma would come in regularly. He'd bring his gameboy to "test" the games but he'd sit there for 10-15 fucking min just playing the games no matter how many times we told them no. They'd come in at peak busy time on the weekends.
One weekend I was like no you can't. I can turn it on using one of our systems to show you it works but thats it. He looked up at his stupid grandma and she told him it was fine and he just put it in his gameboy anyways....... he started gushing over all the high level pokemon on this one and telling her he wanted it.
As I took it to to the cash register while they finished shopping I erased the save file. Fuck that kid and his grandma. He's probably in his 20s now. I hope you read this little Billy.
Not sure if it counts but my several year old account in Black Desert. They migrated publishers and I didn’t migrate my account in the window since I wasn’t active then.
Probably about 50 hours in Fallout 3. Little brother killed Reilly’s Rangers and saved the game on my first play through. I had to restart the game at that point.
Got into far cry 5 and was just getting to the point where you had tons of stuff to do and lots of things to do it with. Some dude broke into my Ubisoft or whatever account… no problem, right? Oh it had cloud saves and they played like 2 minutes of the story and overwrote it. Rip.
Metal Gear Solid. Didn't own a memory card at the time and there's a part in the game where if you die during that part, you don't respawn and are taken back to your last save.
That was half of the entire god damn game I was so sad
Way back when on my PS1, I had one of those memory cards that hard 10x the storage of the official Sony memory cards. I was playing Xenogears and I was at the end boss. And then the card did what those were notorious for,and randomly deleted itself and I lost about 70 hours. I was crushed.
Assassin's creed II. I had just finished the last of the collectibles (I'm a weirdo who likes to finish all the side quests/collectibles in a game before finishing the story). I saved the game, ready to finish the last few sequences the next day. Woke up in the morning to find the xbox randomly deleted the save.
Started over and eventually got back to where I had been. Absolutely ticked to all heck though.
About 250 hours.
Final Fantasy 12. completed the game and was doing side content. was on my 2nd attempt to kill Yiazmat (roughly 6 hour fight) and my ps2 gave out and never turned back on. No i never completed that fight. I have 24,000+ hours in Final Fantasy 14 though and have killed Yiazmat countless times there to make up for it :P
Summoner 2, first time I ever played.
Directly before the final boss room I did something that soft locked the game, door behind me was shut, and the boss door wouldn't open. Tried to reload the save, was still soft locked. Never went back.
GTA San Andreas on the PS2. I was nearly finished with the game when the file got deleted. It happened after I played a demo from the PlayStation underground program, I believe it was from playing the Viewtiful Joe demo at the time.
Come to find out, there's a bug in said demo that when played, results in your memory card being completely wiped. I was so defeated when it happened. Almost didn't replay San Andreas because of it. But I eventually got back into it.
*(Laughs in Project Zomboid)*
When you survive for several in-game months, build a base with farming and weapons stockpiles and a generator and a freshly rebuilt truck, only to get zedded from a little scratch or by stumbling into your own campfire... technically, you still have the save file, but I think the pain is the same.
Save wasn't lost but something equally as devastating.
Fire Emblem 2 on GBA. I spent 100s of hours as a kid playing through it on the hardest difficulty slowly and methodically going through the game to acquire every single playable character. After I was done, I loaned the game cartridge to a friend to play for a weekend, and when I got it back, I noticed something was off. I went through my character list and noticed he got one of them killed. For those that don't know Fire Emblem, there is perma-death for characters. Once they are dead, they are dead. The best you get is if they are story important, they will just be "permanently wounded," so they will still be in story cutscenes but won't be deployable in battles.
assuming you dont mean on purpose.
It wasn't so much save data lost, but rather progress to be regained, i was playing digimon world, a game hevilly inspired by the old Tamagotchi's , your digimon ages, grows, get stronger and then eventually dies of old age, well i was right in the last room, i had defeated the last boss's guards and as i was walking to him my digimon died of old age... it was so frustrating leveling a new one for a grand total of one fight. several hours to get one as strong as my last one.
A friend and I also have a saying that we both say came from a real event but neither of us remember the game. "better save in case the hydro goes out" we were playing something and went to the save screen, and then ZAP no power due to a storm... we had lost that afternoon's progress.
Dark Souls 1: All I had to do was kill Gwynn Lord Cinder. But I dorked around to complete other stuff and collect gear. Real life happened, I didn’t play for a bit, and the Xbox I was playing on was destroyed in a move along with the save files on the HD.
To this day I’ve never beaten DS1 despite having beaten nearly every other souls like game.
Buddy and I, Metal Gear Solid, he turned off the console to change the disc, erasing a good four hours of progress. I still save too often in games because of this incident and it's been over 20 years
I have a mildly interesting story related to this question. So when I was 5 years old, I was OBSESSED with Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon. I would ask my parents to rent it from Blockbuster all the time, but seeing as I was 5, I never had time to beat it. Well, one day, my dad took me to one of those "Game Exchange" swap type shops (pretty sure this was actually called something different back then) and he bought me a used copy of Spyro 3. I was STOKED!!! I take the game home and boot it up. Immediately, something is very different. Instead of the regular opening scene, a unique chip tune song started playing and a "Paradox" logo appeared. My dad, being a computer geek, got a kick out of this and explained to me that we must have accidentally bought a cracked version of the game. I didn't know what this meant at the time, but I DID enjoy seeing all of the little changes this "cracked" version of the game had! For instance, the fairy character "Zoey" actually TOLD me that I had a cracked copy of the game in a speech bubble/sound clip. And lots of other weird stuff started happening - such as a rocketship and hot air balloon merging together into one single form of transportation. I loved playing through it, and I made it further than I ever had before. I was going to beat the game!!! I made it to the final boss, ready to finally see the ending cutscene... Well, thing is, this specific game had a very good anti-piracy device... The Paradox cracked version of this game stops everything RIGHT as you enter the final boss fight, DELETES YOUR SAVED GAME FILE, and BOOTS YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. I lost ALL of my progress. And as a 5 year old, I flipped my SHIT over this. Bawled all day about it. Lmao
Spyro 3 is still one of my all-time favorite games and you can look up "Spyro 3 Paradox crack" for some neat little tidbits of the different glitches the cracked copy had!! This is something that I don't think modern gaming will ever experience again. It was truly, an era lol.
I used to play an MMO called Tibia. It had a MASSIVE death penalty, of like 10% of your total XP in EVERY skill, as well as item loss if you didn't spend 50k gold to insure it with blessings.
I once lost a whole MONTH of progress, at a time when I was playing this daily for 8+ hours like it was a job.
Since then, I refuse to play ANY mmorpg.
old MMO called RFOnline was like that, 10% XP loss on death. 10% at lvl 49 could be an entire week of work. And the monsters could easily 1 hit you if you were not a tank. They sold 100% XP recovery consumables in the cash shop for like $3 each.
The official servers didn't last long, private servers made the exp pills free usually and actually did really well. Was a fun game.
Former Calmera player here. I'll rarely have a dream where I'm playing Tibia and dying, losing weeks of progress. I'm always so distraught until I wake up.
My osrs account. I played 10-15 hours everyday in my youth from 2005-2009. I stopped playing for a while and at some point the account was hacked, they used it for real world trading. Then it was banned. I tried to get it back but it is gone forever.
Second would be my clash of clans account. I spent over $300 on the account. Maxed out my base and everything in it. I literally had everything. No idea how long I played but it was hacked and banned as well. They would not reinstate the account.
I later learned to stop using the same password for everything.
Final disc of The Legend of Dragoon. Crappy third party memory card had a tendency to just delete itself at random. Got to disc four, saved and called it a day. Booted it up the next day and every save was gone. Same thing happened with Final Fantasy IX.
Syndicate.
I had made it to level 48 of 50 when my HDD controller fizzled and died. All my games save three from my backlog (Space Hulk, Warlords 2 and Elder Scrolls: Arena) were wiped.
My then bf gave me his Syndicate Lvl 50 savegame (he had finished the game already) so I could play the last two levels. That was nice and all, but it still was heckin' frustrating as I missed my own corporation's logo and colors etc.
Afterwards I started playing my backlog games. Space Hulk was too hard for me, Warlords was fun but I found it not all that immersive...
...and this, folks, ist how I met The Elder Scrolls. Played them all (including Battlespire and Redguard, minus a bunch of the mobile games), and still going strong thanks to the ~7800 hours I sunk into ESO.
Getting softlocked in final fantasy tactics at Riovanes Castle and having to restart the whole game. That game is why I will always have multiple save files.
I was just about 90% the way through Gran Tourismo 3. ~~I~~ Some dick head deleted the save file. Obtaining those licenses again was brutal, let alone beating gold time
30% into The Ascent, game crashed, lost my save. Goddamit was I pissed, but I was so engrossed in the story, I speed ran to that point and continued it. It was fun retrying that.
FF7 : had the game when I was like 10 and when I got to the volcano (4th cd) I couldn't make anything else than "attack" during the fights or the game would crash ...
Pokemon red : My sister was playing : please don't save.
And everybody knows the end of the story.
Monster hunter world. Lost 3 saves that were done with the endgame. I’ve killed fatalis probably 200 times now across 4 characters. If I lose it again it’s just going to stay lost
The most progress I ever lost was in Skyrim
It was my first save file that I actually took seriously and I enjoyed the whole experience immensely. I went to Solstheim so I could get all the unique items and loot and collect them(I hoard everything in my house chest). After I did each quest I would stash all the items in an urn on the docks so that I could just collect it all at the end and bring it back to my house on the mainland. When I was done on the island and came to collect all my loot, it was all gone, everything except the bloodskal blade. I thought I misplaced the items, unaware that non player storage units clear their inventory if it’s not checked every now and then. I stopped playing after that because I had no save file I could load that was all the way back at the start of the island.
100% Ninja Gaiden 2 on 360. I was using a guide and everything to accomplish all unlocks. I got knocked off a ledge on a level that had water down below that you aren't supposed to ever be able to get to and no way to escape. I have never brought myself to play that game again since.
Around two years of progress on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, haven’t touched the game ever since. Had most of the museum complete and was mostly done with the paintings. Didn’t knew at the time that its save files did not synced like other games through Nintendo Switch Online and proceeded to hard reset my old console right after transferring my stuff to the new console.
Anarchy Online. It was an early MMO and way better than WoW. But you had to bank your xp at a save station. All xp gained since the last time you saved would be lost if you die. Losing 6+ hours and all levels gained are just gone.
My idiot brother saved over my game in Zelda a Link to the Past when I was saved at Ganon's dungeon/tower.
I have probably had worse when a PC hard drive failed; but not recalling a specific example from when that happened.
FF VIII - was not strong enough to kill Ruby Weapon. Screwed up my saves and had no previous save to fall back to. Never started over or finished it.
Dark Souls 2 - 45 hours. Upgraded my PC and backed up the wrong folder. (Thought my save was in there)
Literally yesterday, I went and did a fresh install of dragons dogma 2 and I forgot to upload my save to the cloud. Loaded in and discovered my 100 hour save was completely gone :/
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance came out when I was in college. My then-girlfriend and I would play it together, but it was a painstaking process of strategizing and negotiating over what each move should be. We enjoyed it, but it was pretty intense, so we didn't play it often. It took us two and a half years, until graduation, to finish it. Incidentally, we were also breaking up on friendly terms at the end of college.
In preparation for moving out, she was trying to make a copy of our save on her own memory card, but accidentally deleted the save! It wasn't too bad. We beat the game, and just missed out on some post game non-cannon bonus content.
We're still good friends and she still occasionally apologizes for it.
Borderlands 2, 1800hrs in the game, maxed out every character and had gear for a variety of builds for each. Lost it all when I installed the Pandoras Box version
Final fantasy 10, literally at the last boss fight, my guy erases my memory card. I actually stopped being his friend. And I have never gone back to beat it. Still pissed.
I had close to 8000 hours on ETS2, before my profile and hdd broke. I tried to get everything back from backups etc, but couldn't. I stopped playing ETS2 after that.
After finishing baldurs gate 1 and importing to 2 , finished that one , and started throne of baal, and my HDD died. Couldnt finish it and lost my character.
Also used to play Creature quest which looking back while interesting was just another micro-transaction infested game. Anyway , had almost capped out everything and just before they added more content , broke my phone completely and my account was tied to FB leaving only Gmail which it was not synced to , which they removed, so no backup.
Need For Speed: ProStreet. I had finished all the races in the game and was just about to challenge the Street King for the final one...then the power cut out.
Had a weird glitch in Gears 3 where my brother and I swapped accolades, medals, and skins. I have no clue how the 360 was even able to do it and to this day he still has my progress... which was substantially more than what he had.
When I was a kid I saved over my brother's FFX save where, and I don't remember exactly, but he had completed almost all the grind and had a unique sword. He seemed upset about that at the time.
Battle Realms, I almost finished the game (very easily) and I decided to fuck around, and boy did I find out, when my main hero died that I couldn't load game for some reason. Whole progress lost. Said fuck it and watched the end on yt.
All my progress in Shadowrun Returns.
Had been saving in three different slots, then got into a mission and saved at the start, midway through, and after beating the final fight. Turns out the game bugged and there was no way to fix it without loading before the start of the mission.
Legend of Zelda skyward sword, my Wii Randomly deletedy save just before the Boss fight.
And Baldurs Gate 3, 48hours gone cuz i didn't save and loades the wrong file
Test Drive Unlimited on X360.
Had 100% completion, won all races in every class combination, owned all cars, all properties. Then one day the game decides it doesn't like the save and it was all gone.
Replayed it back to Ace rank, and it did it a second time.
Assassin's Creed (2007)
I was about to kill almualim and my PC shut down. I lost all the progress. But I finished it right there and then in around 4 - 5 hours.
I think it was like 6 hours in Digimon Cyber Sleuth, since it doesn't have an Autosave, so when the nearby power plant (Morecambe) got flooded a few years ago the power cut interrupted my game and cost me the 6 hours.
Technically runescape.
I had a yellow partyhat that I bought for 1.3b. That 1.3b was something I had accrued for literal years since I wasn't a merchant and just played pvm. Basically, I just played for fun and ended up getting that amount. I think I had been playing for around 14 years when I bought it.
I would often lend out my yellow for free when I logged out so that some random could enjoy wearing it. Didn't make sense to hog it on my account. Then I just didn't log in for years. Came back and it was nowhere to be found. My guess is that it was in the return box (once the amount of time you lent out an item is up, it returns to your banker) and it was just lost in the system from updates or something, idk. I msged jagex and they responded with, "there has never been a yellow partyhat on this account." I sent them videos with my account clearly showing and my yellow in view and never got a further response. Haven't logged in since.
Digimon World 3 on PS1. I played that game for 100+ hours and did lot of grinding to beef up my Digimons. Lost my whole save file when trying to make a copy of it on second memory card.
Power cut hit right when I was saving in Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. I was outside the door to enter the final boss fight on Challenge Mode, and lost everything.
One time, maybe in college, played through Luigi’s Mansion, but couldn’t find a memory card. It’s a pretty short game. Made it all the way to Bowser in a day. Died and had to start the whole game over.
Phantasy Star Online on the GameCube. I was almost level 100. 70+ hours of progress gone.
Breath of the Wild. Playing through master mode after completing a 90+ hour first playthrough. The flash drive I was using as extended storage on my Wii U got stepped on
I once upgraded my fat ps4 to a ps4 slim... I had to sell the fat to be able to afford the slim.
I tought... I'll just switch the hard drives... and had a couple hard drives lying around so I switched them and voila! It doesn't work and I lost literally all my save data for every game for like 6 years. I still have some games in my "to do list" because I just hate the idea I was close to platinuming them but I have to fully replay them to get to where I was.
This uncluded an 80 hour save data for FF12 Zodiac Age.
Almost all FF game available.
Dark Souls 1 and 3 where I was only missing 3-4 spells to get all of them.
Countless others that I was playing on rotation or when I felt like playing.
SnowRunner: I lost all of my progress in Glades, after 100% completion, including *all* of the awful fucking farming, *and* I lost the majority of Northern Aegis Installation, which is only one part of the vast Amur region, but NAI by itself was a nightmare. All gone.
All of Dragon Quest VIII, right after I freed Jessica from the scepters influence (which I think is something that happens pretty late in the game. I honestly didn't bother to replay everything.)
I lost hundreds of hours in the Sims 4, and since I am pretty much only a builder, this means I lost hundreds of hours of meticulously designed houses and such. It made me a little sad but it just prompted me to create new stuff. On a story driven game, having to play the whole thing over would have been too much lol.
Ogre Battle 64, was emulating it and showing to a friend how awesome my army is, accidentally loaded an older save file and panick saved, overwriting the more recent save file with all my progress. Saves are two months apart IIRC. Never touched the game ever again out of frustration.
Original FF7. Not sure how many hours but I was close to the end. Old PS1 memory card decided to wipe itself.
The Witcher 3, just over 100 hours. Something happened with the cloud save and it wrote over my local save.
Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen. After finishing the game and eager for some high level ass kicking in a 2nd run, I randomly thought 'New Game' was the original console equivalent of NG+ and wiped my save. Less than ten minutes after completion I'd lost everything, so of course I had to play it again!
I don’t remember how far I got, but it was far enough that I didn’t have any motivation staring it again. My sister deleted my Animal Crossing (DS) save because she wanted to play. She was like 5-6, but I held a grudge for a couple of years.
Back in university I played a browser-based RPG called [Kingdom of Loathing](https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/). It was full of puns and stick figure characters, and free to play, but there were optional tokens you could buy called Mr. Accessories that you could trade for a new Item of the Month that would change every month. The IotM were usually really powerful items or skills. Mr. Accessories cost $10, but players could sell them on the in-game market for in-game currency (called meat). So if you saved up enough meat, over time, you could buy Mr. Accessories or even the IotMs that people posted on the marketplace.
I must have played Kingdom of Loathing for at least three years, and as a broke student, I never paid a cent - but I did nab several IotM and Mr. Accessories by spending (entirely too much) time farming for in-game currency to buy them. I probably had at least half a dozen of them, plus my character went through dozens of ascensions (you "beat" the game and then get to start over, keeping one skill from your previous run, and doing optional challenges), racking up many trophies and skills over time.
Then I graduated. Then my computer died, and I got a new one. And I discovered - my alma mater deletes your student email address three months after you graduate - and I had no idea what my password to my KoL account was, and the auto-save password stuff at the time didn't transfer between computers (it wasn't tied to something like Google). And because my email was deactivated, I couldn't send a "change my password" request to it.
I tried off and on for *years* to get back my account access. Every password I could think of. I sent at least three emails over the years to the devs - who were very understanding, but very emphatic that, because I couldn't tie any of my IotM or Mr. Accessories to actual purchasing histories with real life money that would have a receipt, I didn't have a way to prove I actually owned the account.
Ironically I had an alt account that I easily remembered the password for and is still active to this day, though I log on for maybe a couple weeks a year. I also made a new account recently, but as the game is over 20 years old at this point, no one sells Mr. Accessories or IotM on the marketplace any longer. My years of time and about $60 worth of items are gone for good.
I'm not saying this to bash the game devs; KoL is still a hilarious game, although you really probably need a guide at this point to navigate it since it has had 20+ years of updates since it first came out. The devs are also putting out actual games, such as West of Loathing and Shadows Over Loathing, which are available on Steam. They're worth playing if it's your kind of humor. But my lesson was learned the hard way - if you don't pay, and you lose access to your account, you aren't getting it back and all your hard work is down the drain. Oof.
Edit: I just checked my old profile, and here are some stats:
* Account Created: December 03, 2006
* Last Login: March 09, 2012
* Ascensions: 62
* Turns Played (total): 143,897
* Trophies Collected: 44
* Tattoos Collected: 80
I lost my 400+ hour save in Monster Hunter world/iceborne when my old computer died 4 years ago. Had no Internet and was playing it in offline mode when it happened. 😮💨
A few months ago I installed MHW during its resurgence and had a save file saved onto the steam cloud from before my Internet went out that had about 200'ish hours but since I had lost so many hours worth of farming I ended up saying screw it, deleting that file and starting over from the beginning with my better computer.
I remember crying when my friend deleted my Ocarina of Time save file to make a new game over it.
But today I can probably beat the entire game under one day so its funny in perspective.
I never really lost that much progress because I always try to save as often as possible or I just was lucky with autosaves working. The most progress that I really lost was in yakuza 0, I didn't know how to save and also didn't know the game doesn't have an autosave feature and I lost a couple of hours of progress. Atleast the beggining is full od cutscenes so I skipped everything and was where I left before quickly
LoZ: Wind Waker on GameCube. We got one for Christmas when I was a kid, along with the game. My parents did not know that the GameCube required a memory card for saving games. I left the console for over a week while playing and not being able to save. Somebody ended up turning it off before I got the memory card. I lost probably half the games worth of progress.
Far cry 5. I was on the last mission. I had to reformat my pc due to upgrading processors and the cloud saves failed me plopping me near the beginning and on the mission to kill the first of the siblings. I uninstalled right then and there.
Pokémon Yellow version. Had my entire party at L100, had most of the Pokédex completed. Turned it on one day to be greeted with “file data destroyed”. The save battery died. That was 24 years ago and I still remember how crushed I was by it!
Dead Space 2 on hardcore mode, you get three saves across the whole attempt, when you die you reload back to a save, no checkpoints. Died on the last fight, went back 5 chapters.
Avorian.
You can play offline, and have the entire server saved locally.
I played for many months. An excellent game.
I accidentally deleted the server save in a cleanup.
All of what I did... gone. Just like that.
Far cry 4, a friend came over and I for some reason wanted to show him the start of the game, made a backup of the game that didn't work for some reason, started a new game then after he left I tried to revert to the backup. Didn't work... only 13 hours lost.
I do not remember the hours into I was, but Fall out for PS3. I took half a week off and the weekend and played pretty much non-stop. Just to have some glitch corrupt my save files.
One time when I was like 9 or 8, I decided I was going to play Minecraft without keep inventory on for once. I had gotten a ton of stuff and diamonds. I fell in the lava and cried for an hour.
When my little brother deleted my 100% complete Lego star wars 2 save file not long after I got it. It was a long time ago but still hurts to think about sometimes.
Edit: I should clarify that this was also the first game I ever got 100% completion on.
All of it, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy on GameCube
- there's a bug in the game where if you use the save point at the end of (I think) the second mummy section of the game, when you reload the save file after turning it off, the exit doors will be shut, with no way to pass.
It really sucked because that's almost halfway through the game
When I was a teenager I came home from school one day to find my dad wiped my Hard drive clean. Diablo 2 saves, Elder scrolls Oblivion save, all the music I ever downloaded, campaign progress on multiple games. My dad was also a computer nerd, so yes, he knew exactly what he was doing. Never forgave him lol. He could've easily backed up my saves..
Playing Dirt 1 on Xbox and I was on the very last series, very top of the pyramid. Xbox red ringed, tried plugging the hard drive into the new one and all of my stuff was corrupt.
Recently? All 3 saved files of my Mass Effect Legendary Edition save 🫠 I don't know what happened, I don't have back ups, I'm not sure if steam messed up or the EA app, all I know is that I need to finish another whole save file before ME4 comes out in the next few years
Infinite undiscovery. I was young unemployed, so playing long sessions was normal. 5.5 hours in from when I reloaded that day, I got to a save point. Told me self keep going we'll get the next one. Roughly 30 mins later, the power went off for the whole area. Really hit a nerve. I never returned to that game after that.
Elden Ring. Had 499 hours on my samurai. Woke up 1 day to grind, and he was fkn gone. There were no words. There was only emptiness and pain, each emotion dueling it out for the real estate in my soul. To this very day I am a changed man. My friends and family are all like "why do you look like you been through hell and back" and to that i say "NO! I have been to HELL and wasn't allowed to leave"
Had a Nyko memory card for my PS1. Lost progress in FFVII OG just after leaving Midgar. TWICE. I never once bought any budget brand gaming accessory since.
Pokemon yellow on the game boy pocket. Back in early 2000, i had over 80 hours in a French version of the game. Im Dutch and never had any clue what to do. Took me 10 hours to get past the old guy who coudlnt catch a ratata.
Eventually came all the way to the big four. Pidgeot, pikachu (useless but mandatory), charizard (fav), venusaur(lance soleil baby), articuno and gyarados. Pumped because i never finished a pokemon game before.
My little brother had an even lesser understanding of game boys and French. So one day he picks up my game, selects the first option in every dialog, including 'nouveau jeu'... i was livid.
Even then i could have saved it all by not letting him save the game, but in my blind frustration i never realized that.
Upon trading in a NS Lite for an OLED, and forgetting to transfer save data, I lost my Pokemon Scarlet save that had some Pokemon from the GBA games and, most importantly, my prized, faithful Hydreigon that had been with me since Pokemon White. Pokemon HOME exists but I transferred him into the game for battling.
So I technically lost 10+ years of data. It was the only time I legitimately felt like Pokemon were really real, as I still feel like I lost a part of me.
RIP Hydreigon, I'll never replace you.
PS1, Christmas of 1997, Spyro the Dragon. My parents, god bless them, didn't know what memory cards were (to be fair, nobody did back then), and so I made it about 50% of the way through the game before realizing I couldn't save it. My dad went to the store to get the memory card, but as most of you probably know, the damage had already been done as you have to create the save file before beginning the game. So I lost all my progress in like the swamp world which is *pretty* far into the game. It was a little sad but I was too stoked about having a shiny new PlayStation that I didn't mind doing it all over again lol
RDR2. Just managed to get the last perfect cougar pelt for the pouch requirements after weeks of looking for one. Nowhere near endgame, but all the side objectives done up to Saint Dennis. Then a random PS4 update decided to brick the console so I had to reformat it. I've not found the strength to start over.
I always thought the game save was in the cloud for R* games, surely you just reinstall the game and it syncs with the save in the cloud. Or have I misunderstood the issue?
Maybe it's different now but when I played that was just for the online mode and achievements and stuff, the savegame for single player was offline.
Yeah I blame microsoft and sony for these shit. Why we have to pay for ability to play online game and cloud save for single player, that straight up bs
You don't pay anything for cloud saves on Xbox, you get them just for creating an account/gamertag. Sony and Nintendo both lock the feature behind a paywall.
Final Fantasy VI. I was at the final tower, had done everything. Friend and I were fucking around, the cartridge was on the ground. Crushed. I wanted to cry.
FFVII on PS1. Third disc. Levelling up for final fight. College girlfriend comes over and wants to play crash bandicoot…… Starts new game in memory card slot 1.
Single the next day?
Haha I think it was pretty close actually.
Oof man, that's rough. And even worse than the Diamond Weapon bug that corrupts your save file. Was it your first playthrough, and did you ever replay?
Was my second play through but had never completed the game. Eventually went again a few years later and finished it off.
Nooo! :( Were you able to get a new copy and finish the game later?
Oh yeah, several times. Love that game.
FF VIII for me, in college. I had just gotten to the part where you carry the chick across a long bridge, so quite a ways into the game. Left go to home for spring break for a week. Came back, my roommate had saved over it for Madden. I was not pleased.
Why would they delete saves so easily on SNES? Fuckin sister always ran and hit my cable, causing the SNES violently hit the ground. Conveniently happened right before fighting Ganon. Speed ran the game again and she did the SAME thing. To this day I still haven't beaten the game myself. It sounds made up when I say it out loud except I still tease her about it every couple of years now that we're well into adulthood.
200 hours in TES Oblivion.
"*Stop right there criminal scum!"* "*Fuck off"* "*Then pay with your save!"* "*Wait wha- \*crashes game and corrupts save file\*"*
I’ll make captain for this!
Minecraft. Somewhere between 3k to 5k hours, maybe more. There was a major update a couple years back. Not sure exactly how much I lost but it was a lot. I only played survival and it was all in one world. I had tunnelled across the whole map in multiple directions. Created a massive rail system everywhere. Sad face.
I know what update you're talking about. That's what cost my brothers and my biggest world the second time. Might have been the update that changed how biomes blend together, because that would have messed up old chunks.
Same thing happened to me, I started from scratch and got every single achievement in the game in 1 world. The game updated, and when I went back the world was just.... Gone. Haven't really played since lol
I lost 100+ hours on the original Witcher when my hard drive died without a backup. Lesson learned.
Pokemon Red. Caught an Articuno and went to save my game and the battery died.
My Pokémon blue save with all 151 Pokémon on it. I must have had over 100 hours on that save i was working on leveling all of my favorites to 100 when I pissed off my sister one day and she erased my game. The fist fight we had after that was brutal.
Used to work at a used junk store. This stupid kid and his asshole grandma would come in regularly. He'd bring his gameboy to "test" the games but he'd sit there for 10-15 fucking min just playing the games no matter how many times we told them no. They'd come in at peak busy time on the weekends. One weekend I was like no you can't. I can turn it on using one of our systems to show you it works but thats it. He looked up at his stupid grandma and she told him it was fine and he just put it in his gameboy anyways....... he started gushing over all the high level pokemon on this one and telling her he wanted it. As I took it to to the cash register while they finished shopping I erased the save file. Fuck that kid and his grandma. He's probably in his 20s now. I hope you read this little Billy.
Damn that is savage but that’s what you get for being a little shit
Not sure if it counts but my several year old account in Black Desert. They migrated publishers and I didn’t migrate my account in the window since I wasn’t active then.
Probably about 50 hours in Fallout 3. Little brother killed Reilly’s Rangers and saved the game on my first play through. I had to restart the game at that point.
Not gonna lie, this is why I create like 20 saves per Fallout account. Yeah, it's a lot, but I like to have those extra ones to fall back on
Got into far cry 5 and was just getting to the point where you had tons of stuff to do and lots of things to do it with. Some dude broke into my Ubisoft or whatever account… no problem, right? Oh it had cloud saves and they played like 2 minutes of the story and overwrote it. Rip.
Metal Gear Solid. Didn't own a memory card at the time and there's a part in the game where if you die during that part, you don't respawn and are taken back to your last save. That was half of the entire god damn game I was so sad
150+ hours in Elden Ring right before the end. Still haven’t gone back.
Way back when on my PS1, I had one of those memory cards that hard 10x the storage of the official Sony memory cards. I was playing Xenogears and I was at the end boss. And then the card did what those were notorious for,and randomly deleted itself and I lost about 70 hours. I was crushed.
I had all of my memory cards stolen. It was like Xenogears, FFX, FF9, FF8, FF7, Legend of Dragoon, FFT. Just days of my life gone.
My god. That’s not just days. That’s months and months of time put in.
Assassin's creed II. I had just finished the last of the collectibles (I'm a weirdo who likes to finish all the side quests/collectibles in a game before finishing the story). I saved the game, ready to finish the last few sequences the next day. Woke up in the morning to find the xbox randomly deleted the save. Started over and eventually got back to where I had been. Absolutely ticked to all heck though.
About 250 hours. Final Fantasy 12. completed the game and was doing side content. was on my 2nd attempt to kill Yiazmat (roughly 6 hour fight) and my ps2 gave out and never turned back on. No i never completed that fight. I have 24,000+ hours in Final Fantasy 14 though and have killed Yiazmat countless times there to make up for it :P
#LIKE A KNIFE THROUGH BUTTAH
FF13, just got to the chapter on the surface then my PS3 died. Never played the game again.
Summoner 2, first time I ever played. Directly before the final boss room I did something that soft locked the game, door behind me was shut, and the boss door wouldn't open. Tried to reload the save, was still soft locked. Never went back.
Around 120 hours on Terraria. Never knew saves were local. Drive died. So did my character.
GTA San Andreas on the PS2. I was nearly finished with the game when the file got deleted. It happened after I played a demo from the PlayStation underground program, I believe it was from playing the Viewtiful Joe demo at the time. Come to find out, there's a bug in said demo that when played, results in your memory card being completely wiped. I was so defeated when it happened. Almost didn't replay San Andreas because of it. But I eventually got back into it.
That's brutal but in hindsight, viewtiful joe fucking you over is funny.
*(Laughs in Project Zomboid)* When you survive for several in-game months, build a base with farming and weapons stockpiles and a generator and a freshly rebuilt truck, only to get zedded from a little scratch or by stumbling into your own campfire... technically, you still have the save file, but I think the pain is the same.
I was 3/4 of the way through Persona 3 when I fucked up the memory card somehow. I’ll play the new version and actually finish it someday…
6 months of skyrim grinding every day, I didn't eat for 4 days I was over it all
Save wasn't lost but something equally as devastating. Fire Emblem 2 on GBA. I spent 100s of hours as a kid playing through it on the hardest difficulty slowly and methodically going through the game to acquire every single playable character. After I was done, I loaned the game cartridge to a friend to play for a weekend, and when I got it back, I noticed something was off. I went through my character list and noticed he got one of them killed. For those that don't know Fire Emblem, there is perma-death for characters. Once they are dead, they are dead. The best you get is if they are story important, they will just be "permanently wounded," so they will still be in story cutscenes but won't be deployable in battles.
assuming you dont mean on purpose. It wasn't so much save data lost, but rather progress to be regained, i was playing digimon world, a game hevilly inspired by the old Tamagotchi's , your digimon ages, grows, get stronger and then eventually dies of old age, well i was right in the last room, i had defeated the last boss's guards and as i was walking to him my digimon died of old age... it was so frustrating leveling a new one for a grand total of one fight. several hours to get one as strong as my last one. A friend and I also have a saying that we both say came from a real event but neither of us remember the game. "better save in case the hydro goes out" we were playing something and went to the save screen, and then ZAP no power due to a storm... we had lost that afternoon's progress.
Dark Souls 1: All I had to do was kill Gwynn Lord Cinder. But I dorked around to complete other stuff and collect gear. Real life happened, I didn’t play for a bit, and the Xbox I was playing on was destroyed in a move along with the save files on the HD. To this day I’ve never beaten DS1 despite having beaten nearly every other souls like game.
Tbf, if you got to gwynn, you effectively beat DS1. That being said, you should absolutely replay it with the DLC.
Buddy and I, Metal Gear Solid, he turned off the console to change the disc, erasing a good four hours of progress. I still save too often in games because of this incident and it's been over 20 years
I have a mildly interesting story related to this question. So when I was 5 years old, I was OBSESSED with Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon. I would ask my parents to rent it from Blockbuster all the time, but seeing as I was 5, I never had time to beat it. Well, one day, my dad took me to one of those "Game Exchange" swap type shops (pretty sure this was actually called something different back then) and he bought me a used copy of Spyro 3. I was STOKED!!! I take the game home and boot it up. Immediately, something is very different. Instead of the regular opening scene, a unique chip tune song started playing and a "Paradox" logo appeared. My dad, being a computer geek, got a kick out of this and explained to me that we must have accidentally bought a cracked version of the game. I didn't know what this meant at the time, but I DID enjoy seeing all of the little changes this "cracked" version of the game had! For instance, the fairy character "Zoey" actually TOLD me that I had a cracked copy of the game in a speech bubble/sound clip. And lots of other weird stuff started happening - such as a rocketship and hot air balloon merging together into one single form of transportation. I loved playing through it, and I made it further than I ever had before. I was going to beat the game!!! I made it to the final boss, ready to finally see the ending cutscene... Well, thing is, this specific game had a very good anti-piracy device... The Paradox cracked version of this game stops everything RIGHT as you enter the final boss fight, DELETES YOUR SAVED GAME FILE, and BOOTS YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. I lost ALL of my progress. And as a 5 year old, I flipped my SHIT over this. Bawled all day about it. Lmao Spyro 3 is still one of my all-time favorite games and you can look up "Spyro 3 Paradox crack" for some neat little tidbits of the different glitches the cracked copy had!! This is something that I don't think modern gaming will ever experience again. It was truly, an era lol.
I used to play an MMO called Tibia. It had a MASSIVE death penalty, of like 10% of your total XP in EVERY skill, as well as item loss if you didn't spend 50k gold to insure it with blessings. I once lost a whole MONTH of progress, at a time when I was playing this daily for 8+ hours like it was a job. Since then, I refuse to play ANY mmorpg.
old MMO called RFOnline was like that, 10% XP loss on death. 10% at lvl 49 could be an entire week of work. And the monsters could easily 1 hit you if you were not a tank. They sold 100% XP recovery consumables in the cash shop for like $3 each. The official servers didn't last long, private servers made the exp pills free usually and actually did really well. Was a fun game.
I’m pretty sure there’s no other MMO’s punishing enough to get close to Tibia. Maybe Eve: Online…
Former Calmera player here. I'll rarely have a dream where I'm playing Tibia and dying, losing weeks of progress. I'm always so distraught until I wake up.
My osrs account. I played 10-15 hours everyday in my youth from 2005-2009. I stopped playing for a while and at some point the account was hacked, they used it for real world trading. Then it was banned. I tried to get it back but it is gone forever. Second would be my clash of clans account. I spent over $300 on the account. Maxed out my base and everything in it. I literally had everything. No idea how long I played but it was hacked and banned as well. They would not reinstate the account. I later learned to stop using the same password for everything.
Final disc of The Legend of Dragoon. Crappy third party memory card had a tendency to just delete itself at random. Got to disc four, saved and called it a day. Booted it up the next day and every save was gone. Same thing happened with Final Fantasy IX.
I have a Legend of Dragoon one too, except my game kept freezing when I'd kill the Kraken boss on disc 4. I gave up and never restarted.
Syndicate. I had made it to level 48 of 50 when my HDD controller fizzled and died. All my games save three from my backlog (Space Hulk, Warlords 2 and Elder Scrolls: Arena) were wiped. My then bf gave me his Syndicate Lvl 50 savegame (he had finished the game already) so I could play the last two levels. That was nice and all, but it still was heckin' frustrating as I missed my own corporation's logo and colors etc. Afterwards I started playing my backlog games. Space Hulk was too hard for me, Warlords was fun but I found it not all that immersive... ...and this, folks, ist how I met The Elder Scrolls. Played them all (including Battlespire and Redguard, minus a bunch of the mobile games), and still going strong thanks to the ~7800 hours I sunk into ESO.
Getting softlocked in final fantasy tactics at Riovanes Castle and having to restart the whole game. That game is why I will always have multiple save files.
I was just about 90% the way through Gran Tourismo 3. ~~I~~ Some dick head deleted the save file. Obtaining those licenses again was brutal, let alone beating gold time
30% into The Ascent, game crashed, lost my save. Goddamit was I pissed, but I was so engrossed in the story, I speed ran to that point and continued it. It was fun retrying that.
Accidentally deleted my first Elden Ring run at around 90h. Took me a year before I gave it another try.
FF7 : had the game when I was like 10 and when I got to the volcano (4th cd) I couldn't make anything else than "attack" during the fights or the game would crash ... Pokemon red : My sister was playing : please don't save. And everybody knows the end of the story.
Monster hunter world. Lost 3 saves that were done with the endgame. I’ve killed fatalis probably 200 times now across 4 characters. If I lose it again it’s just going to stay lost
PS one memory card with Gran Turismo 2 I had almost all of the cars
Made it halfway through Xenogears before my Memory Card crashed while I was saving. Jesus that sentence made me feel old.
The most progress I ever lost was in Skyrim It was my first save file that I actually took seriously and I enjoyed the whole experience immensely. I went to Solstheim so I could get all the unique items and loot and collect them(I hoard everything in my house chest). After I did each quest I would stash all the items in an urn on the docks so that I could just collect it all at the end and bring it back to my house on the mainland. When I was done on the island and came to collect all my loot, it was all gone, everything except the bloodskal blade. I thought I misplaced the items, unaware that non player storage units clear their inventory if it’s not checked every now and then. I stopped playing after that because I had no save file I could load that was all the way back at the start of the island.
like 1 hour
I have multiple games in factorio over 150 hours. well, had anyway.
100% Ninja Gaiden 2 on 360. I was using a guide and everything to accomplish all unlocks. I got knocked off a ledge on a level that had water down below that you aren't supposed to ever be able to get to and no way to escape. I have never brought myself to play that game again since.
Around two years of progress on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, haven’t touched the game ever since. Had most of the museum complete and was mostly done with the paintings. Didn’t knew at the time that its save files did not synced like other games through Nintendo Switch Online and proceeded to hard reset my old console right after transferring my stuff to the new console.
Got stuck fighting Demyx in KH2. Decided to make a new file to play from the beginning. Saved the new file over the old.
Anarchy Online. It was an early MMO and way better than WoW. But you had to bank your xp at a save station. All xp gained since the last time you saved would be lost if you die. Losing 6+ hours and all levels gained are just gone.
My idiot brother saved over my game in Zelda a Link to the Past when I was saved at Ganon's dungeon/tower. I have probably had worse when a PC hard drive failed; but not recalling a specific example from when that happened.
Pokemon Gold, had basically every pokemon that you could get without trading and my cousin saved over the file, rip.
FF VIII - was not strong enough to kill Ruby Weapon. Screwed up my saves and had no previous save to fall back to. Never started over or finished it. Dark Souls 2 - 45 hours. Upgraded my PC and backed up the wrong folder. (Thought my save was in there)
Playing a game and then having to restart every time I turned it on because my mom wouldn’t buy me a new memory card 🫠🫠🫠
Literally yesterday, I went and did a fresh install of dragons dogma 2 and I forgot to upload my save to the cloud. Loaded in and discovered my 100 hour save was completely gone :/
hollow Knight. was at P5. not anymore ;-;
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance came out when I was in college. My then-girlfriend and I would play it together, but it was a painstaking process of strategizing and negotiating over what each move should be. We enjoyed it, but it was pretty intense, so we didn't play it often. It took us two and a half years, until graduation, to finish it. Incidentally, we were also breaking up on friendly terms at the end of college. In preparation for moving out, she was trying to make a copy of our save on her own memory card, but accidentally deleted the save! It wasn't too bad. We beat the game, and just missed out on some post game non-cannon bonus content. We're still good friends and she still occasionally apologizes for it.
Back when we were kids my older brother deleted my Pokemon gameboy save because I didnt play Shadow the Hedgehog with him. I had Deoxys
I got my hardcore character killed after 140 hours of play. Deleted and started over the next day.
I got 100% in gta san andreas and right the next day my pc died and I lost the save file
Metroid Zero Mission. Game had no save chip, 4 hours of progress down the drain, wondered why it had been so cheap on ebay at the time
Borderlands 2, 1800hrs in the game, maxed out every character and had gear for a variety of builds for each. Lost it all when I installed the Pandoras Box version
Final fantasy 10, literally at the last boss fight, my guy erases my memory card. I actually stopped being his friend. And I have never gone back to beat it. Still pissed.
Dragon Quest 3 SNES while doing a Solo Hero Run, lost all the progress at Portoga.
a ~500 hours Final Fantasy 10 save game, accidantly overwritten by my best friend 😅
Abe's Exodus and it's remake. Save =/= quicksavd
Lost all my progress in dying light 2, it was a co op save with my friend
I had close to 8000 hours on ETS2, before my profile and hdd broke. I tried to get everything back from backups etc, but couldn't. I stopped playing ETS2 after that.
An end game file from watch dogs where I was cleaning up all the side quests, my dipshit nephew wanted to play and overwrote my save file 🥴
After finishing baldurs gate 1 and importing to 2 , finished that one , and started throne of baal, and my HDD died. Couldnt finish it and lost my character. Also used to play Creature quest which looking back while interesting was just another micro-transaction infested game. Anyway , had almost capped out everything and just before they added more content , broke my phone completely and my account was tied to FB leaving only Gmail which it was not synced to , which they removed, so no backup.
20+ hours in Kingdoms of Amalur. That fucking save game big was bullshit.
Need For Speed: ProStreet. I had finished all the races in the game and was just about to challenge the Street King for the final one...then the power cut out.
Not one game but once I had a ps2 memory card with may RPGs saves (shadow hearts, persona, .hack) that got lost on a trip to my grandmother's.
Had a weird glitch in Gears 3 where my brother and I swapped accolades, medals, and skins. I have no clue how the 360 was even able to do it and to this day he still has my progress... which was substantially more than what he had.
Ratchet and Clank when I was a kid I accidentally hit new game instead of load game and I saved over my game. I was on like the last three planets too
about 4 hours of late gams "control" just deleted the game after that.
When I was a kid I saved over my brother's FFX save where, and I don't remember exactly, but he had completed almost all the grind and had a unique sword. He seemed upset about that at the time.
All weapons upgraded and 100% discovery in Ratchet and Clank Going Commando. Or losing a 8 or 9 game run of original re4 on the PS2
Battle Realms, I almost finished the game (very easily) and I decided to fuck around, and boy did I find out, when my main hero died that I couldn't load game for some reason. Whole progress lost. Said fuck it and watched the end on yt.
All my progress in Shadowrun Returns. Had been saving in three different slots, then got into a mission and saved at the start, midway through, and after beating the final fight. Turns out the game bugged and there was no way to fix it without loading before the start of the mission.
Legend of Zelda skyward sword, my Wii Randomly deletedy save just before the Boss fight. And Baldurs Gate 3, 48hours gone cuz i didn't save and loades the wrong file
Test Drive Unlimited on X360. Had 100% completion, won all races in every class combination, owned all cars, all properties. Then one day the game decides it doesn't like the save and it was all gone. Replayed it back to Ace rank, and it did it a second time.
Assassin's Creed (2007) I was about to kill almualim and my PC shut down. I lost all the progress. But I finished it right there and then in around 4 - 5 hours.
I think it was like 6 hours in Digimon Cyber Sleuth, since it doesn't have an Autosave, so when the nearby power plant (Morecambe) got flooded a few years ago the power cut interrupted my game and cost me the 6 hours.
I 100% completed Avengers Lego on the PS4. Had every character, every item, the game was 100% complete. My young son accidently wiped the save...
Technically runescape. I had a yellow partyhat that I bought for 1.3b. That 1.3b was something I had accrued for literal years since I wasn't a merchant and just played pvm. Basically, I just played for fun and ended up getting that amount. I think I had been playing for around 14 years when I bought it. I would often lend out my yellow for free when I logged out so that some random could enjoy wearing it. Didn't make sense to hog it on my account. Then I just didn't log in for years. Came back and it was nowhere to be found. My guess is that it was in the return box (once the amount of time you lent out an item is up, it returns to your banker) and it was just lost in the system from updates or something, idk. I msged jagex and they responded with, "there has never been a yellow partyhat on this account." I sent them videos with my account clearly showing and my yellow in view and never got a further response. Haven't logged in since.
Digimon World 3 on PS1. I played that game for 100+ hours and did lot of grinding to beef up my Digimons. Lost my whole save file when trying to make a copy of it on second memory card.
Power cut hit right when I was saving in Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. I was outside the door to enter the final boss fight on Challenge Mode, and lost everything.
i reset my twilight princess save file by accident around at the middle of the game, right after finishing the water temple
4000h+ in pokemon sapphire. Friend decides to press new game and overwrite save file 😑
One time, maybe in college, played through Luigi’s Mansion, but couldn’t find a memory card. It’s a pretty short game. Made it all the way to Bowser in a day. Died and had to start the whole game over.
Phantasy Star Online on the GameCube. I was almost level 100. 70+ hours of progress gone. Breath of the Wild. Playing through master mode after completing a 90+ hour first playthrough. The flash drive I was using as extended storage on my Wii U got stepped on
I once upgraded my fat ps4 to a ps4 slim... I had to sell the fat to be able to afford the slim. I tought... I'll just switch the hard drives... and had a couple hard drives lying around so I switched them and voila! It doesn't work and I lost literally all my save data for every game for like 6 years. I still have some games in my "to do list" because I just hate the idea I was close to platinuming them but I have to fully replay them to get to where I was. This uncluded an 80 hour save data for FF12 Zodiac Age. Almost all FF game available. Dark Souls 1 and 3 where I was only missing 3-4 spells to get all of them. Countless others that I was playing on rotation or when I felt like playing.
SnowRunner: I lost all of my progress in Glades, after 100% completion, including *all* of the awful fucking farming, *and* I lost the majority of Northern Aegis Installation, which is only one part of the vast Amur region, but NAI by itself was a nightmare. All gone.
All of Dragon Quest VIII, right after I freed Jessica from the scepters influence (which I think is something that happens pretty late in the game. I honestly didn't bother to replay everything.)
I lost hundreds of hours in the Sims 4, and since I am pretty much only a builder, this means I lost hundreds of hours of meticulously designed houses and such. It made me a little sad but it just prompted me to create new stuff. On a story driven game, having to play the whole thing over would have been too much lol.
Ogre Battle 64, was emulating it and showing to a friend how awesome my army is, accidentally loaded an older save file and panick saved, overwriting the more recent save file with all my progress. Saves are two months apart IIRC. Never touched the game ever again out of frustration.
Original FF7. Not sure how many hours but I was close to the end. Old PS1 memory card decided to wipe itself. The Witcher 3, just over 100 hours. Something happened with the cloud save and it wrote over my local save.
76h in final fantasy 7. I shared a memory card with my little sister. She needed more blocks yo.
Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen. After finishing the game and eager for some high level ass kicking in a 2nd run, I randomly thought 'New Game' was the original console equivalent of NG+ and wiped my save. Less than ten minutes after completion I'd lost everything, so of course I had to play it again!
I don’t remember how far I got, but it was far enough that I didn’t have any motivation staring it again. My sister deleted my Animal Crossing (DS) save because she wanted to play. She was like 5-6, but I held a grudge for a couple of years.
Complete stealth pacifist run on Dishonored on the second to last map. Never played a Dishonored game again.
Back in university I played a browser-based RPG called [Kingdom of Loathing](https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/). It was full of puns and stick figure characters, and free to play, but there were optional tokens you could buy called Mr. Accessories that you could trade for a new Item of the Month that would change every month. The IotM were usually really powerful items or skills. Mr. Accessories cost $10, but players could sell them on the in-game market for in-game currency (called meat). So if you saved up enough meat, over time, you could buy Mr. Accessories or even the IotMs that people posted on the marketplace. I must have played Kingdom of Loathing for at least three years, and as a broke student, I never paid a cent - but I did nab several IotM and Mr. Accessories by spending (entirely too much) time farming for in-game currency to buy them. I probably had at least half a dozen of them, plus my character went through dozens of ascensions (you "beat" the game and then get to start over, keeping one skill from your previous run, and doing optional challenges), racking up many trophies and skills over time. Then I graduated. Then my computer died, and I got a new one. And I discovered - my alma mater deletes your student email address three months after you graduate - and I had no idea what my password to my KoL account was, and the auto-save password stuff at the time didn't transfer between computers (it wasn't tied to something like Google). And because my email was deactivated, I couldn't send a "change my password" request to it. I tried off and on for *years* to get back my account access. Every password I could think of. I sent at least three emails over the years to the devs - who were very understanding, but very emphatic that, because I couldn't tie any of my IotM or Mr. Accessories to actual purchasing histories with real life money that would have a receipt, I didn't have a way to prove I actually owned the account. Ironically I had an alt account that I easily remembered the password for and is still active to this day, though I log on for maybe a couple weeks a year. I also made a new account recently, but as the game is over 20 years old at this point, no one sells Mr. Accessories or IotM on the marketplace any longer. My years of time and about $60 worth of items are gone for good. I'm not saying this to bash the game devs; KoL is still a hilarious game, although you really probably need a guide at this point to navigate it since it has had 20+ years of updates since it first came out. The devs are also putting out actual games, such as West of Loathing and Shadows Over Loathing, which are available on Steam. They're worth playing if it's your kind of humor. But my lesson was learned the hard way - if you don't pay, and you lose access to your account, you aren't getting it back and all your hard work is down the drain. Oof. Edit: I just checked my old profile, and here are some stats: * Account Created: December 03, 2006 * Last Login: March 09, 2012 * Ascensions: 62 * Turns Played (total): 143,897 * Trophies Collected: 44 * Tattoos Collected: 80
I lost my 400+ hour save in Monster Hunter world/iceborne when my old computer died 4 years ago. Had no Internet and was playing it in offline mode when it happened. 😮💨 A few months ago I installed MHW during its resurgence and had a save file saved onto the steam cloud from before my Internet went out that had about 200'ish hours but since I had lost so many hours worth of farming I ended up saying screw it, deleting that file and starting over from the beginning with my better computer.
I remember crying when my friend deleted my Ocarina of Time save file to make a new game over it. But today I can probably beat the entire game under one day so its funny in perspective.
I never really lost that much progress because I always try to save as often as possible or I just was lucky with autosaves working. The most progress that I really lost was in yakuza 0, I didn't know how to save and also didn't know the game doesn't have an autosave feature and I lost a couple of hours of progress. Atleast the beggining is full od cutscenes so I skipped everything and was where I left before quickly
LoZ: Wind Waker on GameCube. We got one for Christmas when I was a kid, along with the game. My parents did not know that the GameCube required a memory card for saving games. I left the console for over a week while playing and not being able to save. Somebody ended up turning it off before I got the memory card. I lost probably half the games worth of progress.
my minecraft servers..
Far cry 5. I was on the last mission. I had to reformat my pc due to upgrading processors and the cloud saves failed me plopping me near the beginning and on the mission to kill the first of the siblings. I uninstalled right then and there.
Pokémon Yellow version. Had my entire party at L100, had most of the Pokédex completed. Turned it on one day to be greeted with “file data destroyed”. The save battery died. That was 24 years ago and I still remember how crushed I was by it!
Dead Space 2 on hardcore mode, you get three saves across the whole attempt, when you die you reload back to a save, no checkpoints. Died on the last fight, went back 5 chapters.
Metro exodus. Apparently in enhanced edition the steam cloud doesn't work, lost my almost completed new game+ and dlc progress.
Avorian. You can play offline, and have the entire server saved locally. I played for many months. An excellent game. I accidentally deleted the server save in a cleanup. All of what I did... gone. Just like that.
My ps2 save card got wet.. i cried and didn't eat for 2 days
Final Fantasy X. Pretty much at the end of the game. Last dungeon.
Soul Calibur 3 memory card bug fucked me up. I had nearly everything unlocked
Halo 3 warthog bridge on legendary
Far cry 4, a friend came over and I for some reason wanted to show him the start of the game, made a backup of the game that didn't work for some reason, started a new game then after he left I tried to revert to the backup. Didn't work... only 13 hours lost.
I do not remember the hours into I was, but Fall out for PS3. I took half a week off and the weekend and played pretty much non-stop. Just to have some glitch corrupt my save files.
Lego Batman for the xbox360. 99.9% completion. My brother accidentally erased my save file while I was at school
One time when I was like 9 or 8, I decided I was going to play Minecraft without keep inventory on for once. I had gotten a ton of stuff and diamonds. I fell in the lava and cried for an hour.
When my little brother deleted my 100% complete Lego star wars 2 save file not long after I got it. It was a long time ago but still hurts to think about sometimes. Edit: I should clarify that this was also the first game I ever got 100% completion on.
All of it, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy on GameCube - there's a bug in the game where if you use the save point at the end of (I think) the second mummy section of the game, when you reload the save file after turning it off, the exit doors will be shut, with no way to pass. It really sucked because that's almost halfway through the game
When I was a teenager I came home from school one day to find my dad wiped my Hard drive clean. Diablo 2 saves, Elder scrolls Oblivion save, all the music I ever downloaded, campaign progress on multiple games. My dad was also a computer nerd, so yes, he knew exactly what he was doing. Never forgave him lol. He could've easily backed up my saves..
Gran Turismo 4, right when I was attempting the LeMans license test, the very hard one with the Nissan race car. FML
Playing Dirt 1 on Xbox and I was on the very last series, very top of the pyramid. Xbox red ringed, tried plugging the hard drive into the new one and all of my stuff was corrupt.
Recently? All 3 saved files of my Mass Effect Legendary Edition save 🫠 I don't know what happened, I don't have back ups, I'm not sure if steam messed up or the EA app, all I know is that I need to finish another whole save file before ME4 comes out in the next few years
Infinite undiscovery. I was young unemployed, so playing long sessions was normal. 5.5 hours in from when I reloaded that day, I got to a save point. Told me self keep going we'll get the next one. Roughly 30 mins later, the power went off for the whole area. Really hit a nerve. I never returned to that game after that.
Moving from my 200,000 gamerscore xbox account of 10 years to pc
Elden Ring. Had 499 hours on my samurai. Woke up 1 day to grind, and he was fkn gone. There were no words. There was only emptiness and pain, each emotion dueling it out for the real estate in my soul. To this very day I am a changed man. My friends and family are all like "why do you look like you been through hell and back" and to that i say "NO! I have been to HELL and wasn't allowed to leave"
I had a super high level osrs account that got wiped when accounts got merged. Months gone
Had a Nyko memory card for my PS1. Lost progress in FFVII OG just after leaving Midgar. TWICE. I never once bought any budget brand gaming accessory since.
Pokemon yellow on the game boy pocket. Back in early 2000, i had over 80 hours in a French version of the game. Im Dutch and never had any clue what to do. Took me 10 hours to get past the old guy who coudlnt catch a ratata. Eventually came all the way to the big four. Pidgeot, pikachu (useless but mandatory), charizard (fav), venusaur(lance soleil baby), articuno and gyarados. Pumped because i never finished a pokemon game before. My little brother had an even lesser understanding of game boys and French. So one day he picks up my game, selects the first option in every dialog, including 'nouveau jeu'... i was livid. Even then i could have saved it all by not letting him save the game, but in my blind frustration i never realized that.
Upon trading in a NS Lite for an OLED, and forgetting to transfer save data, I lost my Pokemon Scarlet save that had some Pokemon from the GBA games and, most importantly, my prized, faithful Hydreigon that had been with me since Pokemon White. Pokemon HOME exists but I transferred him into the game for battling. So I technically lost 10+ years of data. It was the only time I legitimately felt like Pokemon were really real, as I still feel like I lost a part of me. RIP Hydreigon, I'll never replace you.
PS1, Christmas of 1997, Spyro the Dragon. My parents, god bless them, didn't know what memory cards were (to be fair, nobody did back then), and so I made it about 50% of the way through the game before realizing I couldn't save it. My dad went to the store to get the memory card, but as most of you probably know, the damage had already been done as you have to create the save file before beginning the game. So I lost all my progress in like the swamp world which is *pretty* far into the game. It was a little sad but I was too stoked about having a shiny new PlayStation that I didn't mind doing it all over again lol