No Man's Sky dev pulls out all the stops to fix a player's buggy save with 611 hours of playtime at risk: 'I promise to hawk that bug and fix it'

misk@sopuli.xyz to Games@sh.itjust.works – 355 points –
No Man's Sky dev pulls out all the stops to fix a player's buggy save with 611 hours of playtime at risk: 'I promise to hawk that bug and fix it'
pcgamer.com
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I honestly don't recall any other developer ever saying this before.

TFW I spent hours of my life debugging an issue that exclusively happens with czech/hungarian keyboard layouts and no one remembers it (to be fair the game was much more obscure than NMS)

Deep Field (developers of Unfortunate Spacemen and Abiotic Factor) has actually recreated entire saves for AF that people have lost. The main director has popped into the discord to tell the people himself that he would fix the issue. I thought that was pretty cool.

CoffeeStain has fixed some crazy Satisfactory saves that went all the way back to update 2 from 2019.

From what I've heard they also specifically used the insane "let's make the factory into a bowl of spaghetti with a radioactive giant swirl towering over it"-save to do some heavy optimization improvements.

Some players take games to insane lengths in their saves, and it seems those saves can sometimes be hugely useful assets to study, and learn a lot about the game when put into that kind of state.

Stardew Valley/Concerned Ape has a policy of fixing saves personally.

Factorio devs fixed a bug that corrupted a 2 year old save from a guy, the limit now is a few sextillion, satisfactory took josh from let's game it out save to help optimize the game lol, that's the closest I can remember

Edit: found it https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=101341 the devs also fixed the save for the guy and later updated the game with a fix lol

i cant remember off the top of my head exactly which ones, but Wube will take bug reports from vanilla saves and modded saves and fix them all! Great Devs!

They even the concept (with permission) of someone else's game that they reengineered from the ground up to help multithread the game. They're simply amazing!

Even Nintendo did it with a Zelda and another time for Metroid. I dont specifically remamber which ones tho. Players would get soft locked out of progression and you could send it in and they'd fix it. That was many moons ago tho. No way they'd put that much effort into anything these days.

The only other time I've heard of this was Stardew Valley. ConcernedApe is a treasure.

Almost every developer has a system to report bugs.

In the old days it was an email or a forum, lots of devs use Steam forums and discord for this exact scenario still in todays age.

Do you have any devs in mind that don’t have a bug reporting feature where they almost always ask for a save?

Reporting bugs isn't the same as getting personal assistance from a dev to fix an issue specific to you.

How so? Someone looks at your save and fixes the specific issue related to it. You also have to report it for it to be able to be looked at and fixed as well dude….. how else would they know the issue or be able to fix it…?

The only difference is a dev getting some marketing out of it with this specific case. Every save issue bug is a specific issue that needs to be looked at, you are always getting “personal care” with these issues.

The difference is some devs are recreating save files from scratch using data in a corrupted savefile. The difference is sometimes lead programmers do that. This isn't WoW where you get your gold back because of a scam, this is allowing you to resume a broken save which often cannot be salvaged at all.

Did you read the article? Because this is talking about save issue bugs, not a gold issue.

Even Bethesda Blizzard has a system in place to report this stuff, so it’s incredibly ironic you used them as an example….

Ah yes, World of Warcraft, the famously Bethesda game. Did you read my comment? This isn't some public policy that every developer does. It is rare and should be encouraged. You acting like it's not a big deal just diminishes what is good customer service.

Sorry blizzard, not Bethesda.

And actually that’s what the users in this thread are pointing out. It’s far more common than you think, and almost evryr dev has a system for submitting bugs, which game breaking save state issues are included in.

Or are you suggesting they look at OTHER issues, but leave save state issues alone…? That can’t be correct. You submit a bug someone looks at it (what would this be called other than personal assistance…?), just like what happened in the article. So what’s different? You get personal assistant in every case that’s been brought up, and yet you claim there isn’t? So how does it get fixed if someone doesn’t personally look into it? Hrmm?

No one said it was public policy, so why bring that up? And also, why bring up a gold scam as well? That has nothing to do with the article or what’s being discussed.

Most devs have a system to report bugs and someone will personally deal with it, if you want to argue something else go right ahead. Can you provide an example to support what you’re claiming here? That devs don’t want saves and won’t fix bugs and state that somewhere?

If you have a broken save, and a dev personally fixes the issue, then repairs your save and sends it back - that's not something that "every gaming company has". You are conflating "reporting a bug that gets reported by 3000 other people and gets fixed" with "a dude with 600hrs in the game has an issue that makes him unable to play further. Let's fix it for him specifically because he put so many hours into the game".

Yes that’s what happens in most cases….

Using your Example, they actually specify they don’t deal with the issue your brought up!.. holy shit dude, read the article and maybe know what you’re talking about here…?

So what issues would they deal with and why aren’t you dealing with any points that address the actual topic and keep going off on unrelated topics?

WOW also wouldn’t need your save since it’s all online, but games without online saves ask for your save. Maybe this is what’s confusing you about submitting them? Online is automatic lmfao.

At least when you're wrong about something you're willing to keep doubling down and not see how!

The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."

So where is the save being sent back for an engine issue….? This specific fix had nothing to do with fixing a specific save issue, they got sent a save that HAD the issue, and used that to fix a generic issue. Why is everyone going on about this being a save fix?

Dude you didn't even read what I said and defaulted to saying the same stuff you said earlier. Replying to you is pointless - you're doubling down when you are wrong and basically just talking to yourself. I don't know why either - don't lile NMS? I don't like them either. But I will give credit when it's due.

I read what you said, and you still haven’t read the article with the argument you keep going on about.

The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."

So how is this anything about using personal assistance with a save…? They used the save to fix a generic bug, which is what I was originally talking about until you derailed the topic with your bullshit.

So again, did you ever. Read the bloody article…? Because nothing you’ve talked about is related to it…

A bug report is by no means a guarantee that you'll get personal assistance with the bug.

It's a report, not a support ticket. It's purpose is to capture data so the developers can figure out what is causing the issue so it can be patched in the next release.

The devs treating a report like a support ticket is what's remarkable about the interaction.

As the article specifies, the save was to help with an issue, it wasn’t “personal assistance” it just helped the person as well.

The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."

Read. The. Damn. Article. Instead oof a single tweet taken out of context.

The devs posting to social media is for clout and viral marketing. Why else would they post about it their own bug fix…?