You know what makes me never want to play The Sims 3 ever again?

[kane_magus]

This is what makes me never want to play The Sims 3 ever again: Playing it most of the day, with a Sim family that I have been playing off and on for the past few months now, and then, when I'm ready to quit and save the game I get "Error Code 12: World file save failure." So, I tried to leave the game running, alt+tab out, and search around Google and thesims3.com forums, but had no luck finding a solution. I did, however, find a lot of other people complaining about this same issue. One of the so-called "solutions" put forward, supposedly by EA support, was to delete the save files. I.e. start over. Screw. That. After a while, and after getting increasingly frustrated by the whole thing, I just gave up, shut it down, and pretty much lost at the very least everything I've done since the last time I quit (several hours worth). Perhaps I've lost everything ever if the save files are completely broken (several months worth). I think there are some auto-backups in there somewhere, so maybe it's not all completely gone. But even so...

Well, okay, that tears it. I most likely won't be playing this game again for a very, very long time, if ever. Now that I know that there is the very real potential for it to not properly save after playing it for several hours, that makes me gun shy, even if this problem were to never happen again. It really sucks, because up until it stopped letting me save, the game was pretty awesome, especially with the new World Adventures expansion, which I'd been playing for a couple days now. Now, however, when I look at it, all I will be able to think about is "Error Code 12".

*bone-weary sigh*

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

In before "so why are you waiting several hours between saves?"

A) It takes forever to save, given how big my lot is, the fact that there are 8 Sims on it, the fact that the longer I've played the more stuff that has been collected that needs to be saved, so on and so forth. We're talking "get up and take a bathroom break and/or grab something to eat, then come back five to ten minutes later and there's a good chance that it might still be saving" amounts of time here. It seemed as though installing the expansion pack and associated patches may have shortened the time to save somewhat, but if they also broke it in some way in the process of doing so... well, I'd rather have 5 to 10 minute save times and have it actually work, than have shorter save times with greater possibility of outright failure.

B) This isn't a game where there's high intensity activity or imminent threat of death such that you need to save often. Unless you are consciously aware of the time, lots of hours can be eaten up by this game, such that you don't even really think about the need to save until you're ready to quit for the day.

[alessar.livejournal.com]

I thought the game autosaved, actually. Then while playing a marathon session the night daylight savings time turned off, I found out the hard way it doesn't. When my computer's clock shifted, the Sims hard crashed.

I had never saved the game after starting it. It was all gone.

Since then, especially since the expansion seemed to be straining my video card, I've made a point of manually saving occasionally, and using 2 slots so I have a fallback in case of corruption. Your save time is weird though, one of my games has 6 sims and the save still only took 2-3 minutes. Is your CPU kind of old? Have you defragged lately?

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I'm running on a 3GHz Pentium 4, upgraded within the past year with 4GB RAM from the original 1GB (though it only registers as like 3.4 or something, due to some technical crap or other associated with this particular motherboard), and a Radeon X1650 which is supposedly the highest AGP card that ATI offered before switching everything to PCIe. As a whole, though, the system is around 5 years old. Also, I have a batch file set up to run three times a week which automatically runs defrag.

The game does chug at times, especially when I'm throwing a fund-raiser party for my Leader Of The Free World Sim with the max allowed number of Sims invited over, but it wasn't unplayably slow. As for save times, it seems the bigger the lot (I'm on one of the biggest lots, up in rich Sim country), and the more Sims you have living on the lot, and the more miscellaneous junk you have on the lot, the longer it takes to save, which isn't surprising but still somewhat annoying. I haven't really sat there and timed it, so I doubt it actually hit the 10 minute mark, but I know that it was generally greater than 5 minutes. At least, it was prior to installing World Adventures and the latest patches, because I noticed a rather significant decrease in save time after that, down to just two or three minutes or so, which is kind of odd since there's more stuff for it to save now. But again, if something they did in decreasing the save times is what broke saving, then I'd rather have the longer save times.

[alessar.livejournal.com]

Is that a single core machine? I would believe it then. Also the game size is still 25% or so more complex than any I'm doing.

[stuckinacave.livejournal.com]

While I've never had that particular problem, I have had crashes that occurred as I was about to save. It really does damper your spirit towards the game, and for some reason, more so than any other game I've played.

I'm glad that you're enjoying the expansion too. I've installed it, but haven't played it yet because I'm trying to finish up Borderlands as much as possible and then move on to Dragon Age. I've been horrible in playing new games before finishing old ones and I'm trying to correct that habit. I still have Brutal Legend shrinkwrapped and I'm anxiously awaiting Mass Effect 2.

Boy am I glad EA offered me a 25% off an order coupon for my birthday a couple months ago so I could afford 4 of their games.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the adventures themselves are pretty cool. I've only sent one Sim to China a few times so far, but after the first couple of unconnected adventures, it started to have a sort of overarching story to it from adventure to adventure. In my case, the overarching story is to eventually clear out the Dragon Cave. The latest thing they wanted me to do was to go to France to find some guy's journal, which shows that the adventures are not confined to just one particular area like I'd been expecting them to be, which was cool. This tied in nicely because all of my other Sims on the home lot (except for the three infants, of course) had gotten job/school opportunities that required going to France for some reason or another.

The point at which I was going to save last night was right before I was about to age up the three infants to toddlers and then try to take everyone to France afterward. Or at least take the two adult and three teen Sims, since it wouldn't let me take the infants before and I doubt it would have let me take the toddlers either, so I'd probably either have to leave a Sim behind or hire a babysitter or something.

I almost kind of sort of want to go back and try it again now, despite how pissed off it made me last night when I couldn't save, but I still think I'm going to lay off of it for a while. Hopefully, if this saving thing was something that got introduced with World Adventures or one of the patches, maybe they'll fix it with a newer patch sometime soon.