Boy am I pissed right now. Is this a joke?

I bought this game a few days ago, played non-stop for several hours (no doubt completing a good portion of it) then turned it off and walked away for the weekend.

I come back today, wait 15 minutes for the intro cinematics to finish, click "continue" and instead of starting me where I left off I get some weird screen with "play", "skills", "documents", "conspiracy" etc. Not sure what these are, all are empty and none seem to have anything to do with, well, anything so I click "play" and it starts me off at the beginning of a new game.

Huh? What gives? I go to "load" and all I see is a big fat list of empty save files, including an empty "quicksave" slot. Quicksave? Since when does this game have a quicksave? It's not listed in the "controls" section and tapping F6 ot F9 (the standard keys for quicksave) in-game does nothing.

Is this a joke? Are you telling me, Ubisoft, that I just played for 10 hours straight and your game didn't automatically save ANY of my progress? How was I supposed to know to tap "F5" in a game that uses checkpoints? When was I informed that I could "tap F5 to save my progress" at all?

I'm so frustrated I can't even... hours, HOURS of playtime, just... gone, because Ubisoft tricked me into believing, hey, you go ahead and play, we'll take care of the rest. Son of a *****. I mean the game is good, but not THAT good. Maybe in a few weeks I'll give it another shot, but ouch. I mean, OUCH. So glad I only paid $6.00 for this time burglar.

So mad at this game right now. Spent all weekend thinking about it only to come back and get crapped on.

sorry bro for your loss, but if there is a save option in the menu before you quit you should usually use it.

You're right and I'm feeling pretty dumb right about now. On the other hand, a game should never flash "checkpoint reached" on my screen unless it is performing some kind of autosave in the background. "Checkpoint reached" is PC game slang for "good job, we're backing up your progress" not "good job, we're backing up your progress during this session but you have to start over from scratch if you quit." Seriously, what PC game in the last 15 years doesn't have some kind of integrated autosave feature? In an FPS no less? This is bad programming, period.

I do agree that the checkpoint thing is deceptive and the lack of showing you the quicksave button in the control layout (it's F5, by the way) is just silly, but seriously, hours of gameplay and you never once thought to make a "safety net" save? I've been burned far too many times by the failure of an autosave feature to ever trust it as my sole means of maintaining progress. The start of every level and before I quit each gets its own save, just in case. Doesn't matter what the game is, I know that at most I might lease an hour of gameplay in the event of something unexpected.

Don't give up on XIII, its a seriously good piece of game design. I'd go as far to say its the Goldeneye 64 of PC games.

LOL, I agree that the omission of any sort of autosave is ponderous. The "quicksave" feature is ponderous in its own right...all it does is save the last checkpoint. Not much of a quicksave. This (rightfully) earned it a lot of criticism when the game was released. When I first started playing this, I thought EXACTLY the same thing!!!! (I've changed my mind, though--missions are linear, there's nothing to unlock, and there's no leaning. I'm personally still waiting for a proper Goldeneye 64 on PC. I realize it will never happen, but I'm not giving up hope.)

I second the suggestion that OP should give the game another chance.

Yeah, the fact that you can only save/quicksave at the last checkpoint is weak (the same thing happend to me too the first time playing XIII), but it's worth playing again IMO.

The problem is not that you can only save at checkpoints (I think the game balance would suffer considerably if you could save anywhere), but that it has both checkpoints and quicksave/quickload, but they only work if you use both. Since you can only continue from the last checkpoint, why doesn't it "quicksave" automatically whenever you reach one?

I can really understand the OPs confusion/frustration because the system as-is makes no sense. Continuing from the quicksave slot simply means returning to the last checkpoint passed, so I don't understand why the require you to press F5 whenever you reach one, and also why they only tell you this in the manual.

The frakked up save system is due to the game being a lazy port Westerna. Sorry to hear you got burned by it. Come back to it though, it's a game worth playing!

EDIT: And I just realized this thread is super old. Awesome.

*takes a punch on the idiot card*

This is an old thread but when I consider what happened to you it makes my OCD issues seem more positive, I saved very often when I played this game, sometimes when it doesn't make a difference(didn't get to the next checkpoint, still saved obsessively).

I'm pretty sure that the manual covers how to save your game

I am going to start playing this game soon, so I am glad you bumped this up so that I am prepared =)

Aw shit, I did not get to far into the game but I had assumed the checkpoints ment it was auto saving.
eh, only an hour lost of gameplay.

This should be a sticky actually. It happened to me when I first played it eons ago.

Check point save only applies when you die during your current play through and does not save your game. You need to quick / manually save it.

Weird but hell, it's a great game indeed.