gekko
11-24-2011, 03:18 PM
So I beat Halo Anniversary on Legendary, got all skulls and terminals. Then last night my save went back in time, to when I was on the last level of the campaign and only had a couple skulls and terminals.
I do get prompted every time I sign in for which device to save to, since I have HD and a memory card in. However, after that there's no control over the save. So even if one device had an older save, it would've had to load from that device, and then overwrite a newer save on a different device. Since I have been playing co-op, one user saving to the HD and the other to the memory card, I can see it being possible that they have some bugs and mixes up the devices. Considering this is one of the buggiest games I've ever played. More on that in a second.
What I don't understand is that Xbox 360 has been out for 6 years now, why don't we have the ability to "recover" game saves based on achievement data? Certainly not all data can be recovered, but as long as we have games there will be corrupted saves and device failures causing you to lose everything. Would it be so hard to read the achievement data and give me part of it back? For Halo, this is trivial, and most games follow similar patterns:
There is one achievement for each level, allowing you to figure out how far through the campaign they are (but not what difficulty). So unlock them all at the level select screen. There are achievements for beating the game on various difficulties, which in Halo gives you nothing, but other games unlock higher difficulty levels. There is an achievement for getting all skulls and one for all terminals. Granted you can't do anything with the "Found half the terminals" achievement, once I find all of them you can simply unlock them all and be done with it.
With this simple approach, I would have all skulls and terminals back, and while I might not have a cool "Legendary" emblem next to each level (since they can't tell Solo or Coop), I can certainly have all levels unlocked and access to everything again. I lost my Black Ops save after beating it on Veteran, same thing applies, they could've scanned my achievements and unlocked all levels and the extra Zombies maps again. Not really sure if you can read back achievement data, haven't done a whole lot of achievement work, but in this day and age, losing your game save and having to start over when you have 1000 achievement points is stupid.
This could've certainly been prevented in Halo without any fancy recovery methods. I don't understand why the game save is 9MB to begin with. The only data being saved is what difficulty you have completed each of the 10 levels on for both Solo and Coop, the status of 10 terminals and 16 skulls, plus your settings. That can easily be stored in 8 bytes + settings data, so we're far less than 100 bytes, certainly not 9,437,184 bytes. That means it's easily small enough to be stored with your Live profile and then it just follows you whenever you sign in and you wouldn't need to mess with the devices.
But it certainly doesn't seem like they put too much love into this title. When I first booted it on, I plugged in the code to download the map pack and then started looking at the menus. I selected the multiplayer, and my Xbox froze. Rebooted, tried signing in a second player, and my Xbox froze. Went to the options menu, Xbox froze. Went back to the options menu, and the selection got screwed up and wasn't moving (but audio was playing). Finally got into the campaign, and when loading the second level, it froze again.
Since that night, I haven't had those problems. However, there's still plenty of issues. We were in a graphics mode transition when hitting a checkpoint, and we respawned to a black screen. If one player in co-op has a skull, it won't show up at all preventing the other player from getting it.
There also didn't seem to be much thought put into the achievements. The one for not picking up another weapon on Two Betrayals? Well it means you can't pick one up, ever. If you accidentally pick one up trying to reload, you can't simply revert to checkpoint, you must restart the entire level. Why? If you can go from checkpoint to checkpoint never using anything but your spawn weapons, you've done the task, but they don't count it.
For as many problems as there are with the original Halo, I respect their decision to keep it as close to the original as possible. However, what I can't accept is how a game with a Halo budget was shipped with so many bugs and how nothing was done to improve the non-gameplay features. For your flagship product, this is unacceptable.
/rant
I do get prompted every time I sign in for which device to save to, since I have HD and a memory card in. However, after that there's no control over the save. So even if one device had an older save, it would've had to load from that device, and then overwrite a newer save on a different device. Since I have been playing co-op, one user saving to the HD and the other to the memory card, I can see it being possible that they have some bugs and mixes up the devices. Considering this is one of the buggiest games I've ever played. More on that in a second.
What I don't understand is that Xbox 360 has been out for 6 years now, why don't we have the ability to "recover" game saves based on achievement data? Certainly not all data can be recovered, but as long as we have games there will be corrupted saves and device failures causing you to lose everything. Would it be so hard to read the achievement data and give me part of it back? For Halo, this is trivial, and most games follow similar patterns:
There is one achievement for each level, allowing you to figure out how far through the campaign they are (but not what difficulty). So unlock them all at the level select screen. There are achievements for beating the game on various difficulties, which in Halo gives you nothing, but other games unlock higher difficulty levels. There is an achievement for getting all skulls and one for all terminals. Granted you can't do anything with the "Found half the terminals" achievement, once I find all of them you can simply unlock them all and be done with it.
With this simple approach, I would have all skulls and terminals back, and while I might not have a cool "Legendary" emblem next to each level (since they can't tell Solo or Coop), I can certainly have all levels unlocked and access to everything again. I lost my Black Ops save after beating it on Veteran, same thing applies, they could've scanned my achievements and unlocked all levels and the extra Zombies maps again. Not really sure if you can read back achievement data, haven't done a whole lot of achievement work, but in this day and age, losing your game save and having to start over when you have 1000 achievement points is stupid.
This could've certainly been prevented in Halo without any fancy recovery methods. I don't understand why the game save is 9MB to begin with. The only data being saved is what difficulty you have completed each of the 10 levels on for both Solo and Coop, the status of 10 terminals and 16 skulls, plus your settings. That can easily be stored in 8 bytes + settings data, so we're far less than 100 bytes, certainly not 9,437,184 bytes. That means it's easily small enough to be stored with your Live profile and then it just follows you whenever you sign in and you wouldn't need to mess with the devices.
But it certainly doesn't seem like they put too much love into this title. When I first booted it on, I plugged in the code to download the map pack and then started looking at the menus. I selected the multiplayer, and my Xbox froze. Rebooted, tried signing in a second player, and my Xbox froze. Went to the options menu, Xbox froze. Went back to the options menu, and the selection got screwed up and wasn't moving (but audio was playing). Finally got into the campaign, and when loading the second level, it froze again.
Since that night, I haven't had those problems. However, there's still plenty of issues. We were in a graphics mode transition when hitting a checkpoint, and we respawned to a black screen. If one player in co-op has a skull, it won't show up at all preventing the other player from getting it.
There also didn't seem to be much thought put into the achievements. The one for not picking up another weapon on Two Betrayals? Well it means you can't pick one up, ever. If you accidentally pick one up trying to reload, you can't simply revert to checkpoint, you must restart the entire level. Why? If you can go from checkpoint to checkpoint never using anything but your spawn weapons, you've done the task, but they don't count it.
For as many problems as there are with the original Halo, I respect their decision to keep it as close to the original as possible. However, what I can't accept is how a game with a Halo budget was shipped with so many bugs and how nothing was done to improve the non-gameplay features. For your flagship product, this is unacceptable.
/rant