Ever loaded an old game save and wondered what you were thinking?

I recently reinstalled Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire and tried my best to understand what I was thinking about in that old save. I still can't really grasp it, even if I guess the combat works. It's like you really wanted to be there to question the whole thing.

Ever had a similar experience to the point of you thinking: What in the name of all things workable did I think about when making this character or group of characters? Hell, maybe you made the most optimized group ever, but with time passing you forgot all about it?
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
Sorta. X3: Terran Conflict can have a lot of big factories going on at once. If I put the game down even for a few weeks, I would pick it back up and wonder just how the factories I set up were all supposed to work together - or were they meant to work together, maybe I just had that factory for a step in the mighty HUB quest so now it was just selling everything off? I had little trade ships set up to handle a lot of it but some was supposed to be handled personally plus, eventually, I would need to modify how those traders were buzzing around. Luckily, it's a forgiving game.
 
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I launched Elite Dangerous for the first time since it first came out and, for whatever reason, my ship was in the middle of deep space between two systems. Because it had been so long since I last played I started off by accidentally jettisoning my cargo and then ramming into it while trying to get it back with my cargo scoop. Eventually I got to a space station but crashed into it while attempting a landing.

I payed the insurance to get my Hauler back, and before even leaving the ship I accidentally fired a mining laser, causing dozens of automated turrets to obliterate me.

Eventually I got the hang of all of that and figured I had been outfitted for mining, so left to the core of the system where an asteroid field was located. Not remembering how to control my ship while in frame shift drive mode caused me to fly directly into the system star, which drops out of FSD mode at a distance from the star where it practically blots out half of the horizon. I burned up shortly afterwords.

After more fiddling I got to mining. As I recalled, you shoot an asteroid with a mining laser until a hunk breaks off. You then have to lock onto the hunk and maneuver it into your cargo hatch. It takes some work, but it's good practice learning to fly again so I put on a podcast and stuck with it. After about an hour bumbling around the minefield I had depleted all of the asteroids I could find and flew to the closest space station.

I sold my 3 ton cargo for a whooping 2,500 credits. I repeated this process 4 or 5 times and ended up with a cool 50k.

Since I didn't know how to upgrade my ship at all, and I recognized my refinery could only collect two minerals at once (and you usually found more than two per asteroid) I decided to look up a guide on mining.

30 seconds into the guide is the point I realized I'd wasted several hours of my life.

You see,, zapping rocks, chasing the chunks that come out of them, and meticulously maneuvering your ship to capture the material in the cargo scoops is exactly what mining was... in 2014. It turns out some savvy team member of Frontier Developments looked at this tedious, time consuming (and not particular profitable) process, and decided to make it a little easier. Well, ok, a LOT easier.

They added drones to the game called Limpets at some point. By having the right controllers aboard your ship you can use Limpets for all kinds of nifty things. For mining in particular you can use a Limpet to prospect the asteroid you're mining, which doubles the materials you receive from it. Then, just by having a collector Limpet deployed near the asteroid, it will zip and and pick up that tasty chunk of enriched rock FOR YOU, and place it right into your open cargo bay.

Mining an asteroid went from taking 15 minutes to about 2. In my first haul, I hit 5 asteroids in about 10 minutes and made 75k.

EDIT: Also logged into a old Skyrim save to find myself in a cave full of cheese wheels, something I have 0 recollection of.
 
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Civilization 6 (or really any Civ game) is probably the biggest offender for me. If I set a certain save game aside for a long enough period of time I become completely unable to return to the mindset that got me into whatever situation I'm in.
 
Last weekend I loaded an old savegame from M1 Tank Platoon on my old Pentium 166 MMX. The last time I used the diskette was probably some 20 years ago, and it still worked fine. Was suprised to see our charactersheets were still on the disk. My brother: 'Colonel Scorpion'...and me: 'GENERAL Badman' LOL. Now I remember the rivalry between us. The campaign, stats, etc...that brought back some memories.
 
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Really cool that the diskette survived after all those years:) Reminds me that I someday need to boot up the old hard drive I used as a teenager.

Yeah. I thought a diskette had to be re-magnetized or something, after a decade or so. If not, it becomes unreadable. Well, that's not true. I tested diskettes that were 25 years old, never used since 1995 or so...still worked fine.
 
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Probably Path of exile with my older characters when i started off. I had no idea what i was doing. I was thinking that armor/evasion were the most vital. All the suffix's and prefixs? ignored them So concept of of elemental resistances, life increases etc and unsurprisingly by acts 5 or 10 i would get crushed.

I didn't learn properly until the betrayal league. The guys on the POE board on Gamefaqs were immensely helpful and informative. It was a real eye opener and now these days i can at the very least get 12 challenges.
 
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@Johnway Funny thing when I tried to load an old character from PoE. The talent tree had been reset and I had absolutely no clue as to what I was doing in the first place:)

Yeah same here. in my early days when the game ended at act 3 i played as a duelist but opted to be a full archer. It was a terrible idea. My second big mistake for a while was thinking that the passive tree was going to be make or break me. Too bad i knew so little about the nuiances of POE. Like Increased is additive whereas More was multiplier and not realizing that it was all gear dependent.

I think playing POE has completely changed my perspective when it comes to ARPGS. That said, they all have their own mechanics. I did get my 24 challenges in POE heist league and my large game collection calls to me...
 
My wife had this when she accidentally loaded one of my saves trying to continue a game with a friend of ours and wondered why there were Moai statues everywhere. My friend and her still bring it up sometimes.

We recently started a new game and I kept being pretty much equal to my friend and above my wife, despite again building Moai statues everywhere.