Can't find my Gothic III savegames

I haven't played the game since maybe January, but I started it up (it was still installed) but none of my savegames were present. The folder in "My documents" titled "Gothic III" which is where I assume they should be, is empty. I have done some system restores since last time I played, though I don't think that should have mattered. Is there a way to search for them? I made quite a bit of progress and don't feel like starting all over again.

 

Do you know how you named the files? Or does the game name them according to some pre-programmed forumla? Maybe they have a special extension (the three letters after the dot in a filename)?

If you know how the saved games were named you can search for them by describing the general form of the saved games file names with wild cards and typing that in for your search (see below for an example).

If you can't recall how the saved games were named then start up a new game and immediately save and notice whether the game itself names the save or lets you name it.

If you get to type the name use something like "findgothic3" or whatever and then, look in the My documents folder/gothic subfolder to see if it was, in fact, stored there. Then make sure the file extension (the three letters after the dot/period in the filename) is visible and make of note of it as long as it's not a commonly used file extension (like .doc or .rtf or .txt) Then you can search for all files with that extension by using the asterisk ( * ) wildcard.

For example -- typing "*.abc" (without the quotation marks) into the search window means "Search for all files with a file extension of 'abc' " The asterisk means, in essence, "I don't care what comes before the file extension. Whatever it is, if a file has an extension of 'abc' I want to see it listed in the search results."

If the game uses a common file extension (like say ".doc") this particular wildcard formula won't work as it will likely produce too many hits to be helpful.

But once you figure out how the file names are structured there are other ways (and another wildcard character, the question mark) to do a wildcard search.

If you know the general way you (or the Gothic 3 program) structured the saved file names post back with that info and we'll help you structure a wild card search that may help determine if the saves are still present on your hard drive.

You can also specify a range of dates for a search and the search engine will return only files with a time and date stamp within the range you specify. The narrower the range the better, as more than a few days "wide" may return too many files to wade through to make it useful. But if you know for certain which weeks or months you were playing the game you can search on successive days (because you may have skipped playing the game on a particular day), checking through the list of files with a date/time stamp for a particular day, then checking the next day and so on until you either spot one of the saved game files or realize that, for whatever reason, apparently they're no longer on your hard drive.

Hope this is some help and good luck finding them.

 

Strange, I never uninstalled the game, or manually deleted them, but the savegames are nowhere to be found. I found the specific extensions for the save files but none came up in a search. All I can think of is that somehow the times I had used windows system restore might have gotten rid of them. Thanks for the help anyway. How they went missing will haunt me...

 

One last suggestion -- have you checked your recycle bin? If you haven't emptied the recycle bin since you last played the game it's possible that you'll find some of your saves there, but I suspect you've already done that -- or you've emptied the recycle bin since you last played.