Man, love and hate Metro Exodus. Crashes baked into save... "roll back to DX11" they say. And then people say they still have crashes in DX11. It's because it bakes in, and then taints every save after. The accursed 'save virus'. You can't save it. I've always caught them and shot back to the furthest back save. Got easier when they expanded the slots to house 4. Use quicksave sparingly so if this happens you have longer lead-ins to bail from. 30 minutes of playtime seems safe. The autosaves are super-frequent. No need for manual saves much.
But that is to say there are still crashes like that, and then you still have to go back to not kill the playthrough completely. It seems to have to do with how level subzones load in, because these freezes always occur in the same spots after loading in. Something it calls-in from the save each time gets corrupted. I think one variant involves a collision-detection conflict or something with AI navigation, because usually it's something like an enemy roaming into the wrong spot, you passing through the wrong doorway or walking up to trigger the wrong QTE (before you start it,) or simply a round hitting the wrong wall, or a can bouncing into the wrong area - as soon as any of these things 'hit,' the game hangs and can't move forward. Other times I think it's a conflict with a mesh somewhere, because you get that medusa effect, where looking at the wrong thing is a guaranteed crash. Once you have one, those spots become frequent and often prohibit stealth runs or block you from progressing full stop. Load back before the damage was done and bypass all of them. I had a quicksave that went back a full hour from a long line of these deadzones and after loading from that and going back through, not a single crash. Huh. The only other games I've seen do that at all recently were made by Bethesda :/
But okay, there is at least a workaround for that. Protecting your playthrough is pretty much a meta-strategy at that point, but okay. I accept it. The game is still majorly worth playing.
But the one that kills me... every time. DISAPPEARING ATTACHMENTS. There's no rhyme or reason for it. You can lose stuff for parts of Caspian and all of Taiga because they randomly decide not to carry over. In this playthrough, I lost the 8-shot revolver cylinder entering the Caspian. Going from Caspian to Taiga you will lose duplicate attachments, forever leaving you with one green laser. At least you get the 3 red dots back, but multiples of things like the 4x scope? Nah. If that's your favorite attachment, be assured it is scripted out.
The big sin is the 15-round semi-auto clip for the Valve. It was originally only in the trailer, but was later added. But they made it impossible to keep, I swear. Such a dick move, dangling the twinkie. I first found it in Taiga and fell in love with using it. But the game dictates when I get to, rather than my skill or diligence. Listen, I'm fairly sure I know every single weapon/item location in the game. Among them is the place where you find this attachment in Caspian (there IS a spot in Taiga, but it seems to be either random or bugged - sometimes it's there, other times it isn't, other times it's something useless - but for sure it is the only spot there I've ever found it in Taiga.) The Caspian spot is static. You can always get it where the 'baron' camps, only after being down to the final mission for the level. So I always grab it - it is the secret juggernaut killer. They can only take so many of those 7.62's to the nuts. And then 4/5 times it's not there when I get my backpack, meaning I never get to use it for the last part of the game it's actually really useful for. Often you NEVER get it back, so forget about bringing it to a NG+ playthrough, I've tried many times... only succeeded once. And really only by the grace of the powers that reside over this interpretation of post-apocalyptic Russia. I did nothing but grab it and pray to the fish to forgive my heresy in using it.
It's the most infuriating bullshit ever. Spend so much time hunting your favorite attachments only to lose them on a whim. From a realism standpoint, okay. Things are chaotic, disorganized. Stuff gets moved around and taken into uncertain places/situations. Stuff is gonna get lost. From a gameplay standpoint, no. If you're going to have that as a mechanic, allow the player a way to get it back! I might actually enjoy that. But as it is, it actually kind of kills everything for me. I earned my way to the end, and now I can't use my favorite weapon, not because it's totally not allowed, but because the game feels like tormenting me for this playthrough by taking away my reward this time. And forever, everything that happens could've been better, if that one attachment never went poof. I got through all of the parts I'd love, and seriously enjoy using it for, with only the memories of using it earlier in the game to remind me of how disappointing it is. There are often better options for those parts, too. But I find the more difficult option more fun. Why can't I make that choice for myself?
The thing is... if this is a way of limiting you to add difficulty, it's a shitty way. There are so many ways to succeed that you won't be hurt by the loss, even being down a whole weapon would still be more than doable. It's just less fun, because you're being forced to use certain strategies, when there are other equal-difficulty ones you know and prefer. What is the value of executing a strategy that you by the power of god sometimes can't choose? What is this Dionysian bullshit? Am I the player or am I just a particle in a universe-sized miasma of chaos? If it is a bug, it's a BAD bug that needs to be fixed. If it's not, it's a terrible mechanic... not the way to mix things up. It's returning players who are most impacted by it, as they know what they love and hate to use. Taking the former and leaving the latter, with them knowing it wasn't like that last time, kind of sucks the wind out of things. It feels broken and needlessly unfair. At this point, you already know how to use everything... taking the choice away doesn't affect their ability to complete the game, only the desire to. Shit man, I go in honing in on certain things that I want. No point in playing for me, having zero confidence that I will get to keep it like I did last time and the time before that. Of course, if it's your first playthrough, you probably don't even notice. For me, and probably a lot of others, it sucks. I have spent hours wandering around for stuff I knew I grabbed yesterday, only to give up dejected and have to just walk away for months. Come back, try again, same shit, different top-tier attachment gone...
...a few times I've said "okay, I'll get it back at the aurora, take it with me to the end, and use it in NG+. And then that doesn't work and I swear I'm never touching it again. But then, it's a good enough game that I eventually come back to get let down by it again. It's such a trivial thing... one or two attachments gone. But somehow it's always the ones I most want to use. Like, if I gave no shits ab out the 15-round semi-auto valve clip, like I grabbed it and never put it on the gun, I would have it the moment I grabbed the backpack.
So it's like the game is saying, "Which weapon is the player most enjoying playing the game with?" and then taking that away. It's baffling, how that could be a good thing. I get the concept of taking you out of your comfort zone, but Taiga already does that, without damning you to never use your favorite shit ever again! It's too much!
They really do just go poof. Taiga is actually pretty small. I COMB it. I am an insane collector. I know I get it all. I drop every enemy on the way (sometimes they spawn with your attachments, which would be an awesome incentive to not just shoot through, if only they spawned with ALL of your missing attachments so it would be like a hunt to get them back... just guarantee that each will spawn - games can do this easily with scripting right at the load screen, predetermining a list that must spawn at x quantities and using a randomizer to distribute them.) But no... stuff just goes, and it varies from playthrough to playthrough. People say it comes back when you get to the workbench on the aurora. Sometimes this is true, sometimes...
If I don't get it back to drag through Novosbirsk I am so done. I can't let it go anymore. Too many other games out there. I don't have enough reasons to come back and I'm tired of getting burned on a big pile of stupid little things. This is stuff I hope they focus on improving on next time. A lot of these details were either botched or missed. Not enough play trials, probably.
It'd be like doing all of the extra grinding/side-questing in FF to get that s-tier gear/summmon for the extra endgame bosses, then never getting use it on any of them, and having to finish the game that way. It's like, why is it even there? The payoff is shot at that point... it's nothing but the best, most promising, and most useless thing you can spend hours trying to get.
