Geoffrey Wiseman

PS4 Corrupted Data

Last night, after my son had finished all the other things he had to do, we went downstairs to play some more Lego Marvel on the PS4, to build up some more gold bricks and studs, buy more characters, and, frankly, just to spend some time doing what my son loves (video games).

After we'd been playing for twenty minutes, the game crashed. The PS4 and its early titles are pretty crashy for me, so this wasn't a total surprise. It doesn't happen during every gaming session, but it's not so infrequent that either one of us was really put off.

However, when we loaded Lego Marvel again, we discovered that the loading screen, instead of showing a 55%-ish complete saved game, now showed 'Corrupted Data'.

I updated the PS4's system software, tried again, still 'Corrupted Data'. It's possible that we'll find some way to bring this game back to life, but for now it seems that all of our progress in this game is gone. That means that all the completed levels, all the side quests, all the additional characters are all gone.

I'm not yet sure if my son will want to do this all over again to get back to where he was. I know that if he does, I'll be copying the saved game to a USB disk periodically to have a backup. I shouldn't have to, but it seems like a sensible precaution at this point. You can also save them to "the cloud" if you have a PSN plus account, but paying a yearly fee to protect what the Playstation shouldn't destroy anyway seems ludicrous.

It's frustrating. It shouldn't happen. It damages your experience as a gamer in a pretty signficant way to lose games. But it does seem to happen, both on the PS4 and in Lego Marvel.

Thanks, Sony.

Thanks, Lego Marvel.