So, after many years, I decided to play Neverwinter Nights again, as I had never finished it (got busy playing other games in the past, that were more engaging to me at the time).

I was playing through, and after I had created 10 save files for my character, I decided to start overwriting the old save, so as not to keep too many save files around. It warned me I was overwriting a previous save, which I was fine with, then appeared to save the game.

But, on the next game session, when I went to load my most recent save, the saves I had overwritten weren't in the list to load - but ones I did not overwrite were. I did some google searches, and found some ancient forum posts, but nothing helpful. Basically, people said, "don't overwrite old saves, just delete them". Which is sound advice.

However, it didn't help me regain an hour or two of lost play time that I didn't really wish to replay.

So, I started doing some investigating. I found the saves dir (which, tsk-tsk Bioware - you put in the PROGRAM FILES directory structure, which is a mortal sin of software development, but it is what it is). I found that each save is a separate sub directory. I also saw that the dirs for my "missing" saves were there, and when I looked in them, there were several files.

I compared "good" saves (ones which still show up in NWN when I click the "Load" button), with the corrupt saves, and noted the following:

* The primary file for saving the game state appears to be file with the extension .sav (makes sense), along with some smaller supplemental files.

* The sav file has the name of the chapter in the game you were playing at the time of the save

* In the corrupt save folders, there were TWO .sav files - one called "The Prelude.sav" and one called "Chapter One.sav"

* I was playing Chapter One at the time of the most recent save, and Chapter One.sav had the same "modified time" ntfs metadata timestamp as the smaller supplemental files.

So, I deleted the leftover "The Prelude.sav" file, and then tested it in NWN, and that save started showing up in the list again, and I could successfully load the most recent save game.

So if you overwrite an existing save game, and you are in a different chapter than the previous save, it will likely corrupt your save game, and the way to fix it is to locate the "saves" directory, and then the specific subdirectory for your saved game file, and delete the older .sav file which doesn't have the same mtime as all the other files.

You install the game, and you can choose where to install it. I've never installed it in the Program files... Maybe if you install it in the Program Files directory, maybe something else weird going on in your setup.

I've been playing for 20 years, and over-writing save files the whole time, it never once corrupted saves.

This is not a freak occurence. Corrupted saves are a common enough issue with NWN. I did enough searches for solutions back in the day to figure that out. Unfortunately in this regard Bioware provided no solutions and just left it as is.

Perhaps, Installing in the program files directory is not a freak occurrence, or having a bad storage device. Note that is where the user above had his saves. I know the GoG version doesn't install there by default...

I ALWAYS overwrite save files, and have played THOUSANDS of hours, across multiple computers, and multiple OS, and I've never had a corrupted save.

Autosave, and Quicksave in particular are both overwriting all the time, and I use Quicksave a lot.

I'd say something is wrong with the setup or the HW if you are getting corrupted saves.