I hadn't played it in about a week (and due to other things not for a month or so before that), but I sat down this afternoon to play it -- it's even still in my Steam menu last-five-things-done-in-Steam --
And clicking on that button from the taskbar menu, as usual, took me to an installation screen.
I cancelled of course, then went into my Steam Library to check. As far as it's concerned, Far Cry 3 doesn't exist on my computer. Local content has been deleted.
Yet an 11 GB folder still exists on my drive, right where it should be.
Yet the two save folders (as far as I can tell) are empty.
30 hours.
I wasn't even halfway across the whole map yet (i.e. not all the way across the northern half of the island -- the first island?? -- working my way toward Badtown or whatever it was called.)
30 hours. Gone. Poof.
After poking around for a while (and trying to uninstall the files which are clearly there with CCleaner, which only took me back to the Steam shell), I discovered that Uplay stored my saves offsite somewhere (yay Uplay??? -- I feel so dirty giving thanks there...).
So even though Steam didn't recognize the install's existence, and so couldn't verify the game's cache (or whatever), I told Steam to "install" it -- and it effectively verified the game was already installed (less than five minutes) -- and maybe downloaded a file or two -- and loaded me up through UPlay -- and boom, there's my campaign ready to go.
Then I quit, took three aspirin, and decided to watch GaoGaiGar for the rest of the evening. ;)
Sounds like more ridiculous UPlay nonsense.
That doesn't mean there aren't some annoying installation tendencies with a few Steam games. Those are probably more due to the way developers update, however.
I've noticed that a handful of titles tend to practically reinstall the whole game during some updates, as if the developers didn't want to bother keeping track of all the smaller files they updated so they just cut a corner and upload whole folders. Which, in turn, makes you download whole swaths of files whether they were updated or not.
I recall some Total War titles doing this on occasion, in the past. Downloading 9 or 10 GB update, pausing six times in between to install. Had some issues once when I happened to shut down the computer in the middle of one of these long updates IIRC. There were a couple other titles which did this far more regularly although the updates weren't quite that large (recall 3GB on some). It all got sorted after letting it (re)run, or at the worst reinstalling manually. But this may be just a UPlay screw-up, which isn't unusual.
Jason, did you buy FC3 via a key shop? If so, that might be the cause. There was an article a few weeks back stating that Ubisoft had removed game serials sold by certain key vendors due to legal stuff.
Good question. I don't think so -- I'd have to check if I bought it from Gamersgate, but I doubt that would be a problem. About 80/20 I remember buying it from Steam/GG.
At any rate, since a re-install over the install fixed everything (so far) by effectively validating the files were already there (except for whatever little bit had gone missing), I'm sure removing the game serial number couldn't be the problem. It's more likely that somehow installing Take Command 2 caused a shared file to glitch.