No, there's no option to restart a section other than loading a save. I've looted midair a lot, it can be done. If you're using KB&M, try spamming "f" after the jump.
@Balerion74 These are community driven boards, not a method to contact EA or Bioware. You can contact EA here.
I've played this game probably 10 times, the majority of which I've sided with the mages, and I've never encountered this bug. It doesn't affect most players (look how few posted on this thread), so there wasn't a huge demand for it to be included in one of the patches, while there were many game breaking bugs impacting the majority of players which did need to be addressed. It's also an easily avoidable issue if you save regularly, meaning it's nowhere near 'game breaking'.
@Leora85 Thank you for responding. Strange, I had already tried contacting EA via the link you provided, but I only got the option of posting on these boards. Perhaps it was due to the time of day I tried it or the subject I chose. Now I got the option to initalize a live chat as well. I would have preferred an email option, though.
Since you have had time to play this game 10 times it looks like you have a huge amount of time to play computer games. Redoing a whole evening of game play is probably insignificant in that sense. For me it usually takes a couple of months completing a game of these proportions, so a setback like this feels like game breaking to me. The game was released more than a year ago, so I expected that any bugs that stopped game progress would have been fixed by now. Had I known about this bug I would of course have saved the game regularly, but since the autosave happened quite often I didn't see the need for it.
The number of people reporting this bug on this thread/board is only a small indication of how many it affects. It could affect countless players who doesn't care for various reasons (for example they don't mind replaying a whole evening), or they can't find their way to this particular board. I've found the same issue being reported on several other forums. Do you play the game on the same platform as me (PS4), by the way? If not, the perhaps that explains why you've never encountered the bug.
I'm sure there have been other game breaking bugs that needed to be adressed before this. However, the game is well over a year old now, so it should have been fixed by now.
EA seems to like to make it difficult for people to contact them (which is why many 'technical support' links lead people here. They then come here to yell at EA, not realising EA isn't really here). Makes sense that live chat would be blocked off during off hours (some people already have to wait ridiculous amounts of time for it). Might also help to change the location on the page I sent you to, it may have been set to Australia. Think there's usually an email option, too, weird you're not getting it.
Pretty sure those in this thread play on various platforms (such as EA_David, whose solution involves using keyboard & mouse. Actually, looks like most in this thread are on PC). Personally, I play on PC, and yes, I have had a lot of time to play games this year, health issues have made it pretty impossible to sit anywhere else in my house (or do anything that requires much in the way of thinking/concentration, which is why I've been playing the same game over and over again... Apparently when I feel blah, I just want familiar things 😛 Is also why my comments can be a bit gibberish, my brain likes to hide words, or just forget to include them, or put them in the wrong order).
As for my comments about it not being a game breaking bug, I was talking about its importance to the developers. There are ways to avoid the bug, it doesn't affect many people (considering the number who play the game), and Bioware is under EAs thumb, so I don't think they're given the resources to fix everything they'd like. So they had to prioritise what they included in the patches (this might also be a part of why support was cut for the old consoles). Patch 10 was supposed to be the last patch ever, then Trespasser was chock full of bugs which did break the entire game, so they had to do one more patch. It's quite likely that there won't be any more (again, probably an EA policy). At least the game tells you to make multiple separate saves if you activate trials (they came with Trespasser), as they can make the game buggy, and it saves you from having to go back to a save from hours ago if something bad happens.
Oh, and autosaves do seem to overwrite themselves, so don't rely on them too much. Not sure if the console version has quick save, it's only one slot but I find it great if I'm just running around and not doing anything important story wise, but the idea of redoing what I've done is just tedious. 😛
Hope EA was/is useful.
