Feedback: The new save system.
Xendhaius
Member Posts: 11
I'll be honest, I absolutely hate the new save system.
1. Auto-Save. This is horrible, it drove me away from Pillars of Eternity (partly because they add an insane amount of time to loading areas for no explainable reason). I see how it's useful for some, though a lack of an option to disable it for those that have no need of it is disappointing as it contributes to issue 3.
2. Quick Saves now make multiple saves rather than overwriting a single slot. This is completely unnecessary, quick saves should be an easy and quick way to make a safe point before encounters and leave hard saves for sustaining overall game progress. This also leads to the next issue.
3. The new UI killed the functionality of the Save Menu. You moved the buttons to the bottom of the screen in order to make room for displaying my character's name. I know what my character's names are and I know how to name saves accordingly to reflect what character it is and what I'm actively doing in that particular save. You have added unnecessary tedium for a "feature" that increases required mouse movement, thus adding time to the process of deleting the dozens of quick-saves and auto-saves.
4. Finally, you added tedium to creating hard saves by not having the text box automatically selected, a feature that has always been there. (I'm not sure if this is actually an intended change or a bug.)
5. Due to the increased size of each save slot, fewer are visible on screen at once. This is a minor thing, however less need for scrolling is always better.
Please either consider restoring the old save system (that was in my biased opinion, perfect) or give players the options to:
Disable auto-saves and set how many quick-saves get created from 1 to however many a player may want. I can live with the new save UI, but these two things make it unbearable. I live by quick-save and having to go in and delete tons of them every so often to remove the clutter is not enjoyable.
Thank you for reading and providing constant support for such an old and beloved series. The save system aside, I'm loving the improvements from patch 2.0 and look forward to buying and playing Siege of Dragonspear once it is released on Steam on the 31st.
EDIT: Corrected some inaccurate information.
1. Auto-Save. This is horrible, it drove me away from Pillars of Eternity (partly because they add an insane amount of time to loading areas for no explainable reason). I see how it's useful for some, though a lack of an option to disable it for those that have no need of it is disappointing as it contributes to issue 3.
2. Quick Saves now make multiple saves rather than overwriting a single slot. This is completely unnecessary, quick saves should be an easy and quick way to make a safe point before encounters and leave hard saves for sustaining overall game progress. This also leads to the next issue.
3. The new UI killed the functionality of the Save Menu. You moved the buttons to the bottom of the screen in order to make room for displaying my character's name. I know what my character's names are and I know how to name saves accordingly to reflect what character it is and what I'm actively doing in that particular save. You have added unnecessary tedium for a "feature" that increases required mouse movement, thus adding time to the process of deleting the dozens of quick-saves and auto-saves.
4. Finally, you added tedium to creating hard saves by not having the text box automatically selected, a feature that has always been there. (I'm not sure if this is actually an intended change or a bug.)
5. Due to the increased size of each save slot, fewer are visible on screen at once. This is a minor thing, however less need for scrolling is always better.
Please either consider restoring the old save system (that was in my biased opinion, perfect) or give players the options to:
Disable auto-saves and set how many quick-saves get created from 1 to however many a player may want. I can live with the new save UI, but these two things make it unbearable. I live by quick-save and having to go in and delete tons of them every so often to remove the clutter is not enjoyable.
Thank you for reading and providing constant support for such an old and beloved series. The save system aside, I'm loving the improvements from patch 2.0 and look forward to buying and playing Siege of Dragonspear once it is released on Steam on the 31st.
EDIT: Corrected some inaccurate information.
Post edited by Xendhaius on
9
Comments
i agree with the quick save using multiple slots that will fill up fast.
As for the load times, auto-saves have no effect on loading in BG:EE. I merely stated the issue they caused with PoE to expand on why I personally have a distaste for them. As for having them, I can understand the utility and know why some may like them (not everyone likes to micro-manage saves before zoning into unknown or known dangerous areas) , though putting them back into the game without adding an option to turn them off was a poor decision in my opinion.
Especially seeing how almost all of the new feature additions from SoD are toggle-able.
If the game crashes after pressing 'Q' and your save gets corrupted then that's a disaster. That is why multiple quick save slots are an awesome safety net.
I do agree, however, that the number should be limited to either a customizable amount or a fixed number between 3 and 5. That should be enough to be on the safe side.
Auto-saves, if not done excessively, are also fine with me. Anything that protects us from losing a lot of progress suits me fine. Safety first!
Also I'm not sure how it handles the actual saving process but it would be great if it saves to a temporary file before overwriting the destination file if the user chooses to overwrite an existing save file. This will virtually guarantee that there will always be 1 complete save file (The old one) in the event of the game crashing during the saving process or the user suffering a black out while the game is saving.
Basically eliminating the possibility of losing all your progress if you're using a single save slot or an amount of progress if using multiple slots (if you're overwriting an existing save game when the game process crashes).
This change will lead to me explicitly managing dozens, likely several hundred, files unless I am very careful, and the signal-to-noise ratio of useful saves vs. active saves will probably lose me many of my active-character saves as well. Save-game management will become worse than the infamous inventory-tetris, taking fun away from the game (although I personally enjoy inventory-tetris, it is at least an in-game theme, rather than immersion breaking computer-related issue).
I don't begrudge the new system, I can see why some players will find it useful, but this is also a big step back for many of us. Can we have our cake/save and eat/play it too?
To me, multiple quick saves would have come in handy in past, when playing things like SCS in insane mode, where lots of tactical nuances have to be tried until breaking an enemy. sometimes i accidentally overwrote my last-good-preparation-quicksave by accident, there some history of quicksaves would have been handy.
Missing is an Iron(wo)man feature that only gives you one save. That would have made LoB mode extra-crispy.
The thing that throws me off is that the "load" and "cancel" buttons after you hit load game seem to be transposed. I keep hitting cancel instead of load.
1) Autosave has been there since vanilla, and it only ever takes one save slot. I think removing this would generally be considered a bug.
2) You can edit savename.2da to configure the number of quicksave slots: Change the 4 in the second column to a number less than 4. When you hit this limit it overwrites the oldest quicksave. I'll put in a request to make this more accessible (probably a baldur.lua edit instead)
3) We did compensate for this by allowing you to double-click on a save game to quickly load it. Delete is a bit easier for a sequence of files in order, but there is a bit more mouse traffic if you are picking and choosing save games to delete.
4) This is a bug, reported.
5) The number of save slots on the screen is unchanged
2. Thank you for the information. Also, since you brought it up I noticed the game does not recognize and overwrites manual changes to baldur.lua while using the 2.0 beta. I'm unsure if it's just me or if it's a known issue.
Also, could it be considered to have this adjustable in-game? While I have no issue digging around and editing files not everyone enjoys doing so.
3. Thanks for the information, once I edit the amount of quick-saves created this will make my experience far more enjoyable.
4. Another bug bites the dust.
5. Thanks for the correction, the increased size of the save slots created the illusion of lost space though I remember now the number of visible saves hasn't changed.
Thank you kindly for responding to my feedback and providing solutions to alleviate my (and other players) issues. Keep up the excellent work!
I would like to see:
1) Re-order the saves so the most recent is on top. When I first started using the quicksaves I didn't realize why it stopped at 4 and when I loaded 4 I was getting the wrong save. That's because it cycled down to 1, but 1 stayed at the bottom of my save list. Once it overwrites an old save that save should move to the top of the list.
2) Customizable quicksave count like has been brought up in this thread
As long as it can be modified in the .ini then everything is well. Rest of the design is okay, though I fail to see the benefit over the former UI.
To the larger topic at hand, I love the option for multiple quicksaves. I do wish the count were configurable, though to be honest I would most likely choose 3 or 4 anyway. It would also be nice if the quicksaves were maybe permanently affixed to the bottom of the save list, under all the other saves. I, at least, am not generally loading them from the menu, so scrolling over them every time is a minor hassle.
When you bring up the number of playthroughs you have going at one time, are you saying that you're seeing multiple quick saves for each (20*(4+1) = way too many) or are you saying that you think it may just be too many for your playstyle (20 + 4 + 1 = v1.3 + 3) ?
They've dedicated a tonne of space to that one thing which just doesn't really matter.