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Only 5 slots for savegames - Nintendo Switch Edition?

lenselense Member Posts: 5
seriously? Every time a start a new char i see, there is no new slot for a savegame. All saves are full because of the saves of other chars. Will that be the final word? I mean we are in 2019. We are not playing battery backupped modules with 1-3 Saves anymore. If that had been written in the Nintendo e-shop description, I would not have bought it. This is not funny :-(
Norman_the_Biter

Comments

  • UncleSporkyUncleSporky Member Posts: 100
    edited November 2019
    I don't speak for the company or anything, but I know a few things about consoles and the way they handle data.

    The platform owners generally have a policy that save files cannot increase in size, they don't want a game bloating up its save file over time and reaching a point where it fills all of the internal memory and then errors start to happen. On PCs usually people don't have to worry as much about filling it all up, but it's a real threat on consoles, especially with some developers who are incredibly wasteful about save space.

    This is an even bigger problem on the Switch, because the storage space for saves is not user-upgradeable. The Switch has 32 GB of internal memory and all your saves for all your games have to live there. Nintendo has had issues on all their recent consoles with people putting saves on SD cards, messing with them on PC, and triggering a buffer overflow back on the console to hack it and pirate games. So they've said "no more, nobody's getting saves off this thing," so even though the Switch takes microSD cards, the internal storage is all you get for saves...and some games are ridiculous about how much they take up. Dragon Quest Builders is 700 MB, Minecraft is 800 MB. NBA 2K18 demands a whopping 5 gigabytes for some ungodly reason. If you live in a household with others who use the console with their own accounts, each account that plays these games gets their own saves that take up the same amount. People without microSD cards have to store screenshots, videos, and game downloads in ADDITION to the saves within that 32 GB. Some people have filled theirs up.


    Essentially all of this is to say that A ) games need a static save file size, and B ) that size needs to be kept as small as possible.


    Both of the Enhanced Edition collections have a 61.5 MB save on the Switch, which is a lot more manageable than those listed above. They could probably double it to 120 MB, but that would apply to all users everywhere, including some who might be at or near their cap on storage space. I personally appreciate efforts to keep file sizes low, because I've used up a lot of my own space.

    I've looked around online and seen Baldur's Gate saves in excess of 700 KB, and ToB saves posted on this forum in excess of 850 KB, so they can approach a megabyte. And because they need to account for crazy people who might fight the same monster for hours and collect and save every bit of equipment they drop and fill up every container in the world, they need to allocate more space than would ever feasibly be necessary for each save file.

    In this pack there's Baldur's Gate, Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur's Gate 2, Throne of Bhaal, Black Pits, and Black Pits 2. Each of these is given its own 5 individual save slots. Many of them also have a chapter save and autosave as well, so that's 7 slots each. ~42 save files, plus additional saved data for any exported characters, fit into 61.5 MB of space. It's about 1.5 MB reserved per save file.

    I dunno. Sure, it's possible there could be more saves allocated. But it helps to have the context surrounding it all.
    ZaxaresStummvonBordwehr
  • lenselense Member Posts: 5
    edited November 2019
    thx many UncleSporky for that deep explanation of the problem. That helps to understand. I was planning to rush through all BG-content and could not decide which char i am going to play. Therefore i needed alot of saves in the first Baldurs Gate to decide which char plays and feels best. Usually i played a cleric ranger as main. Well, i decided to solo play a fighter/cleric/mage. So 5 Slots per "game" must be enough :-1:
    StummvonBordwehr
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