One last testing for today.
First I played a quest with the burning pants dude (or whatever he's called). Funny quest btw, I liked it.
Anyway, I tried to test the impact of saving so, first time I saved all the time (I was litterally mashing the autosave button all along except up to one point where autosaving isn't possible) and the second I didn't (auto save still occured though).
Starting file was at 3287kb
After first try (constant saving) 3286kb
After second try (without autosave) 3285kb
Didn't seem to have that much of an effect considering it's impossible to match the play time perfectly but it's hard to tell on such a small session. I need to make another testing on a longer one.
Then I played another quest where I had to save a guy called Max (friend of Regina).
This time, I wanted to see how picking up items affect the game so, first try was without picking anything while the second I took all the stuffs available (this included mostly some junks with a few weapons, outfits, grenades and shards). And this is where it gets strange:
Starting file was at 3285kb (I kept playing after the previous quest)
After first try (picking nothing up) 3300kb
After second try (picking everything up) 3298kb
Then I tried to sell all the stuff I picked up just to see what happens (and also to see if selling would have a similar effect as dismantle).
From the previous state at 3298kb (kept playing from last save and yes, I took the most beneficial result for me lol)
Sold all items: 3299kb
Waited 24 hours to purge memory: 3294kb
No change if I wait further
Again, bear in mind that it was impossible for me to match the play time on both sessions (I tried as much as I could but it's just impossible...In fact, it was harder with this quest than it was for the previous one).
Still, I was expecting a bigger influence on picking up items.
I would still not pick them up just in case but it may not be the biggest problem at the end (in fact, so far, I would say crafting (especially grenades and maybe even healings) strikes me as being the most problematic thing).
I will keep making testings and see what I can find.
Also, I'm curious to see if shards causes the game to bloat (because it's an easy thing to stay away from. I mean, getting some lore is cool but it doesn't help you in the actual game and keeping it in a playable state as long as possible seems better to me).
I'd like to mention that we're doing research in why and how this save game corruption is triggered the fastest, so we can give advice to players who come here and don't have a save teetering on corruption so they can adapt their playstyle and buy themselves enough time to wait for a fix without parking their save/playthrough.
Exactly.