TW3 Save Game / Load Game mechanics

[Medy89]

@Marcin Momot
Im actually more interisted in savegame import --- Is there is a mechanic to recreate my decisions from w2 ... I liked how it was done in mass effect ...

Edit : Ok I just read in some other thread that you can do this in the prolouge ...
so thats awesome ... im glad

 

[Kishobran]

Saves in Witcher 3

Bit of a technical question, don't know if anyone mentioned it. How are saves going to be handled this time?

Witcher 2 was horrible in that regard, save folder was growing in size immensely, just from autosaves even. Later in the game, my PC would struggle just by clicking on the Load Game from the menu, because of the sheer size of that folder. And deleting them was also a pain the butt. Large pictures of saves were extremely unnecessary imo, especially since a lot of them were of loading screens.

So either give us 1 autosave or reduce the size of those pics. Or both. W2 saves made my PC sad

 

[HellKnightX88]

They used BMP for the image format which was a bit silly. The issue with the load a save menu slowing down wasn't due to save sizes or images though, it was mostly due to having to load up the save meta data from all those saves. It wasn't very efficient (since it would read all that info from disk each time you'd open the menu) and it's why I ended up moving saves at the end of each chapter.

It was better than TW1 though as far as save sizes go. The final saves for my 4 playthroughs are under 1.8 MB. All my saves total 1.42GB in TW2 (1188 files). In TW1 my final save is over 20 MB, in total they are 6.91 GB (348 files).

I don't mind the space usage that much (although in TW1 it was ridiculous) but I'd like it if they populated their game save list in the menus a bit faster.

 

[chiefje]

It doesn't really matter to me, as long as we don't get a checkpoint system :-X

 

[HellKnightX88]

It doesn't really matter to me, as long as we don't get a checkpoint system :-X

A checkpoint system wouldn't really make any sense IMO, I really doubt they went that route (they might have stated something in that regard, not sure). If you pride yourself in offering your players more freedom by giving them an open world to explore and all that jazz it would be counter-intuitive to limit them with a checkpoint system.

 

[chiefje]

A checkpoint system wouldn't really make any sense IMO, I really doubt they went that route (they might have stated something in that regard, not sure). If you pride yourself in offering your players more freedom by giving them an open world to explore and all that jazz it would be counter-intuitive to limit them with a checkpoint system.

Yes I think you are right, but remember that open world games like the GTA series have a checkpoint system, or something similar (save houses).

 

[Thothistox]

I noticed that all the autosaves in TW2 were actually making the game run slower. (This may have been fixed in later patches.) I'm guessing the game was actually iterating over each save for some reason. After copying those saves out of the save folder it got much faster again.

 

[Mefris]

Yes I think you are right, but remember that open world games like the GTA series have a checkpoint system, or something similar (save houses).

In GTA the autosave feature is mission based so it wouldn't work for The Witcher.

 

[ONLY_ONCE]

Yes I think you are right, but remember that open world games like the GTA series have a checkpoint system, or something similar (save houses).

I don't mind Witcher Hide-Outs & Fast Travel/Inns/Brothels & Quest-Items as my own personal reminder to save a game or two.
If it says checkpoint and shows a tiny loading screen icon in the corner when we get to such & such place, or find such & such person.
Meh.. no thanks, but what about island/city/village/town names popping up on screen like RDR?
Maybe we cant turn that off/on too, who knows...

 

[ONLY_ONCE]

Bit of a technical question, don't know if anyone mentioned it. How are saves going to be handled this time?

Witcher 2 was horrible in that regard, save folder was growing in size immensely, just from autosaves even. Later in the game, my PC would struggle just by clicking on the Load Game from the menu, because of the sheer size of that folder. And deleting them was also a pain the butt. Large pictures of saves were extremely unnecessary imo, especially since a lot of them were of loading screens.

So either give us 1 autosave or reduce the size of those pics. Or both. W2 saves made my PC sad

That is odd because TW2 save system was great on my xbox360. I liked it, I could save anytime/anywhere just as long as I was not in battle.

 

[GuyNwah]

Bit of a technical question, don't know if anyone mentioned it. How are saves going to be handled this time?

Witcher 2 was horrible in that regard, save folder was growing in size immensely, just from autosaves even. Later in the game, my PC would struggle just by clicking on the Load Game from the menu, because of the sheer size of that folder. And deleting them was also a pain the butt. Large pictures of saves were extremely unnecessary imo, especially since a lot of them were of loading screens.

So either give us 1 autosave or reduce the size of those pics. Or both. W2 saves made my PC sad

Decent image compression would solve the problem with save sizes. (Believe me, it was much worse in TW1.) There's no practical reason those images couldn't be saved as JPEG.

 

[Kinley]

Yes I think you are right, but remember that open world games like the GTA series have a checkpoint system, or something similar (save houses).

There are other examples of open world games where a checkpoint/save house save system is not used. I'm willing to bet that W3 will not have something like this, so we shouldn't fret.

 

[tommy5761]

That is odd because TW2 save system was great on my xbox360. I liked it, I could save anytime/anywhere just as long as I was not in battle.

It was the same on PC

 

[GHOSTMD]

Well to be honest, not having the option to override your previous savegame really sucks.
Thats what makes TW2 savegame system bad. Don t know how it was on console.
But if you didn t deleted the savegames manually, you end up having a huge pile of savegames in TW2.
(tough you play through without using save then its only the autosaves you end up with )

Thats the reason i want to know how TW3 handles this. But no answer so far from the developers.
Come on CDPR you already must have some TW3 save games don t you?
Just tell us if we can OVERRIDE our previous savegames or not

PS:
If not, it will be sucks again

 

[Scholdarr]

I expect nothing else than a free saving system with of course the possibility to override previous savegames. And of course I also expect various auto-savegames. A nice addition to the formula is the invention of multiple quicksaves. In Wasteland 2 there were three slots for quicksaves which was quite helpful. CDPR should do at least the same.

 

[sfinx]

Is there a chance to save your progress to your gog account? I have this game on two devices and maybe I am just lazy, but with only small save files (cca 250 kB) there is great chance to save them also to your account and put some save manager into GOGGalaxy, for example.