I know this is long. If the save system in Pacific Drive is something you care about, are curious about, or have struggled with, please try and find the time to read it. I think you’ll find it illuminating. Thanks in advance.
Introduction
Before I dive in, I’ll start by saying: I understand where you’re coming from. I really do. A lot of the games that I play myself are ‘snackable’ in terms of having short rounds that allow me a fair amount of control over how long I play for. Pacific Drive is structured similarly to many other games (run-based with no saves in the middle of a level), but compared to Pacific Drive, the vast majority of those games have shorter stages between the level-transition checkpoints where the game gets saved. While it’s true that you have control over how long you spend in each level, it’s also the case that in perpetual stability junctions or multiple-junction trips, you can end up spending a long time gathering materials and exploring, which means you stand to lose a lot, whether because something goes wrong in the Zone or, as some of you have raised, *life happens* and you need to end your session.
I hope that by reading the rest of this message, you’ll have a better understanding of how the save system works, and why it was the right decision for the game. And from there, I hope that you can find a way to play and enjoy Pacific Drive, either straight away or when the additional changes go live. We should have had better in-game communication about how the system works in place at launch, and that’s on me for not catching and considering. Mea culpa. I believe that the surprise of realizing that you aren’t able to save mid-level when you go to try and do so is a huge part of the pain here. Hopefully it hasn’t soured you too much, and that everything below will smooth some of that out.
What’s in the game now
I want to take a moment to highlight the things available to you in the game right now, which you can make use of in situations where you have to end a session sooner than you’d planned:
- Pacific Drive saves every time you change levels, which means that the most progress you can lose by quitting without saving is the progress from the level you’re currently in. Obviously this can sometimes be a long time on perpetual stability levels, but the open structure of each level means that you, to a large degree, have control over how long you spend in a level and therefore how frequently these mid-run checkpoint saves get created.
- You can manually save at any time while at the garage (of course, this isn’t terribly relevant to the issues y’all have been having—just including it for completeness).
- While out on an expedition in the Zone, you can pause the game at any time if you need to step away for a bit and come back later to get to a save point.
- If you have a few minutes to spare before you need to stop playing, you can trigger a save by heading for a stable access road (the level exit checkpoint thing) and traveling to the next junction, or by opening a gateway and returning to the garage, though that might take a few extra minutes if you don’t already have your the ARC device charged up enough.
- If you can’t do any of the above, you can abandon your trip, which will return you to the garage (triggering a save). By default, this will act like a failed run and you’ll lose your items, but there is an option in the Settings screen to change this penalty.
- If you want to have the default experience for failed/abandoned run penalties overall but you really need to stop playing right now but don’t want to lose your items, you can open the settings screen to change the penalty, abandon your trip to trigger the save, and then change it back.
- If you don’t bother changing the settings or you abandon your trip, the next time you play and your inventory does get left behind, there’s a recovery mechanic you can use to sort of ‘undo’ losing your items: you’ll be able to drive back to the junction where you abandoned the trip and collect the items you had gathered on that run—look for a husk of a station wagon at the location where you abandoned from. Not all is lost!
I firmly believe that Pacific Drive is at its most compelling with all of the settings at their defaults, but I also recognize that everybody has different thresholds for various forms of stress and frustration. If tweaking a few things allows you to enjoy the overall experience, that’s wonderful! I would so much rather you adjust them (even temporarily, if you get interrupted and don’t want to lose your stuff!) and continue playing. Pacific Drive admittedly takes a bit of time to get to grips with, and some of its sharp edges that I love might be too much for you at the default settings—that’s OK! That said, if you give it a chance and make any adjustments to the settings that will enhance your enjoyment, I think you’ll find something really pretty special that continues to reveal itself to you for many hours to come, as you and your station wagon adventure through the Zone. I hope that after reading this, you’ll understand our perspectives and reasoning, and you’ll have the tools you need to find a way to enjoy Pacific Drive.
Why does Pacific Drive’s save system work the way it does, from a design perspective?
Pacific Drive shares some of its DNA with extraction games, with survival games, and with roguelite games. All of these genres are driven by a sense of stakes: the threat of failure, the threat of starting from scratch after a mis-step. Without these stakes—the threat of losing everything that you’ve worked so hard for—these games lose their teeth. And those teeth can be sharp! But that’s what makes them compelling, too. It’s a delicious friction that provides massive satisfaction when overcome, and can be bitter and frustrating when you succumb. I worked on Don’t Starve for several years earlier in my career, so I’m no stranger to the ways that games can be delightful and maddening at the same time.
Pacific Drive is a game that is designed in this vein. When you go on a trip into the Zone, you’re gathering precious materials, materials you desperately need to keep your car running so that it, in turn, can keep protecting you. You won’t make it through the Zone in one piece without your trusty steed. The inability to save the game mid-level (combined with the failed run penalty) is the thing that creates the stakes I mentioned above: you’re out on a limb, dangling over a proverbial canyon that’s filled with anomalies. If you lose your grip, or take a wrong step, disaster can strike. This is one of the main sources of the tension that pervades each expedition into the Zone. It is integral to the core (default) experience of Pacific Drive: if you had the safety net of being able to save at any time, and then rewind to that save after one such misstep, the tension evaporates.
Worse yet, if you could save and reload at any point in the middle of a level, it would mean that any inconvenience or situation that is starting to tilt against you no longer needs to be dealt with. Pacific Drive is at its best when it asks you to be dynamic, to react to a changing situation, especially a situation you didn’t quite anticipate or prepare for. It’s these emergent moments where you’ll find creative solutions to the problems you’re facing, and the game is most alive. If we had included manual saves that work in the middle of a junction level, it would rob the experience of this aspect, because you can always just go back a few minutes and do it better the next time. The Zone is a place of consequence. It’s unforgiving, and uncaring. And you, and your car, must persevere in spite of this.
Why does Pacific Drive’s save system work the way it does, from a technical and production perspective?
Before I talk about the particulars of the technical issues here, I want to briefly point out how many options we included in the settings menu to allow players to tweak the experience to make it hit their ‘sweet spot’ for comfort and tension. I think the vast number of options here speaks for itself in terms of demonstrating how much we value accessibility and how important it is to us to make the game ‘available’ to as many people as possible. With that in mind, even outside of the design reasons explained above, it should be telling that manual saves in the middle of a junction was not something we included in the game: every time we thought of something that would welcome in more players, we would pursue it unless it wasn’t feasible from a technical and production standpoint.
All of that is to say: we thought long and hard about whether manual saves was something that we could implement given the time and resources we had available to us, and at the end of the day, the answer was a pretty clear “no”, unless we were willing to sacrifice a whole bunch of other stuff that makes the game and the Zone what it is, which we were not. Game dev is hard and this was one of the hard decisions we had to make along the way. We are a pretty small team (about 20 people, as I write this) and we made a very big game. I am regularly amazed at and delighted by what this team has been able to accomplish, but it is inevitably not everything under the sun. Here’s why mid-run manual saves didn’t make the cut (again, in addition to the design reasons above):
- Manual saves are enabled in the garage, but the garage is a much more controlled space, with vastly fewer game actors that can appear there (and no procedural spawning to speak of). It also has the benefit of items usually being stored in (relatively few) containers, which makes them much easier to track and save. Very few things in the garage have any meaningful state to maintain when saving and loading, besides the car itself (which obviously saves and loads in all cases: technically a level transition is also a save and a load). It’s only because of these parameters that we were able to tackle making the garage support manual save.
- In a junction level, none of this is true. We procedurally spawn all the anomalies and resources and many buildings. There are in each level hundreds of anomalies and resources and buildings and item containers. All of these things can be anywhere and in a variety of different states. This isn’t even an exhaustive description each of these things’ states, but here are a few examples: an abductor can be grabbing something or not, a bunny can be chasing your car or attached to the car or in its recovery state (and it has health), a spark tower or ARDA trailer can be powered on or not, a searchable container can have all or some or none of its items (and each of those items might have stats that need to be saved), an abandoned vehicle can have all or some or none of its parts (and each of those parts have health and statuses etc that would need to be saves), radiation shielding could have all or some or none of its plates (and each plate has health), and there might be a ton of miscellaneous items that are scattered around on the ground each with their own stats and states. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
- For every single one of these things that we would need to save and load if we supported mid-level manual save, it would need to be architected from the start to support robustly loading into the correct state based on the saved data. And everything that gets saved needs to be manually marked to be saved. None of this is automatic; it all needs to be done by hand and done in a bespoke fashion for every piece of content in the game. If you look through the Logbook in the game and check the number of entries in each category, you’ll get a sense of how massive an undertaking this would be, and why we are unable to revisit the issue: the content was not built to support it, and there is an enormous amount of content.
- Beyond the herculean amount of work that this represents, if we had found a way to do it, it would mean massively bloated save file sizes (which is also a performance issue).
- Beyond the increased save file size, if we had found a way to do it, we would then have had to do save/load QA on every piece of content in the game. Inevitably, there would be bugs. Lots of them. We already had plenty of save/load bugs to deal with, despite not tackling mid-junction manual saves.
In summary, pursuing this feature would have caused a significant downward drag on the overall quality and scope of the game. And that was not a compromise we were willing to make. Pacific Drive would be nowhere near the game that it is we had taken a different path.
What’s coming for saves in Pacific Drive?
So, what *are* we doing? I said at the top that we won’t be changing the save system. This is a firm position. You might be asking, “what else is there?” In short, we’re making it clearer when the game does save, and we’ll be adding some info to the new-game flow that explains what to expect with the save system, as well as improving the UX of leveraging some of the ‘workarounds’ I described above to make them more apparent and available to players that want to make use of them. My hope is that by giving players advance warning of what they’re up against, and easier-to-use tools for stopping playing quickly as needed (and doing so in ways that don’t make the whole game more forgiving), that will take a lot of the sting out of it, while maintaining the crucial stakes I described above.
In this patch, here’s what we changed:
- Moved the “Saved” indicator to appear in more obvious locations and in more obvious moments. It will now appear while the loading screen is still showing when transitioning levels mid-trip, right above the loading bar. It was previously appearing in the bottom right after the loading screen got hidden, which made it hard to notice because your eyes are busy looking at the level you just loaded into and the ‘welcome banner’ UI that displays, showing you details about the junction. Players should now have better awareness of when the game is autosaving on their behalf.
- Save backups to help with corrupted save files. From now on, whenever the game saves, it will automatically create and store historical backups of the last two saves for that save slot (the oldest backup is cycled out). These backups have filenames formatted like so: “odsave#-backup-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-SS.sav”, where the # is the number for the save slot and the YYYY etc is the date and time. The backup files will live in the same directory as the main save games: %localappdata%/PenDriverPro/Saved/SaveGames/. If the latest save becomes corrupted or otherwise fails to load (usually occurs from crashes that happen while saving), the game will automatically attempt to load the most recent backup save and inform you that this is happening. If you are on PC, you can increase the number of historical backups that are stored by changing the AutoSaveBackupCount value in the following file: %localappdata%/PenDriverPro/Saved/Config/GameUserSettings.ini.
- Always show Quit to Menu option in the pause screen, rather than only mid-trip. If you want to quit without saving while in the garage, you no longer need to force-quit the program or load a game first. *NOTE:* This change is fixing a simple oversight—it’s not meant to address the frustration around saving.
In the near future (WIP implementation, plus waiting on localized strings), date TBD:
- Add a popup that appears when you start a new game. It will describe when the game saves by default, how you can trigger a pseudo-manual save (e.g. by exiting the level), and inform you that there are options in the settings menu to change these mechanics. Here’s the English text: “While playing Pacific Drive, the game will automatically save whenever you transition to a new level. In addition, you can manually save at any time while in the garage. If you need to save in the middle of a trip into the Zone, you will need to proceed to the nearest exit. There are also options in the Settings to allow for triggering a save by manually returning to the garage with reduced penalties.”
- Additional options in the settings menu for separately controlling the inventory-retention penalty for the various ways you can end a run (e.g. dying, abandoning, and the new option in the next bullet point).
- An option in the pause menu that is called “Save and Quit” that will appear while out on a run into the Zone. When you select this option, a popup will appear explaining how it works. Here’s the English text: “Pacific Drive autosaves when you enter a level and does not allow manual saves in the middle of a trip. If you load or quit without saving, you will start at the beginning of this level when you resume playing. By default, the mid-trip Save and Quit option works similarly to the Abandon Trip option: you will lose your collected items and return to the garage, creating a save, and then quit to the menu. Before you Save and Quit, would you like to enable the setting that adjusts the penalty so that you keep all collected items? You can change this at any time in the Settings menu.” The dialog will display your current Save and Quit penalty setting and offer these actions you can take: “Keep Current Penalty”, “Enable Setting” and “Cancel”.
I know that was a lot of words, but hopefully it was informative and this information and these changes will addresses your concerns. At the very least, it should demonstrate that we are hearing the feedback and taking it seriously, while staying true to our vision and accounting for the production and technical realities that we are facing. Thanks again for reading, and for playing. Good luck out there in the Zone, and don’t forget to say hello to my best bud, the Friendly Dumpster.
Seth Rosen, Ironwood Studios
EDIT: Some additional clarifications in the thread here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1458140/eventcomments/4309452818503912403?snr=2_9_100000_&ctp=8#c4309452818504651890
