2024 Backup anytime, anywhere ...

[DaWiT]

Do we have to redo an entire chapter because we have to interrupt our game for some IRL reason? Seriously ? Your games are hard to understand, especially when you have to read subtitles and hope that the translation is good. The first chapter I farmed for an hour, I visited everything, filled my bags, the trunk of the car like a survivalist and I 'died' because a pester turned my car over once the portal was activated but ?! it's totally stupid, even the demo didn't play this trick on me...
The second chapter, I understand that we have to break down a dam... uh no my car is smashed and my game is dead because of this damn mist that is coming...
I'm not having a good time
In short, I expect a backup everywhere whenever we want and not just once in the garage... Be modern. Consoles have hard drives now... There's no shortage of space.

[colours (⌐■_■)]

From the recent blog post by the developers

Pacific Drive saves every time you travel to a new level, which means that the most progress you can lose by quitting without saving is the progress from the level you’re currently in. Most levels will give you maximum ~30 minutes of play time before it becomes a very good idea to leave (thus triggering a save game on level transition), though mission levels do not have timers. The intro/first mission of the game calls for longer sessions as you're getting to grips with it and figuring out the systems, but the save cadence evens out afterwards. And obviously you can spend a long time on perpetual stability levels (including mission 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!

[Sven777b]

the game does a autosave whenever you pass a gate or jump to / from the garage.
So whenever you did something very stupid -> just reload. You only loose the progress since you entered the actual zone. The devs stated very very very often that the lack of manual saving is not a technical issue - its intented.

Quicksave ingame would destroy the whole concept of the game. There would be almost no point in planning the route , thinking about priorities or even upgrading the car if you could just QSave/QLoad. I have > 50 h ingame (which is not that much so far) and I´m in the inner circle. I never died and my car never lost a single part. If you read several comments to the game or threads in this forum you will see that this is not a exception. The most players have > 50 hours without dying or loosing their car.

Maybe its because I´m a little older and played games from the early 90´s where you had to read 50 pages of paper manuals to even understand the basics of a game. As for me - most actual games are just way too simple - not challenging at all. I like the thrill to not surely know if the actual trip will be worth it and if I´ll make it home safe with the most of my car.

[DonJuanDoja]

The devs basically "explained" it by saying they don't have the resources to change the game enough to implement a better save system. Even though they understand what people don't like about it.

I read it as "We know everyone hates the save system and why, but we messed up and built a game without really knowing what we were doing, so now it's stuck like this and it's too much work to fix, so you just have to deal with it."

Common excuse with small indie devs. You always get some really cool game concept that just never fully materializes because of lack of resources. Ah maybe someday the indie devs will unite and actually create a AAA game.

[Deja Vu]

Originally posted by DaWiT:

Do we have to redo an entire chapter because we have to interrupt our game for some IRL reason? Seriously ? Your games are hard to understand, especially when you have to read subtitles and hope that the translation is good. The first chapter I farmed for an hour, I visited everything, filled my bags, the trunk of the car like a survivalist and I 'died' because a pester turned my car over once the portal was activated but ?! it's totally stupid, even the demo didn't play this trick on me...
The second chapter, I understand that we have to break down a dam... uh no my car is smashed and my game is dead because of this damn mist that is coming...
I'm not having a good time
In short, I expect a backup everywhere whenever we want and not just once in the garage... Be modern. Consoles have hard drives now... There's no shortage of space.

If only there was a stickied post that explains the entire save system.

I mean seriously, what are you people doing? Nearly 40 hours in here and I still haven't died. Take your time, plan better and play smarter. If it's too challenging for you there are PLENTY of gameplay options to make it easier.

[Ottomic]

Originally posted by DaWiT:

Do we have to redo an entire chapter because we have to interrupt our game for some IRL reason? Seriously?

If you quit the game while in a junction, you will restart that junction. Previous progress is saved.

[Ramstar]

What you ‘expect’ isn’t what you’re getting. You should just deal with it.

Sorry if that’s harsh but is what it is.

[Irantu]

The game is not designed to be saved mid-mission. You are supposed to go in, do/collect what you came for and then move on.

Having finished it and started a second run, I'll admit that the first mission(s) might be the reason so many people get the wrong impression. The first missions, by necessity, have Perpetual Stability. All mission critical junctions have this modifier, otherwise the storm could interrupt a main story quest and force you to leave.

However, this suggests to people that they should spend 30+ minutes or even longer in a junction, when there is never any reason to hang around for this long. In non-mission junctions the storm naturally cuts this short and makes it clear that you're not supposed to linger. But as I pointed out, the storm doesn't appear (on a timer) during the first missions.

Maybe a very short intro mission, with the storm on a 5 minute timer, would've helped make this more clear.