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The freedom to save


Zenpai

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I'm back with a new blog! This time to talk about games saves, namely the ability (or lack thereof) to share them with other people. This should be a lot shorter than my previous blog, so let’s get right into it.

 

Back in the 5th and 6th generations of gaming consoles (apart from the Nintendo 64, which still played by old school rules), game saves were truly free. If you wanted to copy some friend’s save, you could. Just grab his memory card, put it into the same console as the one your own memory card is in, copy it and you were good to go. Hell, with the right tools, you could even download saves from the Internet! It felt like a progression of the state of gaming, an increase in freedom regarding the way you played.

 

That is, sadly, no longer the case. From the 7th generation of console onwards (apart from the Wii and the PSP, which still played by old school rules - and in a good sense this time around),  your game saves were now locked to your own profile, meaning you could only use your own saves to progress in the game.

 

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It first started with the PS3. Most games allowed you to transfer saves between users of the same console, which gave you some freedom, but you were certainly more limited than you were before. And not only that, some games just did not allow you to copy their save data under almost any circumstance. The only exceptions were if you made a backup of the entire console and then restored that back up to the exact same console and account the save was created in, or, later, if you used PS Plus cloud storage (and even then, unlike all other save data, copy-protected saves can only be copied one at a time to and from your cloud folder and even then, only once per day... for some reason).

 

Now, with the PS4, absolutely no saves can be transferred between users under any circumstance. It seems that machine-locked saves have fortunately gone the way of the dodo, but at the cost of being able to share your progress with the people that use the same console as you.

 

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The Xbox 360 worked in a similar fashion as the PS3, with the exception that you also couldn't trade between accounts of the same console. The Xbox One is even worse in that regard, considering that, unlike the PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360, you can't even put your save data onto a USB drive for easy backup and safekeeping. Fortunately, the X1 does come with free, automatic cloud backup, so as long as you remember your password and are connected to the Internet, you'll still be able to reach your saves wherever you play (an offline solution would still be more practical and timeless, but anyway...).

 

On Nintendo consoles, and as I've mentioned before, the Wii still works by old-school rules in the sense that you can freely copy any save data you want and use it on your profile as your own. Sadly, that is no longer the case with the Wii U, which, like all modern consoles, locks all of your save data to your profile. It will, however, let you back them up to an external drive... which is more than what can be said for the Nintendo Switch, where the only way to back up your saves is to shell up for Nintendo Switch Online... which, in my honest opinion, is highway robbery and just outright bull. All modern consoles allow for some way to back up your saves without having to pay for it.

 

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Regardless, console manufacturers do have a few more or less legitimate reasons to restrict the copying of your save data, most prevalent among them to prevent cheating and to protect the “sanctity” of the trophy/achievement system. To be honest, I think this is quite an unfortunate turn of events as I believe there are also a few legitimate reasons to let us leech off each other’s game saves. Let’s go through them one by one:

 

I LOST MY ORIGINAL SAVE

 

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 Plenty of people have had this happen to them for one reason or another. Someone, maybe even you yourself, could have accidentally (or even purposefully) overwritten your save, or it could have gotten corrupted.

 

I’ve had both of these instances personally happen to myself. I’ve accidentally erased my own Devil May Cry 3 save (and you know how time-consuming 100%-ing a hack-and-slash can be) and got my Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session save corrupted (I actually did it all over again and got even better scores than before, but that’s beside the point).

 

Despite the fact that you can back up your saves with a manual, offline backup or just use cloud saves, being able to use someone else's save would still be a good solution for people that don’t have Plus (like me) and that don’t back up their saves frequently (or at all).

 

 

I BOUGHT THE SAME GAME ON A NEW CONSOLE

 

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 I will give you my personal example on this case. As a huge hack-and-slash fan, I bought Bayonetta on my X360 a few years after its release. And I loved it. It’s like Devil May Cry on steroids.

Quite a few years later, I got myself a Nintendo Switch and was finally able to play the sequel, after (like pretty much everyone) not having bought a Wii U. But as it turns out, Bayonetta 2 comes bundled with the first Bayonetta. And since it polishes a lot of the technical blemishes (like the screen tearing) it’s a better experience than the original X360 game.

I 100%-ed the original Bayonetta. I did everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. And Bayonetta requires you to pass the entire game with three different characters. I must have spent more than 200 hours of furious button mashing on this game. And since I now have an improved version, I would also really like the have a 100%-ed save on the Switch as well. The problem is... I'd have to spend yet another 200+ hours of furious button-mashing to do it. And with the amount of games in my backlog... it's just hard to justify spending all that much time on a game I've already 100%-ed as if it were the first time.

And here's where another person's save would really come in handy. I've basically already earned the right to have a 100%-ed save by doing it back on the Xbox 360, I just don't want to spend double the time and effort to have the same progress on a different console.

And this is just my own personal case. With the amount of remakes and remasters coming out these days, imagine how much more convenient it would be if people could just grab a complete save from the Internet and have everything just as they left it on their previous version. It could even increase the sales of remakes and remasters!

 

 

TO SAVE ON THE GRIND

 

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 There are some games that require some serious grind. And I mean serious grind. For example, the only reason I still don't have the Platinum trophy for Dragon Ball FighterZ is because its last trophy, Set for Life, demands that you spend a minimum of 100 hours mindlessly grinding the same battles over and over again (no wonder the completion rate is so low). There's also Dragon Ball Z Budokai 2, which made you play through the story mode a total of 35 times if you wanted to get all the skills. And I still have Vietnam flashbacks to the time when I got every. single. item. in Dragon Ball Xenoverse. The RNG on that thing was insane. (What's with all the grindy Dragon Ball games?...)

 

Well, some of us are adults now, with jobs, responsibilities and families. That doesn't mean people on this site don't enjoy spending some time with longer games, even playing them to completion, but I think it's pretty safe to assume that when confronted with trophies that just require you to dump time into them for its own sake, that's when those people go:

 

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In my personal opinion... grinding is just not fun. I can handle a little bit of it, but when you start getting onto the dozens or even hundreds of hours pouring time onto something just for an item or trophy... then the game starts feeling less like enjoyment and more like a second job. Especially when your time gets more and more limited and the backlog pile gets bigger and bigger.

I do realize some people enjoy grindy games as a means to relax and unwind, but to me, personally, it's just not worth it.

And that's when I think other people's saves could come in handy. You'd save on all the repetitiveness and just... have fun. And I don't personally see anything wrong with it.

 

 

TO SEPARATE FAMILY ACCOUNTS

 

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 People with younger siblings, cousins or children will know the feeling. You spend a lot of time with younger family members who don't really want to take the time to create their own account, they just want to play, and they want to play right now! But then they grow older and decide that they want to have their own personal accounts. But what about the saves that they already poured so much work onto back on their relative's account? Yeah, that's when we get a problem.

Quite often, people share their accounts with family members who don't know any better, only for them to later realize that they want their own personal account. The problem is that now you have the progress of two people on your account rather than just your own - and not just saves, but trophies as well (the trophy system should also be more malleable, but more on that in a bit).

This happened to me personally, and is the reason why I have so many hidden trophies - most of them belong to my younger brother, who played for 5 years on my account before we both realized he could just make his own. Fortunately, the PS3 (mostly) didn't have this problem and I could easily copy most of his saves over to his new account (with the exception of the aforementioned copy-protected saves), but sadly, the PS4 isn't as forgiving. Your saves are your saves. Period. Someone else played on your account? Well, now their saves are also your saves. Suck it up.

And this is where I think being able to freely share save data would come in really handy - so that each person can use the save that they actually worked in without having to do all of the work all over again.

 

I JUST FEEL LIKE IT

 

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 Let me ask you all something: remember back in the days of the PS1 and PS2, when you could freely copy from one memory card to another with the only restriction being how much space you had left?

Have you ever heard a single person complain about this ability?

Yeah, I reckon not many of you have.

I just put a lot of reasons in here for why people might want to copy each other's saves, but those were the examples that I could think of. There might be many more that didn't even cross my mind. That doesn't mean they're any less valid.

If people want to play a game straight, nothing's stopping them. But if people want to take shortcuts or even cheat... then so fucking what? The PS1 and PS2 didn't sell any less for providing this capability, nor did I hear a single person complaining about it. In fact, both consoles sold over 100 million units. What's truly important is that people play the way they fucking want.

 

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Besides to prevent cheating, which I've already talked about above, the other main reason console manufacturers have to disable the sharing of game saves is the "sanctity" of the Trophy/Achievement system. Such a feature would be certain to devalue the leaderboards, but I have two solutions for that problem:

 

1: DISABLE ACHIEVEMENTS ON COPIED SAVES

 

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You could just make so that whenever you used game saves that weren't originally created by you, you weren't able to earn trophies until you came back to your own save. This is a simple, quick, and easy way to please everyone. The guardians of the leaderboards can rest easy knowing that their glorious metrics are protected and the people that want to take shortcuts (and most of those don't care about trophies/achievements, really) can still play the game however they want.

Alternatively, you could also let the player still unlock the achievements with the copied save but then prevent that game from ever being registered in the leaderboards. You'd still get the trophies, but you'd get no points for doing so, just the satisfaction of hearing that good old trophy "ping". Basically, that trophy list would still turn 100% offline, but would only be in the console for the player's own self-satisfaction.

 

 

2: SCREW THE LEADERBOARDS AND THE TROPHY SYSTEM

 

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This one here's going to be controversial... but screw it.

 

Are there really all that many people that truly care about leaderboards? Most people just want to play the games they want however they want to play them. Personally, even if copied save data didn't disable trophies/achievements... I wouldn't give a single rat's ass. I can still play games 100% clean if I want to, so it's absolutely no skin off my back.

 

Then again, I also believe I should be able to delete my games' trophy lists if I wanted to, so clearly, I'm of a very liberal mindset when it comes to achievement systems and leaderboards.

 

(I do realize this suggestion is controversial, so if leaderboards are indeed important to you, feel free to write so below)

 

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Currently, and as I mentioned before, out of all the modern gaming consoles, the Nintendo Switch is particularly egregious in the locking down of your game saves, considering that, even if you shell out for Nintendo Switch online, which, let me remind you, is the only way to back up your saves on the console, certain games, like Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee, are currently restricted from being backed up to the cloud, even if you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Nintendo claims that it's to prevent cheating... conveniently forgetting that:

 

A - Both Playstation and Xbox offer cloud save backup with no restrictions and so far, not a single person complained about it.

 

B - If they really want to prevent cheating in online multiplayer, they could just separate the progress in online modes from single-player and this way, ensure that everyone online plays fair and square (and if it's offline cheating... then who really cares?...).

 

C - People already cheat aplenty in Nintendo games! Splatoon 2 is actually quite infamous for it. The restriction of cloud saves backups isn't changing a single thing.

 

And the Switch needs a way to back up your game saves more than any other console due to the fact that it also doubles as a handheld, which are vastly more susceptible to certain problems than home consoles, like getting stolen, lost or broken. All of Nintendo's previous handhelds also didn't allow you to back up your saves, but they did save to the game cartridge instead of the console itself, so even if you did lose/break the console, as long as you still had the cartridge itself, your save would still be safe. And even if you did lose the cartridge, you would just lose the save for one game, unlike the Switch, which stores all of your data inside the console itself, so therefore, if you lose/break the console, you're losing the saves for all of your games at once. So given all of this, to see that the Switch is the only one that requires you to fork over actual cash just to ensure you don't lose all of your progress...

 

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Sony's handhelds were much better in that regard, considering that you could always back up your saves to both an offline storage device or using PS Plus cloud save backup. Heck, as I mentioned before, the PSP still let you use other people's saves no problem! Ah, good times...

 

This is an aspect where PC gamers have it much better than consoles. You can just use other people's saves without (much) fuss. Heck, you don't even have to pay to play online! I'm very much a console peasant myself (I mean, I'm on this site, aren't I?), but credit where credit's due. You may have to sometimes use save editors to be able to enjoy someone else's progress, but it shouldn't be all that hard. And that's the beauty of PC gaming - its malleability and adaptability. You can also do all of these things with consoles, but sadly, you would need to hack into the machine itself, and the process is a lot longer, harder and riskier than it is on PC. You risk not being able to connect online, updating your console and even playing more recent games that require more recent firmware updates. Heck, your machine itself could be banned from ever connecting to the Playstation Network if your hacking's detected, meaning no more online play, no more updates, no more DLC and no more digital games - at all. And it's a real shame that people have to resort to these kinds of extreme measures to do something that was perfectly possible not all that long ago - something that absolutely no one complained about.

 

I would very much like to see console manufacturers' stances on the subject change to allow their customer base to play their games the way they want to, just like how they could back before the 7th generation, but considering how much online connectivity has become part of the console experience in the past decade, I'm sadly not expecting this trend to change any time soon.

 

Well, I guess that's all I wanted to say for now. This is the last topic I had in mind, so there should be no more blog posts from me for the foreseeable future.

 

Thanks for reading and see you guys next time!

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10 minutes ago, MMX20 said:

Um... Not to be rude or anything, but saying something related to leaderboards got a lot of people upset last time. So I hope I didn't mean to be rude to you by saying this.

Damn, don't be so rude man. Someone report this guy to the mods!1!!11!

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Just now, Lucas said:

Damn, don't be so rude man. Someone report this guy to the mods!1!!11!

I wasn't trying to be rude, but I don't want a repeat of last time when leaderboards was mentioned in a certain thread. I am sure none of us want a repeat of that.

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11 minutes ago, MMX20 said:

Um... Not to be rude or anything, but saying something related to leaderboards got a lot of people upset last time. So I hope I didn't mean to be rude to you by saying this.

 

Just now, MMX20 said:

I wasn't trying to be rude, but I don't want a repeat of last time when leaderboards was mentioned in a certain thread. I am sure none of us want a repeat of that.

 

As I said in the original post, I'm kind of prepared for that ? If someone gets out of hand, I guess that's what the mods are there for.

Edited by jrdemr
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A small note in regards to your 1st suggestion (disabling achievements on copied saves) and considering I have zero knowledge how it works on PS4 after owning one for a few months only: 

 

this is/was still a thing on a certain portable that coexists/ed with the PS4, meaning that even now (current gen) Sony is no stranger to the possibility of disabling trophies on shared save files. 

 

Without going into the fickle details, VITA still allows you to continue from saves not your own. As there is no “officially intended” way for the enduser to back up saves to physical storage (´;ω;`) or share one’s (digital game) saves on VITA, the most likely scenario for a casual gamer to stumble over this by accident is when they buy a cartridge secondhand. If you try to start an application with save data that is tied to a different account, the system will simply ask you

 

5-F0694-A9-E693-4-F70-89-E8-31-BF0-B8712

 

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39 minutes ago, Fenrirfeather said:

Without going into the fickle details, VITA still allows you to continue from saves not your own. As there is no “officially intended” way for the enduser to back up saves to physical storage (´;ω;`) or share one’s (digital game) saves on VITA, the most likely scenario for a casual gamer to stumble over this by accident is when they buy a cartridge secondhand. If you try to start an application with save data that is tied to a different account, the system will simply ask you

 

 

  Hide contents

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Huh. Interesting to know.

 

That said, it is possible to back up your save data on the Vita. Just use Content Manager Assistant and voilà.

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Ah, the good old days where saves were in the cartridges (Atari, NES, SNES, etc), then the good old days that forced you to pay for external storage when the mediums became read only, (PS1, PS2, etc) then the good old days of... damn it. Where was I going with this?

 

Oh yeah, if you already had spend dozens to hundreds of hours in a game to get everything, but somehow don’t have your save any more, what possible use would you have obtaining someone’s save just to finish doing everything all over again and start at the end of the game? 

 

I don't think you fleshed out the benefits to save sharing enough for me to relate to your point that locked down saves are bad. I’ve no experience with sharing saves on any games or consoles in my limited history of gaming with them and generally haven’t had trouble with losing or overwriting any of my personal saves. That said, I’ve said in the past, the main reason I pay for Plus is the online backup and the second reason I pay for it is the automatic downloads. The cost is worth those two features alone for me. Less than $5 a month for a huge amount of convenience.

 

Now, I’m not advocating FOR locked down saves, I’m indifferent because I don’t see the big perk to bother having saves unlocked. I’m (clearly) not concerned with leaderboards, and don’t care about if people cheat in their games. I just see this as a non-issue. 

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10 minutes ago, DaivRules said:

Ah, the good old days where saves were in the cartridges (Atari, NES, SNES, etc), then the good old days that forced you to pay for external storage when the mediums became read only, (PS1, PS2, etc) then the good old days of... damn it. Where was I going with this?

 

Oh yeah, if you already had spend dozens to hundreds of hours in a game to get everything, but somehow don’t have your save any more, what possible use would you have obtaining someone’s save just to finish doing everything all over again and start at the end of the game? 

 

I don't think you fleshed out the benefits to save sharing enough for me to relate to your point that locked down saves are bad. I’ve no experience with sharing saves on any games or consoles in my limited history of gaming with them and generally haven’t had trouble with losing or overwriting any of my personal saves. That said, I’ve said in the past, the main reason I pay for Plus is the online backup and the second reason I pay for it is the automatic downloads. The cost is worth those two features alone for me. Less than $5 a month for a huge amount of convenience.

 

Now, I’m not advocating FOR locked down saves, I’m indifferent because I don’t see the big perk to bother having saves unlocked. I’m (clearly) not concerned with leaderboards, and don’t care about if people cheat in their games. I just see this as a non-issue. 

I concur.

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7 hours ago, DaivRules said:

Oh yeah, if you already had spend dozens to hundreds of hours in a game to get everything, but somehow don’t have your save any more, what possible use would you have obtaining someone’s save just to finish doing everything all over again and start at the end of the game?

 

Because plenty of games unlock new features for you to use when you finish them, like new characters in fighting games, new cars and race tracks in racing games, new cheats, tweaks, weapons... some games even provide you with a New Game+. And sometimes you have to work quite hard to earn some of the unlocks, so if I were to ever lose the entirety of my progress, I sure as hell would like some way to be able to restore it, even if it wasn't my original progress.

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  • 6 months later...

He sure could've also used his own backup/cloud save.  Save files generally dont just corrupt, so it should have easily been fixed by a backup. 

 

You used a rather rare occurrence to justify/bump your thread that picked up very little interest the first time around.  Let it die

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