PC Games, often Indie Titles, without Save Files

Why do some PC games, often Indie titles, don’t utilize Save files you can backup for posterity? Worse offenders are those that save their data on the Registry, like LYNE and Dungeon Hearts both games available on Steam. Another game that saves its progress data on the Registry is Back to the Future The Game from the now defunct Telltale Games. I’m the kind of player who likes to keep savefiles of games I play especially if said games have many key points worth returning to for nostalgia, best examples of such a case would be Point and Click Adventure games with memorable moments worth re-viewing and being able to backup save files of such moments is one of my guilty pleasures :hugs:

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Can’t say I have ran into many of those myself, but you totally can back up registry entries. If you know this is what they’re doing just find the entries and export them. You’ll get a .reg file that when ran will re-enter the data into the registry.

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In the case of Telltale games’s Back to the Future game, the Registry data doesn’t always carry over correctly when switching to the next chapter of the game. Things like the name you chose for Marty to use as his alias when going back to the past would sometimes gets mixed up with the other choices you didn’t pick. This being a known issue with the game Telltale games didn’t even fix with a patch whatsoever :neutral_face:

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Well it’s still better than freaking Dark Souls, titan of gaming series ,not having cloud saves in current year… And it’s not just Dark Souls 1… all of them .

Imagine how ‘happy’ i was after buying Dark Souls 3 Expansions , re-installing the game to pick one of my older characters and finding nought…

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Ouch!

Do the games utilize manual saves though.

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Are all those games made with Unity by any chance? Unity saves “PlayerPrefs” in the registry by default. For preferences, this makes sense, it’s the sort of what the registry is meant for (though I personally prefer config to be with the game files).

It’s possible that some devs are opting to use the player preferences tools in Unity to also save the game data because they feel it’s small enough, and doesn’t warrant using a separate saving system for. It’s possible the devs don’t even realise it’s saving to the registry.

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I’m unsure of both LYNE and Dungeon Hearts seeing as those two Indie gamea use sinple Pixel Art visuals but TellTales games’Back to the Future The Game might have been made using Unity as it does use CGI visuals.

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Neither LYNE nor Dungeon Hearts have pixel art visuals. Pixel art is a subset of 2D, not every 2D game is pixel art. Unity is often used for 2D games as well, it’s not restricted to 3D.

LYNE is Unity. I don’t know about Dungeon Hearts and can’t check because I don’t have it, but it could easily be Unity as well.

Back to the Future is not Unity, it’s Telltale Tools. However, according to the PCGamingWiki, it stores its saves as files, not in the registry. Odd that you’d be seeing save data somewhere else. Are you sure it’s not something else in the registry?

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For one thing the alias you give Marty McFly when he goes back in time is saved in the registry and doesn’t always carry over properly when you move between chapters. Say you chose Micheal Corleone, there is a slight chance on another chapter the name will change even though the game is supposed to keep it.

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Dark souls PTDE and Remastered both have cloud and not only that but in PTDE it also carries my DSCM Connectivity mod exe … rar files with different save files in them … folders with certain save files to copy + paste on the fly and god knows what else. My save file folder is about 15 mbs and never had any issues.

I bet it will carry over pictures as well :wink:

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Well while yeah, PTDE seems to save a lot of weird stuff i also found none of my characters after reinstall . Remastered might have Cloud Saves , didint check that one .

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