This is one of the parts GOG are doing way worse than Steam. Even with a 1GB limit I still have to constantly remove save files from Pathfinder WotR to make it fit inside the cloud sync. 200MB is ridiculously small.
On Steam it’s per-game configured by the devs, no? Crypt of the Necrodancer tells me it has nearly 100GB space left, while Deep Rock Galactic says it’s capped at ~85MB.
Yeah devs get to set the limit. (Source: am a dev w/ a game on steam)
Why would you want to set a smaller limit?
No reason really, there’s just no point to set a super high limit if your save file is a 5kb text file.
Also valve does review the game and might not like an absurdly high limit, but I don’t know if they actually care or not.
When it’s configured by the devs they can set limit appropriate to their game’s save file. Pathfinder got massive save files (there’s even mods to try to reduce the size) compared to most other games, especially linear ones. It seems like GOG is setting a global limit
Is it? Pathfinder seems more like the exception than the rule. I’ve got a big library on GoG and none of my games even reach a quarter of the 200 MB limit.
Should probably have been more clear that it’s extremely small for pathfinder. And since GOG is setting a global limit and they are selling pathfinder on their storefront, their global limit is too small.
I’d more argue that the game company should be finding ways to reduce their save file size. 1GB seems ludicrous, though I don’t know the system enough to know the technical reasons behind that. This is still a strange business decision for GOG as they don’t have the market share to move the needle, the games affected will just sell less on their store until the game company doesn’t even bother with it.
While I do agree that Owlcat could do a better job with their save file system, from the point of view of the consumers it shouldn’t be their problem. If GOG sell their games and offer cloud sync, they should provide adequate amount of space. Storage is relatively cheap.
Save files have a ton of variance. They can be as small as a few KB or they can be full save states of an entire open world. Back in the mid 00s, I had save file folders that were larger than the install directory, like The Witcher and Prey (2006).
A heavily modded Skyrim/FO4 save with hundreds of hours on it can easily go above 200mb.
That’s insane, what’s making up all that data?
Poor optimization of save files probably
Must be, if there’s no real limit then why would they bother?
Most games never hit anywhere near that, but some large open world rpgs like Skyrim track the location of every single object in the game world. Like you can drop a piece of cheese on the bottom left corner of the map, come back 500 hours later, and it’ll still be there. now imagine all of the objects you’re buying and selling and manipulating over those hundreds of hours. Now add in a shit ton of script mods and other stuff that may add even more objects. And add in all of the quest data and interaction data that gets saved etc etc, and your save file can easily hit multiple gigabytes, with each file approaching 200mb.
It still feels like it should be orders of magnitude less. For example, if each piece of cheese has an ID number that maps to cheese, an ID for what area it’s in, three coordinates for where exactly it is, and maybe a few more variables like how much of it you’ve eaten. Each of those variables is probably only a couple of bytes, so each item is probably only 20B or so, which means that even if you interacted with a million different items and there was no compression going on then that’s still only 20MB of save data.
Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it’s not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.
It was a lot worse with Skyrim’s original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they’re most likely to have poor data management in some mod.
Each object also needs the orientation, possibly also velocity and angular rates.
Bold of you to assume the data in save files is packed binary and not something like JSON where { “x”: 13872, “y”: -17312, “z”: -20170 } requires 40 bytes of storage.
Variables.
Of course! But wouldn’t it save space if these variables used zeroes instead of ones?
They would remain 0 until flipped. They did say heavily modded, so like if you added more quests to the game, these all need some way of knowing what legs have been completed. The more modded quests completed, the bigger the save. And that’s just for one thing that a save would keep track of.
Do I even have cloud saves if I just use the DRM free installers and not GOG Galaxy? 🤔
Nope.
I don’t believe so
Just use Steam.
Steam is great! But so is competition, and GOG has been one of the best of them. A healthy mindset and a strong focus on their relationship to the customer puts pressure on steam to do more than the bare minimum to stay in the lead. We’re lucky in the fact that they’re both mostly good companies to their consumers.
They each have their own issues, and I do question the effectiveness of GOG’s strategy here, but GOG doing well is also good for you as a steam user!
