Greetings Captains! We hope you have been enjoying Beta 2.1 so far. Today, we will be pushing up an update to our Save system which may or may not cause some issues in the short term. With this change in place, the games you save from here forward should now load you properly back at the node you were on, within the encounter you were facing, and with everything left as you remember it. We expect that this will cause several bugs and look forward to fixing them as quickly as we can.

What We Tried/Why We Tried It

Saves can very much be a game breaker when they are available whenever and wherever. The galaxy tends to feel a lot less dangerous when you can simply save at every node, especially in games where you might wind up with easier fights or a less damaged ship simply by reloading. In addition to being a game breaking feature, they can also actually break the game. Those of you who have been in the Alpha/Beta for a while have likely noticed that we have gone through several iterations of saves as well as save bugs. Many of you have lost Captains or Crew due to saving games when they were on other ships, never to be loaded again. Others of you have noticed saves that never seem to reload, instead leaving you hanging on a "Loading: Textures" display. Most people who sent their saves into us for fixing had errors within these two categories. To fix both of these, we tried a setup for a while where you had to load at your station or at least at the nearest warp gate. This seemed like an optimal solution both for the bugs as well as the danger factor. What we found was that while this did help a lot for many broken saves, this instead led to a lot of confusion within the game. It feels weird in play to be fighting a pirate fleet, save your game, then come back later to that save at the station as if it was all a dream. Coming back to an old save and already feel weird enough without us changing it further.

Where We Landed

After hearing a lot of feedback about how our saves felt, we have come back around to making Saves available anywhere, loading you in hopefully the exact situation where you last left off. While this does still feel a bit game breaking in an overall sense, we feel that we can counteract this with proper balance. Even if we are unable to, the trade-off is worth it for a less confusing save system. Unfortunately, that means that we may have some save bugs in the short term. So we are asking you all to try it out and let us know what you think. If you have a save bug, let us know. If you don't have a save bug, let us know. As always, thanks for all of your support! Cheers, Warballoon