Deleting old saves

Half to agree with the others I have a ton of saves for games that are parts of series in particular in lost heir series. I messed up once at least and saves for one game got crossed into another and created a issue of playability for that chosen path. Which meant having to replay and thus even more saves as a result. I have a great many games that I love and sometimes I might go months or years between replaying for some while others I play constantly so having a way to delete / clean them up would be greatly beneficial.

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There is another reason I hope they get to a point where one can delete old saves. If there are updates or changes, sometimes old saves can be buggy or unplayable. Certain old games from Psy High 1 would create problems in Psy High 2. I actually had to disable cloud saves to be able and play Safe Haven, as well as deleting all the local saves.

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Still a lot of demand for save deletion… is save deletion on the planned features?

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I’v been watching for a few years hoping for the ability to delete old saves, but their dosn’t seem to be any real plans or news about it.

I know coding and all that isn’t easy but I can’t imagine it being that diffcult to make a delete feature?

I just want to clear some of my older saves, in all the games I play (witcher, skyrim/fallout, dragon age (per character) I almost never have more than 2 or 3 manual saves, and the fact I can’t delete my saves from choice games makes it feel a little daunting and simply annoying, and im sure theirs many others who feel the same.

My point, PLEASE add a deletion feature.

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@jasonstevanhill just shared the following on Reddit and I trust he won’t mind me reposting it here.

"We’ve debated the question of deleting saves for literally ten years. The issue, however, is a UI/UX/security one.

"To delete saves, we’d need to set up an authentication system, which we don’t currently have. Right now, if someone knows your email, they can theoretically log in to your account and play using your saves. But, they can’t delete your saves because there’s no way to delete them.

"You could argue, but my webstore account has a login/password! But not everyone has a webstore account. You can create saves without creating a webstore account, and some people don’t want to create webstore accounts. They are two different systems. In addition, when creating saves, there’s less friction because you don’t have to login to anything, you just enter your email.

"In addition, what happens if you accidentally delete a save? Will a user expect us to be able to recover accidentally deleted saves? How frustrated would you be if you deleted a save that you spent a lot of time developing, and we weren’t able to recover it for you?

“tl;dr: we’ve spent a lot of time discussing how we could implement a save system that would be clean, clear, and secure, and we can’t figure out how to do that.”

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@jasonstevanhill Would the answer be that it isn’t a ‘delete’ function but a ‘hide’ one?

User goes in and flags saves to hide, they are removed from the UI for the user but aren’t removed from CoGs server. They can then be recovered at just a click which shows the hidden saves.

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I like it. It’s an improvement on the current system that feels like it shouldn’t require an authentication system, because of the limited damage that could be done by a third party.

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You should tag @dfabulich for questions like that. :slight_smile:

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We could also have it so a delete feature is only usable with those who have an account, but the hide feature would work for me too, as long as I can put my old saves out of sight and out of mind lol.

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I think even deleting the saves from local storage only would go a long way.

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@dfabulich - Not sure if you saw this post after Jason tagged you. Would this be a solution to the problem?

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Is their any news/uodates about the consideration of a save deletion (or hiding) option?

It (as usual lol) been quite a while

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Truly baffles me that, after all these years, this is not a feature. Is it really so hard for staff to wrap their heads around the pros of being able to delete save files that are obsolete or mistakes? Does the idea of organization and removing extra clutter really seem like such a terrible idea? How about not having to scroll through 50+ save files looking for the right ones?
So many people want this feature added, but instead youd rather argue with us and insult our intelligence? If you cant do it, stop beating around the bush and just own up to it.
Why not ask around and see if anyone knows how to implement it? There is a massive community of talented people here! Surely some ideas can be bounced around? I can guarantee plenty of people would be willing to help.

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Here!

I’d love to be able to delete old saves, too!

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Also in support for being able to delete saves.

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We’re aware that deleting saves is a feature people want, and we agree that there are a lot of good reasons to want it. The issue, as with a lot of things, is that we’re a very small team with limited time and availability. I am not at all involved in the technical aspects of implementing it, so I can’t speak to the details there (and there’s been discussion above of some of the potential issues), but it’s something we want to add and have discussed adding when there’s time to add it.

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I’m earnestly OK with not having save file protection. It’s just saves. Making the original saves was entertaining. Making replacement saves is entertaining. I have multiple copies of the same save because I often enjoy playing the game again and again.

I wouldn’t even mind a hard limit of, say, 20 saves per game. It makes sense, though the file size of each save is generally miniscule, 20’s about how many a human can keep track of.

If someone ‘hacks’ my account and deletes my saves? I’ll just make more. It’s fun! If I delete a save I didn’t mean to, I’ll just make it again. I had fun making it in the first place!

Really “Oh no, I’ll have to play a game I enjoy again.” Replaying is a large part of the fun.

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Lol theyve been working on this for over TEN YEARS. If they couldnt find the time in the last ten years, will they ever really be able to?
But like i mentioned before, both the issues of having a small team and apparently no time, can be potentially solved if they recruit volunteers from the massive community here to work on this issue for them.

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I play through Steam and I’ve found a workaround - manually deleting saves from the save__list file, which basically hides them - but this obviously won’t work for everyone.

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Where exactly is this file? I looked around in the particular CoG game folder and found nothing of the sort.