Steam /Cloud Saving

[ecstaticbrick]

Dear SCS,

Please seriously consider adding Steam cloud game saving. I just lost 200+ hours of progress due to a faulty motherboard.

Yes, I know. Before anyone say's it, always back up your saves! The problem was, my save was backed up to a m.2 drive which was also damaged due to the fault with the motherboard and because I had to re-install Windows, my original save was overwritten. (I checked the old windows files, it isn't in there).

Or maybe even a World of Trucks cloud game save option.

Is there a reason why it is not a option for Steam now?

Thanks.

[pigbrother]

Use cloud storage for such backups. I know I'm offtopic, but I backup weekly my savegames because I have one single save for each game since their purchase and I would have to start from scratch in case of a failure.

On topic: yeah, Steam cloud support would be nice.

[room217au]

What about those players who have up to 10gb of mods?

[ecstaticbrick]

Mods can be downloaded again, I am more interested in backing up my progress (stats/ map/ drivers/ garages etc...). Steam remembers workshop subscribed items and automatically downloads them again if they are missing so it is just manually downloaded mods that you need to remember.

[Lombra]

What about those players who have up to 10gb of mods?

What about them?

[room217au]

@Lombra
So you want Cloud Save, but only for some?

[SiSL]

profiles / saves are different from mods.

Although I can see some problems on upgrading these saves from cloud.

[BlackBloodRum]

Problems? Such as?

There shouldn't be any issues if this were to be added. Heck, the epic Cities Skylines game manages it and also has tons of mods + multiple save options and large updates.

Steam handles saves pretty basic really, when you exit your game any saves marked for Steam are uploaded, if a save already exists it simply overwrites it (there is no merging or such like).

As such, if the game is updated, and updates the save format then steam will have said new save on game exit without issues.

In the event you need to reinstall the game Steam will do the following automatically:

- Install Game (upon user request)
- Download enabled DLCs
- Download saves
- Download subscribed Workshop Items

So basically, after this your game is back to how it was when you started (minus non-workshop mods).

[SiSL]

Problems such as "Reversing back to uncorrupted profile" , unchanged config etc. both mod or upgrade problems etc.

If this game didn't support variety of mods that might effect your saves or profile altogether, or the game never had multiple updates, then yes, it could be fine.

[BlackBloodRum]

Yeah, cities skylines sometimes has that issue, but that's why you're able to save multiple saves at a certain point so you can revert back that way. But to be fair that is user responsibility more than anything.

I mean, yeah you can totally screw up your game with mods even on cities skylines (on that game, you're allowed to have C# mods and such which are way more technical and game altering than ETS/ATS mods - in addition they have a larger modding community with some workshop items having over 800k subscribers - as such they have basic mods such as assets and technical mods which change the game entirely such as one of my favourites which adds the ability to move/reshape roads/objects in-game without deleting/rebuilding them (a feature which doesn't exist on base game).

So yup, mods will corrupt saves from time to time, but to be fair that could happen without Steam too, if you don't keep your own backup of saves. Steam doesn't fix this issue, but it also doesn't cause this issue.

As for game updates breaking its own save, well that's more the games fault than anything else. And again that could easily happen without Steam Cloud. Bear in mind Steam is simply saving the same saves we have now onto Steam cloud.

So really, any situation that can happen with it, can happen without it. It quite literally does nothing more than simply upload the saves to Steam Cloud.

Also don't forget a game developer can add a "save to steam" checkbox which can be configured to tell Steam which saves to upload and which ones to not upload. This way you could save the game normally and backup your own save if you are concerned about corruption (Again Cities Skylines does this ).

PS: Mentioning skylines the most as it is a perfect comparison for how a game with mods and such can handle Steam Cloud and it is also made by an indie studio (Albeit Larger)