The save game feature seems simple but it’s mind-blowing how it can return the exact state of a game with all elements/events organised in the correct order. Can anyone explain how it works?
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So really the amount of information that *needs* storage space can vary depending on the complexity of the game, network state requirements, anti-cheating measures, and whatnot.
Let’s take a game like the Witcher III. The only real things you’d need to truly save are quest journal data, inventory/stash, x/y coordinates and the area you logged out on, and profile/build data like level, acquired currency, skill point allocation. There’s creative ways to compress all this information also to minimize the amount of space saved, but lets just say for the most simplistic approach, with no anti-cheat concerns it just gets saved in a big JSON object. Realistically speaking that object wouldn’t even need to be that large, and serializing it to a file wouldn’t take a whole lot of disk space at all
Basically let’s just say we have sections for all of the above categories and just save it as plain text, or a catalogue of lists simply stating the IDs of items/quests you have or have completed, and the location data which is literally just x/y and zone. Write all of that information down in a notepad file in an easy to read format even if it’s not syntax correct, for an English speaker and then save it. That’s the maximum amount of disk space a save file really needs to take up, uncompressed.
Hint: it won’t be that large
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