Hi, Dev! Light question. For betas and early access games, how come many have to wipe player saves with each version update but, others do not? How come updates for 1.0 games never do this? Are there any common reasons or is it case by case? Thanks!

boynextdoornews

The general rule for engagement here is that after players pay for the game, we can't ever take something in game away from them unless there was cheating or exploiting involved (and even then, we almost always do a rollback instead of a reset). Early Access is probably the one exception to this rule because we state outright from the jump that we may have to reset progress from time to time as new changes come online. We can never do this once the game is officially launched, because too many players have already spent time and money for a game product and taking something away from them makes them feel really really bad.

Now... the main reason we do this before release is because we're making major changes to the game before launch and we need to observe. Old talent trees may not be functional anymore - we may have deleted certain talents or completely rearranged the tree. The old character's tree progress may be completely broken, meaning the character might be unplayable. We may want to observe the leveling experience to verify that our tuning is working properly, so we don't want a character at max level from the jump. We may want to observe how players choose leveling areas and distribute themselves, so we want them to restart from zero. We might have added a parallel progression path or system we want to see players interact with as they level up. There are lots of reasons why we would want to reset progress.

We could try to do this kind of thing piecemeal (e.g. respec all character talents, reset all characters to level 1, etc.) but it's much easier and safer to wipe the slate clean completely. There are other benefits to a clean slate like how it encourages players to try something new and different (e.g. a new class, a new race, a new specialty, a new leveling path, etc.), but we primarily reset progress so that we can observe as many individual playthroughs of the game as we can before the game is released into the wild and we can no longer make any major changes to the launch game.

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