Re: Can't find my characters from old games to make a World State

More work, and also requires me to remember every detail, instead of being pleasantly surprised when the game remembers something I had forgotten about because I thought it was minor. sigh. What, person who I recognize is not an EA employee and probably doesn't have answers, was wrong with importing save files?

I guess if they weren't creating really amazing, immersive rpg experiences and  then ruining it to some degree they wouldn't be EA's Bioware. Thank god for CDProjectRed.

@Pufferwockey I imagine the problem with importing save files for this game is it is a completely different engine than the previous games in the series. The Keep also, hopefully, will make life easier for future games regardless of the engine(s) they use (hopefully... though DAI uploading to the Keep is already not completely reliable). 

Personally I didn't mind the way we need to make world states in the Keep, I had so many DAI playthroughs it meant I got to make some interesting world states that never matched any of my DAO or DA2 playthroughs (some things I didn't even know were possible prior to seeing them in the Keep).  

One thing about importing saves, in addition to different engines, is different consoles too.  With the Keep, you can play one game on xbox, and then next with Playstation, and still continue.  You can also play through different generations of consoles without issue....when the Keep works correctly. 

I'm no expert on the matter, but I can't think of any reason that a new engine or console would be a barrier to reading a bunch of specific variables out of a save file and using them to build a world state. Saving games to the cloud should only have made it easier.

As for ease of making new world states.... Yeah sure, it's a nice option to have, but I wouln't trade it for the import system in a million years. Anyway I'm pretty sure the Mass Effect games eventually made tools for quickly going through choices of previous games, so it's not  like it's nessesary to pick one or the other anyway.

Ah well, it is what it is I guess. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

You can go looking for the flags to pick up if the flags are there.

That's why in Mass Effect 2 there had to be some questions asked in the shuttle to fill in a few gaps.

The Keep was the solution to Origins which was an older game still. A software solution that works across generations and platforms is a tough ask, so the Keep is a pretty good solution.

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@Pufferwockey wrote:

I'm no expert on the matter, but I can't think of any reason that a new engine or console would be a barrier to reading a bunch of specific variables out of a save file and using them to build a world state.

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Agreed. Reading data from a file is easy. There are third party tools that can read and write Mass Effect and Dragon Age saves, and other games have allowed save imports between engines. Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 run on the Eclipse and Lycium engines respectively. Both are updated versions the Odyssey engine which is an update of the Aurora engine. Witcher 2 (CD Projekt's Red Engine) can import save files made in Witcher 1 (BioWare's Aurora engine), so it can definitely be done.

The main benefits of the DA Keep are cross-platform and cross-generation save files, and also to solve the many import bugs that DA2 already had. The Keep never supported importing the actual plot flags from save files because there were too many contradictions (it only ever imported basic data like name, class, and so on). For instance, I had a world state in which Nathaniel survived the first game and was considered dead in DA2, which is a world state that's impossible to recreate in the Keep because it was an error. By making the player create a world state in the Keep, the mistakes that had already happened in importing DAO to DA2 could be addressed directly by the players.

I think it is the cross generational issues that they were trying to fix.  How many people still have their original saves from DAO now, is that the norm and will you have them in a format that you can move to the next platform you are going to play on??  What if you played on Xbox originally, and now have a PS5??  What if you started on consoles and moved to PC for mods, and you still wanted your original decisions??  The keep allows this when it works correctly, but it is clumsy at best to use.

Fixing errors in the saves flags is also a very good idea and also probably a consideration.