Saves of your progress / characters

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#1

Heyo

watching the latest #BadassQuestions for #Battleborn episode brought up one question:

as a BL, BL2 and TPS player I’m familiar with local saves of my characters, which could be augmented and as such were prone to cough some pretty alterations. I know, the mentioned BL series is not about PvP so I couldn’t care less when one guy over-over-oomph’ed his BL character to stomp story mode, I mean, it’s his time and I can simply chose not to play with that sort of people.

now in prospect of Battleborn, which I will be playing too, how are the saves handled? Is this going to be local again? Or are you guys storing those server-side? Both have some kind of advantage and disadvantage, speaking of:

  • local saves = good for modding / augmenting, bad for multiplayer in versus
  • online saves = good for balancing, bad for soloplayers which would need to uphold connection to your server, even when playing local storymode?

thx for shedding some light onto my question :smile: since I couldn’t find it in the FAQ

#2

In my opinion I think it will be online saves, a lot of games are going online only so maybe they will keep it the same.

#3

I can 99% garuntee that it will be local, I’m sure (at least hopefully) GBX wouldn’t make the game unplayable when not connected to the Internet.

Remember this game isn’t a MOBA (definetly not in business model sense), it’s a retail game that has a campaign, splitscreen and (maybe, no offical confirmation yet) offline bots. Why would they make a large portion of the appeal of those aspects null?

It’s also on consoles, which are traditionally a lot more “offline friendly” than PC.

Online saves should only ever be used on games that are 100% online, so you wouldn’t be able to play anyway if there’s no internet. Online verification for singleplayer is something I am VERY against, and I REALLY hope it doesn’t become the norm.

Look what happened to Borderlands 1, gamespy shutdown and not only was multiplayer affected but the game didn’t work properly on PS3 (it wouldn’t save, I lost a perfect parts Torgue Anarchy), the issue was worked-around by disconnecting your PS3 from the Internet, and eventually fully restored (thank you so much GBX). It was all ok, but issues like that are going to become more and more common place as companies shutdown severs for things they assume no-ones playing. I still play games from 1996, will I be able to play games from 2015 in 2034? I hope so, but I’m getting more and more scared I won’t.

Online cheating may end up being an issue, but I’m sure the combination of Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Gearbox will sort that out. They were very lax about that sort of stuff in Borderlands (rightfully so, as it wasn’t competitive) but I’m sure cheaters will be dealt with more harshly in this game.

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#4

You are mixing something up here. Your character level will affect both story AND PvP. So it’ll be server sided.

#5

Why can’t it be client side?

Are you saying that if I play offline, all my characters won’t have customisation and such unlocked?

#6

I’ll try to show you all cases that i can think of. But before that, remember that PvP and solo share one progression level.

  1. No offline mode. Simple and effective against cheaters. You can catch pretty much all of them with this configuration. At least if GBX isn’t ■■■■■■■■. And I think much higher of them than that.
  2. Playable Online and Offline. Opens the gates for cheating gear/money. Even if they added plausibilty-gates; cheating within limits is still cheating.
  3. No offline progression. Doesn’t allow for cheating, but doesn’t reward playing without connection. Still better than no offline mode.
  4. They find another method to offer an offline experience WITH progression, while keeping cheating in check.

NOTE: No offline progression only means, that you can’t unlock stuff while playing offline. Stuff that was unlocked already would still be available.

#7

@Mr_Sandman There will be no offline bots, story mode scales difficulty to amount of players (see latest #badasscommunityquestions)

also yes, your four options extend my concerns from OP. But still for ‘offline mode’ to work with all your unlocks, you would need to ‘update’ your offline profile somehow … i see many conflicts and still ways to alter the vanilla game

#8

Shouldn’t be too hard, i think. Just download the online progress while the player is connected. Allow the player to alter his offline game as he pleases; who cares? But once they connect again, the server save regains priority and all the unrightful customization is gone.
Should be the best way to offer an offline mode, while keeping the official saves untouchable.

#9

well we can discuss any advantages / disadvantages / feelings all day long, but I just want to know how GBX is planning it :wink:

#10

We don’t know. Call for the mighty Jythri.

#11

Oh mighty @Jythri hear our call, we can sacrifice some Kriegs on a badass altar, if you don’t mind appearing? =)

OKOK, I’ll add a Maya, deal?

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#12

If you play the Borderlands series on PC, your progress is saved to a server. When you play offline, your progress gets saved locally, then at the first applicable online instance, the local save is backed up through Steam. It would be very easy for that system to have a set of checks in it to insure that impossible gamesave files are flagged as cheats. Additionally, Gearbox could just implement a “cheat” flag on saves. This flag could be read when entering online mode and tell the server which characters can be used in PvP and which ones cannot. However, this would require Gearbox basically allowing a cheat engine in the game (not really sure how they would feel about that, someone would have to weigh in)

Tl;Dr? even with existing gamesave implementation, Gearbox has some options.

#13

Your progress, stats, and inventories are all stored online.

There are certainly pros and cons to this. The pros are pretty huge, though.

Biggest advantage is that you’ll play the game on dedicated servers, which have regional server centers. So, hopefully ping is kept low and problems of host migration and host disadvantage are not even present.

Another advantage is that it lets us design features we couldn’t in Borderlands. Hardcore mode is one. Hardcore mode (and similar type of high-challenge modes) tend to only be worthwhile as bragging rights when you can reasonably assure that you can’t cheat it. What’s the point when someone can just copy in an old save profile if they die or lose?

There’s also a big advantage with preventing cheating in competitive. It can still happen, but when the server is authoritative, we have a lot more ability to find and lock down cheats to help keep the competitive games fair.

There are some other things we want to do, hopefully, involving leaderboards and tournaments and the like (won’t be at launch) and all of those dreams, again, depend on our ability to maintain the integrity of Story and Versus play. We have to assure that you actually earned what you earned.

Thanks for the question!

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#14

Is there anything that is save locally? Again like TF2(I keep bringing that up) where I can play offline, just without any of my profile unlocks/inventory? Could I still upload my offline play session to my online profile when I get a stable connection?

I’m asking in case this game keeps track of every little thing we do, like enemies killed, shots fired etc. Would things like this still be tracked in an offline session and stored to the cloud?

#15

I see, thanks for your thourougly explained answer. I have the feeling that you guys do the right things right, carry on :smiley:

#16

Online saves are great to prevent cheating but please make an offline mode so the game can still be played in some capacity with no internet. A copy of the save could be stored locally to allow solo / local co-op offline players to retain their progression and then revert to the online save when online to prevent cheating?

Even a basic offline mode with nothing unlocked and no saving would be useful. I personally don’t always have internet access due to work so I know what it’s like, and I’m grateful that I can still practice multiplayer games against bots while offline in games like TF2 CS:GO and Insurgency.

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#17

This makes me so happy. Thank you @Jythri