I was able to track my own past, including my past failures,

April 25, 2023 5:18 AM

I Booted Up a Six-Year-Old ‘Breath of the Wild’ Save and Tried to Understand My Past Self by Patrick Klepek [Waypoint] [Games by Vice] “When I booted The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this week, the most recent save file was dated April 9, 2017—almost six years ago exactly. The save sat in front of the game’s final boss, Calamity Ganon. In the spring of 2017, I beat Ganon, put the game down, and moved on. But with the game’s sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, due to arrive in a few weeks, I felt compelled to revisit what remains Nintendo’s most impressive release of the last decade. Doing so was a delightful form of time travel, an exercise in trying to piece together what Patrick Klepek was up to six years ago in Breath of the Wild. What were his priorities? What did he find interesting about the world? What weapons was he hauling around? I clearly made the markers on the world map, but, uh, I don’t know what any of them mean? I may have been the person who played this for 70+ hours back in 2017, but those memories left my brain the moment the Switch was turned off. They live on, instead, inside the save file.” [YouTube] [Livestream of Patrick confronting the above mentioned six-year-old save file.]

Bonus: My friend and his Pokémon save file [Eurogamer]

“What then, is my friend's save file? Looking at it now, I believe it's a fragment of his inner narrative captured through code. Sure, it's just a little plastic case containing bits of metal and plastic, but it's one which contains a multitude of experience. Just as current snakes through its circuitry causing the ones and zeros to twirl, an impulse fires in my brain, and a curtain is peeled back revealing images from his past I've never known. Like puffs of smoke swaying into view, these fictions harden and dissolve before the distant snap of a sliding door transports me back to the present. In drawing out the artful and the expressive from the cold and empirical, I get to know him better. Perhaps more than any other medium, video games have this incredible pull. Hit play on someone else's save file and you're sucked into a computational universe, a virtual place where one part of their narrative becomes pliable, able to be picked apart by the character you embody, or the puzzle you're solving, or the platforms you're crossing. All these options! And yet a funny part of me is reluctant to mess around with my friend's save file, as I'm afraid doing so will rupture the fabric of his timeline and gradually cause it to unspool at our feet.”

posted by Fizz (17 comments total)

Going back to an old-save is always surprising & also a little bit frustrating. Usually, I find myself creating a new save so I can learn all the forgotten gameplay mechanics & button layout/controller mapping AND then after a few hours, I will return to my save to try to pick-up where I last left off.

I do appreciate that one modern trend I see in many games is to have a short story-update or recap/summary of where the player is in a game via the loading screen. A kind of "Previously on LOST...." type of mechanic. I hope more and more games leave this in. Witcher III was one of the first games I recall to institute that and it helps when you sometimes return to a game a few months or even years later.
posted by Fizz at 5:58 AM on April 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

This phenomenon really underscores how our past, present and future selves aren't really the same.

I have a Genshin Impact account from 1-2 years back with about 54,000 primogems on it that I cannot bring myself to play again. It simply feels like playing someone else's account for them - it's not mine anymore.

Yet so many things in life, from way back in childhood, depend us being able to thread our way from the past to the future. I'm going to tough it out and study for three hours instead of watching TV because my future self will want to get a better mark on their exam. I'm going to wake up early and exercise and eat healthy so my future self will be healthier. It's almost an act of pure altruism.
posted by xdvesper at 6:27 AM on April 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

My favorite form of this is really stateful games that require a lot of planning and deep thought... Kerbal Space Program (ooooh, look - a half-assembled network of keosynchronous communication satellites, and untold number of missions to different planets at various stages of transfer orbits) and Oxygen Not Included (oh god where do I even start... if I don't remember how this sanitation system was working and what the backup system was supposed to be when we run out of Key Resource I will kill everyone before I even start to figure out what this magma-powered steam engine was supposed to be doing) come to mind.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:48 AM on April 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The New Nostalgia: The Before Times, Any Of It

(but I get it though. After finishing the The Last of Us series, I dusted off the game and found that, even though I'd upgraded to the enhanced version, it ported over my saved games from the original without my asking, and once again I was reminded of how the game hit back then versus now.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:52 AM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Coming back to a ~70% complete Outer Wilds save a couple of years later was an odd experience. All these half understood clues leading to what had seemed like dead ends that turned out to be not so dead. Turned out they'd patched in some extra info and clues in the meantime, which made the endgame much more tractable to a dummy like me.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:37 AM on April 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oof...that hit home (One of the root words for nostalgia is sorrow I guess). With a preordered new Zelda weeks away from arriving I've been wondering about returning to my last Breath of the Wild save - for me I kind of gave up on it due to the DLC. I just found them impossible to complete so rage quit after a couple goes. I totally have forgotten all of the combat mechanics so I am dragging my heels about it. I didn't even defeat Ganon as I usually try to finish all the DLC before completing a game.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:01 AM on April 25, 2023

I really wish games had a play-test area set aside in the main menu, like a training room that just lets you mess around and fuss with game-play mechanics. I mean, I guess you could just dive back into a game and do that and mess up a bunch and then re-load your save once you got the hang of it, but still.
posted by Fizz at 9:14 AM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Breath of the Wild does have some training rooms. I have forgotten the controls and I think a good refresher would be to teleport to one of the challenges that limit you to specific equipment, like the Trial of the Sword, or Eventide Island.
posted by Phssthpok at 9:28 AM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just want to bring up one of the worst training areas ever: Bayonetta’s load screens. You are thrown into an empty world with a long list of all the button combos you can press, and the ability to run around and do them. Sounds great, right? Why am I saying it’s the worst one ever?

Because once the level’s loaded, you’re booted out of the training zone. Immediately and unceremoniously. If a door appeared to the level that you could walk into at your leisure, it would have been the *best* training zone ever - it comes up organically throughout the game, giving you a chance to expand your skills, or refresh them if you’re revisiting a decade-old save and deciding to try and get good enough to improve your grade on a few levels.

So close, and yet so far. Maybe they kept it for Bayo 2/3 and fixed this, I dunno, those became Nintendo exclusives and the last Nintendo console I owned was a GameCube.
posted by egypturnash at 9:34 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Breath Of The Wild was the first video game I'd played devotedly in years, when I bought it and a Switch and started playing in 2018.

I've done all the DLC and beaten the game in Master Mode; so has my son, and it was an epic quest we shared at the time

I spent months during the pandemic lockdown playing a BOTW game, where my friend and I would trade screenshots of Link and the other person would have to recreate the shot in the same location.

My "Hero's Path" mode covers every inch of Hyrule by now. My child has moved on to watching Twitch streamers, and my friend and I no longer speak. Lots of bittersweet memories associated with every part of that game, for me.
posted by daisystomper at 10:25 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

There is no feeling in the world quite like loading into an old Minecraft world, looking around, and finding your dog sitting there patiently waiting for you to return.
posted by anastasiav at 11:33 AM on April 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

I kind of love deleting old save files. It provides that absolute certainty that "I'm not the same person as I was when I made this save game" and I'm fine with that. Time continually moves on. I have restarted the same game multiple times and sunk more hours into it than most people have completing the game, yet I haven't even gotten to the middle.

I had a hankering for some Darkest Dungeon recently - I reinstalled the game, Steam pulled my cloud saves from 2017 - I deleted the save without even loading it.

Most games have their interesting parts like novel game mechanics or characters front-loaded, so starting a game from the beginning is the best part. Most video game stories are instantly forgettable, so I don't feel like I'm missing out.
posted by meowzilla at 11:40 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's frightening to think that there might be some perfectly preserved Sim City 2000 cities of mine sitting somewhere on a floppy disk at the back of a closet exactly as I left them.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:14 PM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Not sure this is explained in the article for those who haven't played BotW. The "Hero's Path" daisystomper mentions is something I've never seen before in a video game.

On the map, it will show you a trail of everywhere you've been for pretty much the whole game (or the most recent 200 hours if you've played longer than that). You can easily see which parts of the map you've never been to yet.

I remember a Bungie video about player statistics in Halo—they generated a heat map that averaged the paths of all players so they could see which parts of the map had the most and least activity, and they used that to revise and balance the game. I thought that was very cool at the time. I imagine that now a lot of video game companies collect data like this about what players are doing in the game. But this is the first time I've seen it made available to the player.

It makes going back to BotW years later much less daunting.
posted by straight at 2:12 PM on April 25, 2023

I left Xenoblade Chronicles 2 where I stopped playing after getting to the final boss (but not defeating it) because the weather was getting nicer so there were other things to do but if I were to start it up now I'd need to train myself back up to get my timing down and to remember which combos worked best. I really should have finished it at that time.

I've got a Skyrim save that I stopped playing a couple of years ago and I don't want to go back to it because I don't want to have to reacquaint myself with everything I was doing at the time.

More recently I stopped playing No Man's Sky last month, again nicer weather has played a part in this, and I'll probably come back to it at some point but it's a good question on when that will be.

As far as BOTW is concerned, I only have one save on it and after I finished it and stopped playing my kid took it over and has been playing it on and off for the last 5 and a bit years. It's his save now but he'll still hand the controller to me when he has a tough enemy to fight (he's a better player than me now but he really doesn't like dying) or a puzzle he can't work out. For TOTK we'll probably make our own saves so that we can each discover things for the first time.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:23 PM on April 25, 2023

This was a while ago now, but I decided on a whim to go back to my old BOTW save file to fool around. I had apparently been sneaking around in the castle the last time I played, but I was in the mood for some more lightweight wandering. So, I jumped off the battlements intending to pull out the glider. And then realized in mid-air that I had absolutely no idea what any of the controls were any more. Some frantic button mashing found the "plummet even more quickly do your death" button rather than anything I was hoping for. I'm sure I could have figured it back out again, but it was such a short and hilariously disastrous play session that I just shut it back off and was done.
posted by duien at 5:02 PM on April 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Hero's Path in Breath of the Wild is genius. It makes pulling up an old save far easier. It also allows finding areas you've never been and discovering what's there. I don't have a good memory for where I've been in real life and worse for video games, and I like when games don't rely on remembering everything you've been doing.
posted by lookoutbelow at 8:34 PM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]