Rumour: Cloud Saves Will Be Supported On All Existing Switch Games By Default

Nice artwork with the 3,5' inch floppy discs

Hope that this true! Cloud saves are very important to me, especially if your Switch dies.

People were jumping to conclusions yesterday. Hopefully this clears it up for everyone! Blame Nintendo. Always

Nintendo: You need to ask us if you want older games to NOT support cloud saves.

2K: okay

Nintendo: So for example, if you've got any reasons like... just tell us

2K: cool

Nintendo: like I don't know, 5GB save files or anything

2K: I'll think about it

I hope this is a lesson to all the people that got so angry at nintendo because of a rumour. At least wait till the rumours are confirmed before ranting.

It didn't sound like the user had much control over when cloud back-ups were made, so I'm not sure how useful it would be to rewind. It would be nice to know how often back-ups are made.

Some people will still twist this into being Nintendo's fault if a certain game doesn't enable cloud save support. I can almost guarantee it sadly :/

But what about playing on-the-go? I almost always have to play when I commute, and accepted hi-score uploading is impossible for me, but what if I have to resume a game or save it when I'm on the bus?

@Moroboshi876 it’ll obviously sync with the cloud when it can. If you are desperate to back up you could get online via your phone.

Wait, "rewinding" saves? Is it going to take multiple snapshots of save files, and let a user choose which version of the save history to use?

Awesome. Glad to hear that. And @Darren You get 10 points for the use of 'malarkey'. Lol

@neufel Arguably, Nintendo should be able to support a 5GB save file. Backup/restore might be slow, but it can work in the background.

"Sorry, NBA 2K18 cannot be played whilst the save is being backed up to the cloud."
"Estimated time : 7 hours"

@Moroboshi876

Do you live under a rock?

Like all cloud saves and services like that, it syncs to local storage when it can, and there is a internet connection. I can't see how this could be a problem?!?

If your Switch isn't online very often, then you can't use cloud saves that much. But I can't see why you can't bring it online a couple of times doing a week to let it sync your saves. Then backup saves can't be so important for you?

@beazlen1 Just saving progress. I need to do it in my console, not on a cloud. It's not a matter of desperation, it's just playing on a bus and being able to save.

Besides, I don't know how to use my cell phone's data to access internet with the Switch.

Anyway, hi-scores of Hamster games for instance don't sync. If you don't have connection when the message about saving your scores to the leaderboards pops up, doesn't matter if the game itself saves the score, because you won't be able to upload it to the Hamster leaderboards. I'm positive, I've seen it.

@dres No, I don't, I'm genuinely asking people who know about these things like you. So I will be able to save internally and later sync it to the cloud if I want, then?

@Moroboshi876

Yes.

Cloud saves work differently than a simple highscore. It's actual save data. This is always saved locally on your current playing device, the way normal saves also works now, and then synced to the cloud later.

@dres OK, as long as the internal saving is always there, I'm good.

It's just I don't use cloud saving because I still see it as something I don't control. I know my Switch could break one day, but if that happens the loss of my console will be my main concern.

@neufel, lmao i hear that why the hem are they so large.
Someone on their dev team is doing it wrong man.

@chardir in my opionion, 2 should explain what the fcuk they need 5 GB for in the first place, there are entire games that take up less space than that.

@Jayenkai LMAO

Now I'm even more convinced Pokemon titles won't have the cloud. The Gameboy classics opted out of VC's commonplace quicksave feature for the same reason.

@Moroboshi876 I play mostly on the go, so using mobile internet is routine for me. Not familiar with iOS but if your phone is by any chance an Android one, that tends to be as simple as turning "mobile hotspot" on and off through the slide-down notification panel found in many interfaces by default. First setup involves just checking the password (or changing it to your own) and entering it when you first connect the Switch (with your phone seen as a Wi-Fi network there).

Data-wise, downloading and updating games can naturally take a toll on your plan, but eShop browsing, cloud syncs (judging by the Vita experience) and even multiplayer are quite modest in that regard.

@nhSnork Thanks! I'll check it out. And yes, my phone is an Android one, just like most people's at least here. iPhone is for rich. Lol

@Moroboshi876 you actually raise a good point. What if people don’t want cloud back ups. Can we turn it off? Presumably we can leaving the internet connection live.

@ICISAZEL Oh yeah, 2k have definitely done something stupid, I just think Nintendo will be able to handle it anyway.

@Moroboshi876 All devices store data on local storage when they are offline, including your phone. Once they get signal they upload and download automatically. You don't have to do anything.

I wonder if Nintendo stops supporting cloud saves for Switch in the future what's the point? I mean, Nintendo stops supporting devices very soon compared to any other company.

Hang about, won't that mean people can start exploiting this for Splatoon 2's sub-abilities and Salmon Run Rewards?

@NCChris Nintendo will release a Splatoon 2 update disabling the cloud save option Mark my words.

@BlueOcean They do? This was ONLY the case on the Wii, because of the Gamespy servers being shut down.

A paid for service won't just shut down, though.

@sanderev DS, Wii, Miiverse, Wii U Chat...

@BlueOcean DS & Wii because of Gamespy. Miiverse & Wii U Chat were extra's on the Wii U that almost nobody used and / or required constant moderation from Nintendo.

@sanderev I don't care about the reasons, why are you justifying this to me?

I feel like they could avoid save abuse via the cloud simply by putting a limit on how frequently you can use it. Like you can't pull your cloud save for a specific game more than twice in 24 hours or something like that. Most of us want cloud saves purely as a back up in case something nasty happens to our devices. So it would be very rare that we would be pulling those backups and even more rare where we would have a reason to pull them more than once or twice in a day.

@BlueOcean I'm not justifying. I only explain the reasoning.

@Yorumi I think the information is part of the delayed Direct.

@Moroboshi876

What control are you talking about? You currently have no control over your save files on Switch anyway. You can't move them, or make a physical backup of them. It's all locked.

Cloud saves is a nonsense step in the right direction, and there isn't much to think about. It will just sync/mirror your current save files to the cloud from time to time, and be a reliable backup if you lose your Switch or buy a new one.

I hope Nintendo will make more local backup options available to us down the line, but these cloud saves are a good start.

@beazlen1

I would guess that you could just turn "Auto Sync" off, and just do it manually instead? Similar to how it works on PS4?

@dimi you mean save icons. I found a 3D printer one of those in a draw labelled "GauBan's College Work 1997"

Love people saying that people yesterday were upset by rumors when this is just more rumors.

It's the perfect example of fragmented thinking lol.

@saintayu

Why? The statement isn't wrong.

People should still not be upset about rumors, just as they shouldn't be to confident or exited about this new rumor as well.

@dres because every comment I've seen that mentions it acts like this is an official announcement that somehow debunks it.

It's all rumors. So we agree.

I’m so confused 😐

So what's Nintendos 'good reason' for not offering any way to back up save data other than some mysterious service that launches well over 12 months later?

@Moroboshi876 using your phone is easy for internet. Set up a hot spot and link console to it just like any WiFi network. I do this almost daily, been playing rocket league, doom, fortnite and now paladins on my lunch breaks. I get an hour and need 15 minutes to eat. Half of my gaming everyday comes from playing at lunch. Don’t have time with wife/kids/dogs/house but having a switch keeps me playing a couple hours a day.

@sanderev They'll always find reasons, the thing is that I would like to know what if Nintendo drop saves cloud support in a few years like they usually do with their online services.

@BlueOcean You'd just pull the data to the local system the same as if you need to access the data for offline play. There's going to be customers out there that will start off with a subscription then cancel, so the service needs to allow moving between cloud backups to having it disabled gracefully off the bat, let alone leading up to a potential decommission.

@Smigit I know, I mean if your data gets corrupted in the scenario I was describing. For the users you are referring to it is a way to change console, basically.

No idea why this has anything to do with developers. It is cloud save, it saves whatever you have on the device storage.

Whatever they decide - just select the save file in storage and put it in the cloud.

@BlueOcean You'd probably be stuffed the same with any other console. Ideally we'll see more robust data management include SD Card saves in the coming years though.

I hope this is the case, don't want to lose my 415+ hour save file of XC2.

@beazlen1 again, going by PSN experience, cloud saves are normally synchronized by user request or automatically by a customizable schedule. Steam and GOG also tend to sync the data automatically when you exit the game. Time will tell how many of these options Switch will boast, but I doubt any of it will be "but thou must".

That's not cheating, that's save-scumming. A totally different thing.
The goal of cheating is to give you an unfair advantage.
The goal of savescumming is to be in control of your personal game experience - or even its narrative.

There is no valid reason to have the cloudsave feature disabled.
Cloudsaves should be enabled, period.

This is a rumor that I really want to believe. Still, I'd like some solid info...which is likely in that delayed Direct. It's fine, I can wait a few more days.

Well then we already know pokemon won't support cloud saving.

To be honest saving in general for the Switch shouldn't had been a problem to begin with, there should be external saving, internal saving, and cloud saving in this time and age. Nintendo created this problem by making it complicated for their audience and refuse to have external memory saving, something that would had made it easy for their consumers if they don't want to cloud save. For the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U there's a bunch of ways for you to save, for the Switch it seems your system is your memory card which should had never happen. It's like they look at the Wii Mini (Nintendo's first console with internal saving) with its limited storage space and say hey let's try that for Switch even though it's gonna have a microSD card anyways.

I assumed this would be the case. If it isn't then what a stupid decision.

@neufel @chardir @ICISAZEL @Jayenkai @chardir everyone thinks NBA 2K save files are 5GB. I own the game and have had tons of fun with it and there isn't anywhere near 5GB of save data on my Switch. What's more 2K has been cloud saving to their own servers for free for a year now

@shani "That's not cheating, that's save-scumming. A totally different thing.
The goal of cheating is to give you an unfair advantage.
The goal of savescumming is to be in control of your personal game experience - or even its narrative."

Except if your control of the narrative lets you defy the game's probability based systems versus other players to gain an advantage, such as with Splatoon. That's speculated to be the core reason Nintendo won't let us have local backups at all!

Edit: Which to be fair is their own dumb fault for not storing online player profiles.....online!

@NEStalgia Of course there may be scenarios where both things might overlap, I don't deny that. But imho players should be given as much freedom as possible.

Splatoon is a good example. I sometimes used savescumming on the Wii U when rerolling a piece of gear (for the umpteenth time) gave me something completely different than I wanted. Those damn snails are so previous!

But to give more context, I believe that was completely justified, because when you've played the game for several hundred hours (in my case >600 hours) and after countless rerolls you still weren't able to get the gear you want, what's even the point of playing?
One of my main goals in my personal Splatoon 'narrative' was getting the perfect gear for my playstyle and then playing more ranked with it. But the system was so broken that I eventually had to savescum - and even then I didn't get what I want.

Creating the perfect gear was really one of my main motivations (apart from improving my ranks) to play Splatoon every day so it was very important for my enjoyment of the game.
Luckily they fixed the whole gear system in Splatoon2.

I never used savescumming to regain a rank I lost though because that would be cheating. But even if people did that I absolutely agree that it's still Nintendo's fault for not storing online profiles online... I mean come on, who does that?!
Besides, one shouldn't forget that savescumming was an arduous process, it took quite a long time to copy and load savegames just to redo one reroll. So that made sure people wouldn't exploit it too often.

Meanwhile, in Football Manager 18 I sometimes use savescumming because of the narrative I have planned for that season or part of the season. If things go terribly wrong, I might reload an earlier save etc.
And that's a perfect example for a game where savescumming is really completely harmless.

@shani With Splatoon, I won't pretend to actually like the random roll system. Nintendo loves their games of chance....but it drives me crazy! But scumming was also a problem and a form of cheating. While it didn't give people anything other than they couldn't have had at random it made the ability to have certain combinations that were more practical and more advantageous more common than random chance should have allowed. Thus scumming players got an advantage over non-scumming players due to having far higher odds of more useful builds. If, instead of via scumming, they were obtaining that gear by buying it through microtansactions the game would have been blasted as pay2win. People ignored the effect since scumming was "free" but it presents the same "pay2win" or at least "incorrectly use data restoration 2 win" In that sense it definitely affects the experience of other players in a negative way (and then of course in top ranks anyone who wasn't scumming was severely disadvantaged.)

That wasn't a good situation to have and it definitely should be prevented if at all possible. Blocking system-wide backups wasn't really a good way to go about it. Blocking even cloud backups would still not be a way to go about it. And it still stems from them not storing character profiles online at the start....you'd think they'd learn to do that by now! It's not hard Nintendo...really it isn't!

(I LOLed that even with scumming you couldn't get the build you wanted though....eff that blasted urchin!)

And yeah, I don't mind "scumming" in single player games. Though honestly I don't understand why games just don't allow "save anywhere" like nearly every PC game used to. It's a design thing. Diablo II PC didn't allow it. Skyrim Switch does allow it. It's purely the designers choices but...why why why, do the designers insist on making us find save points in 2018?

While I totally agree about the underlying problem, I wouldn't say save-scummers necessarily had an advantage over other players.
A non-save-scummer might have got the desired gear via random chance while a save-scummer still had to live with subpar gear.
Of course the opposite also happened but I don't think it had an impact if you consider the whole Splatoon population.

Yeah savescumming in FM is just reloading a savegame because you can save any time (expect during a match). ^^

There might be sections of certain games where I can understand not being to save in between (like going through an obstacle course or something), but other than that, I'm absolutely in favor of saying anywhere, like in BotW. I hate looking for save points, especially when I just want to close the game and do something else.

Games that constantly autosave are also fine though. Rise of the Tomb Raider really was a positive surprise in that regard. In the beginning I fell down the cliffs every step of the way but luckily the game saved after every step. ^^

I'd better go play Splatoon 2 one more time before I save some money by passing up this service altogether. I'm glad the people who want cloud saves are getting them, but it isn't worth the investment to me.

The specific example of random weapon drops is funny to me. We wouldn't want people to try and bypass that pain-in-the-neck feature, would we? The RNG is the only thing I don't like in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

"It has been confirmed that the upcoming games Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! & Let's Go, Eevee! will not have compatibility with the Save Data Cloud backup feature that's accessible to Nintendo Switch users that are a part of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription which goes live later this month."

So it won't let you have a backup save of these long RPGs, and presumably the much, MUCH longer & time consuming Pokemon games in 2019. Why even bother?

Don't want people save summing your games? Just have save backups be automatic for those games. Problem mostly solved.

EA: Oh we can think of 50 BS reasons why we wouldnt.....if we had more games on the system that is.

Is this confirmed? I just saw online where the description of Splatoon 2 said it does not support cloud saves. This is right from Nintendo’s North American website. Also listings for NBA2K19, FIFA 19, Dead Cells, Dark Souls and Pokemon: Let’s Go all have the same message: “This game does not support Save Data Cloud backup.”

@Yorumi I thought about that a year ago, but I'm beginning to wonder... perhaps... just maybe... Nintendo still does not have a fully realized plan on actually implementing their "modern" online infrastructure, and they're still scrambling as we speak just to put everything together. My guess is that the initial offering will somehow manage to be a lesser service than the free Miiverse and online infrastructure of the Wii U. It's bad enough that they're charging people money for P2P connections, and people somehow still believe that the multiplayer sessions on games like Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe are being hosted through a server. How much worse could it get?

@shoeses Nintendo/Game Freak NEVER allowed you to back up saves for Pokemon games since the GameCube era. It's no surprise that they are not allowing you to do this for Let's Go, and they more than likely won't for the 2019 games. This is all so people can't easily clone Pokemon.

@MrPerson0 I'd say it's a surprise - for how hard people say how hard of workers the people at Nintendo are, they're going out of their way to be lazy with these clouds saves by just not enabling them instead of finding ways to actually stop cheating. I was gonna get this to back up my hundreds of hours I put into the Pokemon RPGs, but I guess that would require effort on Nintendo's part.

@sanderev I've tried talking sense to some people here. Just don't bother. Save yourself that kind of unnecessary headache.

When the service shuts down, "sucks for you." Nintendo's getting money for this service, so it won't just be like, "hey, screw this thing that costs money to maintain," because this is a paid service, whereas others were free and therefore useless to them but... Once it's done, it's done. Competent save backups already exist for the Switch, Nintendo just didn't have anything to do with it.

So why does Splatoon 2 say it wont support it..??

@Bizzyb Because it won't and neither will Darksouls. I thought NL released an updated article but I guess not. Go here: https://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-says-vast-majority-of-switch-titles-will-support-cloud-saves-ensuring-fair-play-with-those-that-dont/

@Yorumi Give Nintendo a break, sure they're the weakest when it comes to online stuff - but all this internet stuff is a fad right? Being able to back up game data is a fad right?