Don't Start A New Game Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild If You Want To Keep Your Save Data

I could see one of my friends clicking "new game" as a joke to make me freak only to find that my game is lost forever.........cool can't wait

This is such a huge oversight on Nintendo's part. It's always been a hassle with Pokémon, but at least somewhat understandable due to the whole trading and fighting nature of the game.

This though? I can't imagine the outrage that would've been out there if this had happened with The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid V, Mass Effect: Andromeda or Horizon: Zero Dawn. Just the thought of having to create another user account for a second playthrough is absurd, no matter how easy it is to create one.

This means you can't branch your game either, i.e. create a second save and continue both games separately.

I have one major worry with this. They better implement a second save for the hard mode this summer! It would be an absolute pain to set up a user account for hard mode

Strange decision from Nintendo. I know Nintendo are famed for their strange decisions but really not sure what the thinking is behind this.

I mean with all those auto-saves Nintendo could always add a feature to lock one or 2 from getting dropped off.... maybe with the update When the dlc comes out?.... yeah probably not.

Oh well, I always have a guest account on all my consoles these days anyway. And I can't see myself wanting multiple save games running at the same time either.

Hm, doesn't load game allow for multiple saves back? Or does new game actually erase that entire array?

Doesn't it prompt any kind of warning before starting a new game your savegames will get overwritten? That's at least what I would expect.

Makes zero sense, but that's Nintendo sometimes.

You can actually disable having to select a user when you start a game in the options... I have and it just jumps straight into the game... although I do only have the one account on the console, and never tried it out before I found the option, so I don't actually know how much difference it makes.

What happens if you accidentally hit new game, does it just start, no confirmation, then your old saves are overwritten?

Must test.

I mean.....yeah.

Easy fix.

Guest account

Ah, it does ask for your confirmation before starting a new save, it says overwrite previous save data?

I thought this only overwrites your auto saves?

If you do a manual save you should be able to keep more than one save on an account

How is this not clear?

Yet another +1 for Wii U.

Ok, just checked, my old save had 2 auto saves and a manual save, easy to tell from the time they saved. Created a new game and it had 2 new auto saves that did not write over the old auto saves, creating a new manual save overwrites the old manual save. So, even if you start a new game, as long as you don't do a manual save, you'll be fine. And then there's the auto saves that could still be intact.

This seems unnecessary, surely it can't be that hard to allow multiple saves.
When I finished OOT I immediately started through again.

why

Wow... that's craziness. Shame. That's all I can say on that..

But people are forgetting how quick and painless it is to set up a new user account and if you have alot of people sharing your games, your game won't get cluttered with dozens of save files which could accidentally get overwritten anyways. I personally like it alot.

But Nintendo should update the Switch to make people more aware of the profile features.

While I personally don't need a second save, this is indeed strange: is this the first Zelda game to do this?

That is not news. The game tells you.

Many thanks for the info.

So what happens with the Wii U's version?

What about the Wii U version? Is that stuck on 1 per user too?

This has annoyed me since launch and is a tremendous oversight. Why doesn't the game require the current save file to be deleted before starting a new game like all Zelda games before it?

Will I get prompted at least three times if I'm sure I want to overwrite if I by accident select "new game"? If not, this is UI design is worthy of the "Game Poop Award of the Century"!

It is surprising that there are a dozen or so features lacking on the Switch which Wii U had at launch! Password protection on accounts would at least prevent other people to accidentally delete my Zelda save data!

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

"Yet another +1 for Wii U."

Are you serious? I usually have two game saves on my cartridges...... All of the other games have let you do this. This really should be fixed.

This is news? The game warns you when you select New Game that it will replace your save data.

What next? "Nintendo Switch goes on standby when you press the on / off button!"

I'm surprised it appeared on Kotaku and that it warranted reposting.

-No multiple save slots = Bad
-No backup option = Worse
-No cloud backup = Abysmal
-Not keeping quicksaves either = .......

Yeah, there is having only one save slot and there is stuff like that which is extremely unflexible.
Granted, BotW isn't a game one would start over constantly, but the fact that you can't make backups is becoming more and more of a problem.

@Mainer82 So just set up a second account...

@BornInNorway81 You get prompted.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Up to -69 now!

Animal Crossing New Leaf did same thing too (1 Save Slot for 1 Cartridge).
But unlike Breath of the Wild, if I accidentally click New Game, it just only lead you to 2nd character (No Data Loss at all).
Unless if you accidentally choose Re-create Town and you agree with that.

Now does this only apply to the Switch?

It's a bit inconvenient but how is creating a new account challenging in any way?

PC games, or at least the ones I picked one, have only had one slot for a while now and there is no work around for that (excluding getting into the game's files). At least there is a way to have another slot on the Switch.

This is one of my biggest complaints about massive modern games like this. Xenoblade X and FF15 were the same way.

This is fairly obvious isn't it? The same way you can't have more than one save file per user for Mario Kart 8, or Pokémon. It's not even odd that you can't start a new game and not save it, because it auto saves so of course it wipes the existing data. They definitely need a back up system though, because accidently losing a save file of this size would be devastating.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE The Wii U does the same thing. It does warn you ahead of time though, and your auto saves from your old file will be available until they all get overwritten by the new auto saves. ( Which wouldn't be too long... Maybe 40 minutes of gameplay or so. )

Honestly it is a bit of a letdown that we don't have save files, but creating another profile isn't that big a deal, really.

Can people really not figure out why Nintendo did this? They tried to hide the web browser...and locked down save files. Hmmm....maybe they don't want it fully hacked before Christmas and take away from game sales? Every exploit for a Nintendo console has been a backdoor with a save file or a web based payload...so I totally understand why they did it. I just cant figure out the people that keep typing "WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS!" or "MAKES NO SENSE"...you can't really be that dense.

I mean yeah, hardware that's fully hackable will sell, but it does no favor to software sales.

I don't think this is so bad. Perhaps even good for ease of use. It's easy to create accounts. When you start a game switch will ask me at least which account to start the game with. It kind of bad to then have another selection screen in the game. I think this is part of a drive to make the UI easier and quick to use.

Permadeath, noooo! My son occasionally likes to play on my BoTW profile (I just go to my last save to overwrite any progress he made). But this gives me pause, especially after my DK: Tropical Freeze save on the last island mysteriously disappeared....

Any bets on them patching multiple player profiles in?

Very dumb of Nintendo! Simple as that

@JohnSReid I don't want to do that, I never had to before. I would much rather have it under my account. I would also rather have MY game save on MY cartridge, not tied to the console.

How is this news? I knew this for a long time. I thought it was obvious. Stupid, but obvious.

@Mainer82 I'd rather have MY save game on MY console so that I can share MY cartridge between devices.

Not every peg fits every hole. To me this is by design on the Switch. Especially as account switching is so ridiculously quick and simple.

That being said - a backup / copy feature is needed at some point and I do agree with you there. But that's not what this article is about.

@Mainer82

Me too.
I like to work up to my 100% file and then save it for posterity, or days I just want to run around OP and explore what I remember.

Other days I like to start from scratch and play the game afresh. Like on Lufia 2 there are four saves slots: so I have one right before the boss, one while all my favorite party members are together, one for Retry mode, and one right at the Ancient Cave.

.... not on Switch. I guess I'll stick with SNES.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

Yet another +1 for SNES.

Got 3 saves on MY Zelda

Could've told you that the moment I booted up BotW for the first time and was not asked to select a save file. Given that there'll be a hard mode down the line, multiple save files MIGHT become a feature. But maybe they'll just ask you at the start of a new game whether you wanna play in Normal or Hard Mode and delete any old save data from the same user anyway.

But don't they even ask you whether or not you really wanna start a new game and ultimately delete your old data in cases of accidentally pressing the 'New Game' option? If not then that is VERY un-Nintendo of them since they're used to asking you multiple times if you are super duper sure about everything.

I made multiple accounts on my Wii U for this and I already have two on my switch so my nephew can play BOTW when he is over.

Wouldn't ever be an issue for me but it does suck for others.

@-DG

I'd guess that the Wii U is only that way because of Switch equality. This issue is present for absolutely no reason.

Hrrrmmm...

This was the same on the Wii u

This won't be an issue for most users. Would be nice if they patched it eventually, but there's no rush.

just by selecting new game it doesn't delete anything. it will just overwrite your autosaves. but when you have a manual save it will stay, unless you overwrite it of course

I'm not sure how old school save slots would work on the Switch version as you have 1 manual save slot and 5 autosave slots which the game automatically cycles through, it would have 6 save states per save slot. How does the Wii U version handle it all I wonder?

I could see there being confusion over which auto-saves belong to a given save slot, bit in that case, just have us select the save slot, then display the manual and auto-saves for thay slot. Accepting a wholly offline game like BotW to have only one save, particularly in an age of speedrunning, is anti-consumer, and I hope Nintendo catches wind of that sentiment.

@ProjectCafe That's exactly what I thought when I noticed it.

There's a very effective solution to this... Play the Wii U version, and back up your save files, whatever it takes.

@AlternateButtons It doesn't have the same issue if one mods their Wii U...

@Kreeboy411 True, Twilight Princess has a backdoor exploit that allows certain versions of Wii to be softmodded. BotW is a huge game, though. It's only a matter of time until something strange is found that was missed during development. Nintendo is just delaying the inevitable for as long as possible.

@Menchi187 It's funny, just last year, most people on here were bashing anyone who pointed out the Wii U's flaws. Now the Wii U is suddenly hot garbage, and anyone still using one and holding out for later (or even never) for NS is some kind of freak. Bizarre...

@UK-Nintendo Right, you can create up to ten of them and the Switch forces you to select one when starting the game, so no big deal. If you want your friend, wife, son, daughter, or roommate to have their own save file it's a very simple process. Now if we could just backup our save files to cloud, MicroSD, or anything else that would be something we could definitely use.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

Wii U is the same way. One save file per user account.

@PlywoodStick comment72. True lol

@blaisedinsd WiiU owners: but the switch though!!!

Why limit that to one save? Seems dumb to me.

If you have an external hard drive attached to your Wii U then you can run multiple saves. Just backup from internal memory to the hard drive then either have the drive connected or disconnected when you play. The Wii U defaults to the hard drive connected save file but runs the one off the internal memory if the drive is not attached. This is also a good way to backup your save data.

@mr_me450 It's a lot easier to create another account isn't it?

@mortenb Depends if you already have a spare hard drive. I'd say just having it either plugged in or not plugged in to use 2 saves is pretty easy.

Ehhhh, this is news?! I have the Wii u version and this is very clear from the start. This probably also means that if person 1 downloads the season-pass, person 2 can't use it!

To me the prompt reads like it would just delete the auto saves.

I assume this doesn't apply to the Wii U version? haven't really tried it.