Launching your Pacific Drive game now will meet you with a message at the start screen titled “Saving” explaining that the game automatically saves your progress each time you enter a level, and you are free to save during a run by simply leaving your current level, triggering that save.
And like always, you can also do a manual save from the pause menu in the garage. Abandoning the run altogether sends you back to the garage and it still triggers the penalties that are active by default on the game. It’s worth mentioning that these penalties and many other gameplay settings are customizable in the Settings, in case you want to modify your experience. Keep in mind that changing some of these will disable trophies, though.
First explanation on Start Screen
One of the common complaints you could find on critical reviews of the game after it came out was the inability to properly save while out on a run, considering some of the runs could take well over an hour at once. It’s also worth mentioning that the game did save your progress by default, but quitting the game in the middle of a run and coming back later would let you start over at the same junction you were on when you quit, but having lost most of your items by default.
With these new tweaks, introduced in the 1.4.0 Patch Notes from March 19th, you now have several options when it comes to quitting your game, be it mid-run, or by quitting the run altogether. Now you can find in the settings what kind of penalties you incur when you have to leave the game, the options being:
- Lose all items
- Lose most items (This will be the default)
- Keep crafted items
- Keep all items
-
- Message on the new Abandon, Save, Quit
-
- New Message on Quit
Besides the extensive notes on the save states and how they work, the patch 1.4.0 brought some fixes to the UI and certain bugs, that could potentially be spoiler-y, but feel free to go through the entire notes here.
These explanations on how the save states work come after the majority of the negative reviews you could find on Steam were mostly about the lack of a mid-run save. That and the performance on PC being in a close second were the main gripes the playerbase found with the game. As of time of writing, Pacific Drive sits with a Very Positive (83%) rate on Steam.
