What brought me to this forum is that I played this game a long time ago and want to destroy my current character's save. I don't remember where I was or what I was doing and I felt lost. Now that I've gotten used to Dark Souls games I want to start over from the beginning and go through the entire game the way it was meant to be played. But every time I start the game I can only choose Play and it brings up my old save.

I did some research and back in 2019 this same question was asked. The solution was to delete the local files using Steam's UI. As a fellow dev I see this as a feature that should be prioritized in future standups.

https://gtm.you1.cn/app/718590/discussions/0/1678064284157724783/

For example you could create a Linked List or use the Vector Class to create an array of Save State objects. Each object in the array would contain all the current player data you save.

Loading that state would simply be a index into that array to get the state data from local storage, then update the UI accordingly.

So as you already recognized, the bad news is that there is no save profile management in the game,

The good news, though is that it's fairly simple to "manage" your profile, basically there are a handful of small save files that each capture a part of your progress like map, forge, and so forth, for sake of simplicity I recommend that you simply move all of these files into a folder and call it Game One (or something) and start anew, from scratch.

I generally advise against trying to mix&match certain files because of some non-intuitive interaction between certain elements. But, suffice to say, if you back up all of the files, then whenever you restore them, you will be at the exact spot where you used to be, including any progress, unlockables, and so forth.

For your info as far as I can tell there are no further patches planned for Dark Devotion, so profile management will have to join some of the other "would be cool to have" features like volume mixer, new game +, and so forth that are unlikely to ever make it into the game, unfortunately.

how did you got the save back 0.o every time i reinstalled the game i needed to play it from scrach

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

how did you got the save back 0.o every time i reinstalled the game i needed to play it from scrach

If you make a manual save of the safe files, you can just copy it back whenever you reinstall the game and it will pick up exactly where you left off.

The folder path will look something like:

D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Dark Devotion

There's seven small files in the folder (no extension, with names like xxx_Blacksmith where X is a unique number).

The files are quite small, so easy to back-up, your progress is stored in these files.

Unfortunately the game doesn't support cloud saves.

Originally posted by Kira:

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

how did you got the save back 0.o every time i reinstalled the game i needed to play it from scrach

If you make a manual save of the safe files, you can just copy it back whenever you reinstall the game and it will pick up exactly where you left off.

The folder path will look something like:

D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Dark Devotion

There's seven small files in the folder (no extension, with names like xxx_Blacksmith where X is a unique number).

The files are quite small, so easy to back-up, your progress is stored in these files.

Unfortunately the game doesn't support cloud saves.

its a shame since i had almost everything unlocked and starting from scrach for me isn't the most fun, expecily since all skills are locked

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

its a shame since i had almost everything unlocked and starting from scrach for me isn't the most fun, expecily since all skills are locked

That's understandable!

I did reset my game 4-5 times, and I enjoyed the low unlock part of the game a lot, after one of my resets I surprisingly got all the way to the end and beat the Guardian directly on my first life (second if you count the epilogue).

I noticed that it is much easier to progress in the game once you know it a bit, mainly because later monsters drop progressively more XP sparkles, essentially I got the skills maxed after only a handful of longer runs, and I remembered several of the tablet locations, so I could unlock them much faster. Especially the first 3 Faith tablets are very important to be able to get to 100+ Faith which potentially unlocks the strongest blessings.

Originally posted by Kira:

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

its a shame since i had almost everything unlocked and starting from scrach for me isn't the most fun, expecily since all skills are locked

That's understandable!

I did reset my game 4-5 times, and I enjoyed the low unlock part of the game a lot, after one of my resets I surprisingly got all the way to the end and beat the Guardian directly on my first life (second if you count the epilogue).

I noticed that it is much easier to progress in the game once you know it a bit, mainly because later monsters drop progressively more XP sparkles, essentially I got the skills maxed after only a handful of longer runs, and I remembered several of the tablet locations, so I could unlock them much faster. Especially the first 3 Faith tablets are very important to be able to get to 100+ Faith which potentially unlocks the strongest blessings.

i don't usualy play souls likes so when i instal it once or twice a year its bit harder (but not as hard as first playthro xD, i was not able to finish first room like 5 runs in a row, mostly becouse the traps xD)

and as for blessing, i remember having to wait for 2-3 min sometines so i get one xD they should remove ones you have from randomisation and not only check if you have it and randomise again, not sure if it is how they wanted to be but when having 10+ blessings it can take a while xD

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

i don't usualy play souls likes so when i instal it once or twice a year its bit harder (but not as hard as first playthro xD, i was not able to finish first room like 5 runs in a row, mostly becouse the traps xD)

and as for blessing, i remember having to wait for 2-3 min sometines so i get one xD they should remove ones you have from randomisation and not only check if you have it and randomise again, not sure if it is how they wanted to be but when having 10+ blessings it can take a while xD

Actually the blessings work fairly predictably, in a sense, the gist of it is:

So basically you have the six Blessing Altar blessings, Third Eye (-3% Miss per stack), Sharpened Nails (+3% Stun Crit per stack), Wolf's Step (+3 Speed per stack), Sharpened Teeth (+3% Damage Crit per stack), Breeze (+0.3 Stamina Regen per stack), Wise (+2 Faith per kill per stack), and each time you use a blessing altar, it will select a quasi-random blessing and apply it. You know how strong the given blessing will be because you see the Faith cost (it is 20 points of Faith per stack, so 1 to 5 stacks blessing strength based on the cost being 20 to 100 Faith), and you know for sure that as long as you do not have all of the six altar blessings it will select one of the blessings you do not yet have.

Once you have all the blessings, you can get any blessing from the altars, and they will overwrite any weaker versions of the same blessing. So if you have Breeze 3 and you buy a blessing for 40 Faith (2 stacks), if it's Breeze again it will not reduce your Speed, you will keep the Breeze 3.

One way to game this especially on longer runs is to only get blessings from altars that offer you a 5-stack (or 4-stack) blessing for 100 (or 80) Faith. If you can get all 100-Faith blessings, you will enjoy a tremendous boost to your stats because the higher-level blessings are each very strong, and make the game significantly easier.

Another way is, if for some reason you still miss some crucial blessing by The Alabaster Citadel, you have access to traps that wipe your most recent blessing. While this is normally a horrible thing that can happen to you, it can help cycle through low-strength blessings in rooms that have a Blessing Altar and such a trap by applying any blessing (even for 20 Faith) and then wiping it if you don't like what you got.

Most builds will not really care about both of the Stun and the Damage Crit stats, so technically you can leave even a weaker blessing for your off-damage-type crit to focus on the other more important blessings. Also sometimes it might make sense to risk a lower-level blessing early on, for example an early +Piety blessing can make a huge difference for any build on a long run.

Originally posted by Kira:

Originally posted by Wujek Klawy:

i don't usualy play souls likes so when i instal it once or twice a year its bit harder (but not as hard as first playthro xD, i was not able to finish first room like 5 runs in a row, mostly becouse the traps xD)

and as for blessing, i remember having to wait for 2-3 min sometines so i get one xD they should remove ones you have from randomisation and not only check if you have it and randomise again, not sure if it is how they wanted to be but when having 10+ blessings it can take a while xD

Actually the blessings work fairly predictably, in a sense, the gist of it is:

So basically you have the six Blessing Altar blessings, Third Eye (-3% Miss per stack), Sharpened Nails (+3% Stun Crit per stack), Wolf's Step (+3 Speed per stack), Sharpened Teeth (+3% Damage Crit per stack), Breeze (+0.3 Stamina Regen per stack), Wise (+2 Faith per kill per stack), and each time you use a blessing altar, it will select a quasi-random blessing and apply it. You know how strong the given blessing will be because you see the Faith cost (it is 20 points of Faith per stack, so 1 to 5 stacks blessing strength based on the cost being 20 to 100 Faith), and you know for sure that as long as you do not have all of the six altar blessings it will select one of the blessings you do not yet have.

Once you have all the blessings, you can get any blessing from the altars, and they will overwrite any weaker versions of the same blessing. So if you have Breeze 3 and you buy a blessing for 40 Faith (2 stacks), if it's Breeze again it will not reduce your Speed, you will keep the Breeze 3.

One way to game this especially on longer runs is to only get blessings from altars that offer you a 5-stack (or 4-stack) blessing for 100 (or 80) Faith. If you can get all 100-Faith blessings, you will enjoy a tremendous boost to your stats because the higher-level blessings are each very strong, and make the game significantly easier.

Another way is, if for some reason you still miss some crucial blessing by The Alabaster Citadel, you have access to traps that wipe your most recent blessing. While this is normally a horrible thing that can happen to you, it can help cycle through low-strength blessings in rooms that have a Blessing Altar and such a trap by applying any blessing (even for 20 Faith) and then wiping it if you don't like what you got.

Most builds will not really care about both of the Stun and the Damage Crit stats, so technically you can leave even a weaker blessing for your off-damage-type crit to focus on the other more important blessings. Also sometimes it might make sense to risk a lower-level blessing early on, for example an early +Piety blessing can make a huge difference for any build on a long run.

for me it seemed like it gets a random blessing from a pool, checks if i have it, and if i have it rolls again, and as i said sometimes when i bought blessing it took a long while, even to the next room. for eg few last from this run took half of the room to proc https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2389525829