August of last year I said we would make best efforts to maintain player progress as we release updates to the game (you can read about that here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/506480/discussions/0/3809535864677346416/ )
Unfortunately, despite best efforts we won't be able to make old save games work in the new update. I'm really sorry. :crying_yeti:
What We Did
NEW Combat is a massive undertaking rewriting how items, spells, player progress, character creation, monsters, abilities, and gear all work. With so much change we knew it would be challenging. We got sample save files from the Discord community to test with. We tasked a programmer with solely working on this problem.
He did, and hit a dead end.
We made another attempt, with a new programmer for new thinking. Today I got the results that it just isn't going to work. Now, the work on this is jeopardizing our ability to release NEW Combat on Friday.
The problem has to do with the simulator nature of the game and bad data which has accrued from several versions ago to today. We can load the data, world, progress. So on the one hand, loading previous saves actually works. But once you load your old save, you can't save it anymore... That's where things are currently breaking.
We really made best efforts on this to protect player progress, but it just can't be done.
What You Can Do About It
If you would like to continue your existing save file, we've created a new branch called "legacy" that you will need to switch to before the new combat update releases on Friday.
If you haven't switched branches before, here's how to switch branches in Steam:
1. Open up Archmage Rises in your Steam Library
2. Click on the gear just below the banner on the far right
3. In the dropdown menu, click on "Properties"
4. In the new window that pops up, click on "Betas" on the left side menu
5. You should see an option called "Beta Participation" - click on the dropdown menu to the right of that and select "legacy - Legacy & Rivals (Pre-Combat Update)" which should now change your branch to the Legacy branch.
Now that you're on the new branch, it should prevent your game from auto-updating to the new combat update build that will release on Friday.
When you're ready to switch back to the most recent public build of the game, you can follow the same process to switch back to the "default" branch by selecting "None" under the Beta Participation dropdown menu.
Is This Going To Happen Again?
Very unlikely.
The new data structure of everything is THE new data structure of everything. We see no reason to change it again. I was in a meeting yesterday about the rest of the roadmap and nothing coming is close to the work we've had to do for new combat. Adding features like factions, world spell casting, enchanting, it all builds on top of what we've got here. It doesn't change the base.
That being said, while we don't foresee any more issues in preserving save games from now on, in August I was smart enough to write the following so I'll repeat it here again:
Q: Are you promising I will never lose progress during Early Access? A: No! I'm too experienced to make that naïve promise. I'm sure at some point, maybe more than once, it just won't be possible. What I am promising is much more effort and robust tech put into testing and preserving player progress. Dropping it from forced restarts 50x before 1.0 to maybe 5x.
Today is one of those "impossible points". Really sorry about it.