How to save manually in Dying Light 2

Dying Light 2 is finally here, offering players over 500 hours of content to dive into and a vast urban map to explore, with several major factions, branching storylines, diverse and believable characters and much more.

There's a huge adventure in front of you in Dying Light 2, but adventure also means danger. Everything is at stake in DL2 and your choices are much more important than in Dying Light 1. Developers wanted to emphasize the importance of that by embracing the autosave system.

With the autosave system, every battle is much riskier and every foray into an unexplored area brings more anxiety. Also, you won't be able to abuse different choices by simply loading the save file and trying something else.

While this is a great design to build up tension and create a sense of real danger and consequences, for some players this can be rather frustrating as well, especially for a game as huge as Dying Light 2.

But can you somehow save manually in Dying Light 2? Let's see what we know.

How does saving in Dying Light 2 work?

Before we jump to potential manual saving options, let us first see how does the autosave system work in Dying Light 2.

The save system is designed around the developer's goal to amplify a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty in this post-apocalyptic world. As such, players are not allowed to save as they please, rather the game will autosave at certain points.

Whenever you complete a quest, reach checkpoints within missions or enter a new area, the game will almost always autosave. The most reliable autosave point is when the night falls and you go to bed to rest until the morning. The game will always save your progress at this point.

And while this has its merits, unfortunately, this also means that if your game crashes or something happens with your console/pc during a play session, you will lose all your progress past the previous autosave point.

Asides from autosaving, the second key aspect of this system is that there's only one save file, which is being overwritten after each new autosave. This means you won't be able to return to a previous point in the game, or even worse - it means that your save file can be easily corrupted at which point you are doomed and all your progress is lost.

Can you manually save in Dying Light 2 work?

Unfortunately, the game doesn't support manual saving for the above-mentioned reasons, but there's still one trick that you can do if you want to return to some previous positions in the game, but it only works on Steam.

You will need to find a folder where the game keeps local files, which looks like this by default - “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata"

There, open the folder that has your SteamID3 as a name, and find a folder named "534380", this is the ID code for Dying Light 2 on Steam, and thus it contains some local files for the game, including the save file.

Copy it somewhere safe, and the next time you decide to return to that position, just copy it back there and start the game again.

The game will inform you that local save and cloud save are not synced, and you just choose to play local save in order to start from the desired moment.

Warning: this will override any potential progress you've made after that save, so if you want to use this strategy, we strongly advise you to always make another copy of the "534380" folder, otherwise, you might lose some progress that you didn't intend to lose.

While not ideal, this is the only way how you can return to some previous point in the game.

• Read more: Dying Light 2 multiplayer: Is there PvP mode?

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Featured image courtesy of Techland.