This hunk of Vlandian beef is Pyotr.

The ruler of Freeland (which encompasses all of Calradia), his hobbies include combat, forging shiny new weapons for his retinue and doing wee favors for the peasants, townsfolk, ladies and lords who inhabit his domain. Most days, you can find him and his 400-strong army traipsing around the countryside, driving cattle or battling old enemies who – despite their recurring losses – seem disproportionately fond of him. Despite the prodigious body count his conquest has racked up, he is still as Daring, Generous, Honest and Merciful as he was on the day his real parents (Character Generator and Player Intent) brought him into the world...

This slice of digitized danger is V(eronica).

Top of the merc food chain, this disgruntled former Arasaka corpo-slave revels in causing Spontaneous Localized Disruptions (read "hacking, smacking and shooting anyone who looks at her funny"); expanding her eclectic collection of outerwear and hanging out with her girlfriend, Judy, and cat, Nibbles. If you ever hear her souped-up Rayfield Aerondight charging down the street, steer clear: adept as she is at gunplay – much like the rest of Night City's best gunsels – she's a horrible driver. But should you ever find yourself in dire straits – being hassled by Barghest goons or picked on by some self-entitled rich gonk – you can bet if she's around, she'll do something about it (up to and including running you over).

Of the two, V(eronica) is eldest, inhabiting – as she does – a five year old save game dating back to the wonky, wobbly, 2020 release of Cyberpunk 2077. Pyotr, on the other hand, is only three (those Vlandians sure grow fast); and calls a 2022 save state of Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord his home. Both have been in the wars, over the years, seeing their worlds revamped, remodeled and retconned by their respective Developer Gods. But even though they share the trauma of periodic revisions to how their game world functions, only one has made it through the process relatively unscathed.

And that's not down to Vlandians being hardier or the future being more complex: simply put, the changes to one game engine were programmed correctly, while those of the other didn't account for asset dependencies and largely ignored backward compatibility.

The way games are released nowadays is hardly ideal. More akin to letting players participate in Ongoing Roadworks than Charging Money for a Finished Product, they slant the experience in the devs' favor by letting them continually "refine" the experience post-release regardless of the inconvenience this poses for the players.

Folks don't like it – I certainly have a pork with it – but it is what it is. The days of consumer feedback noticeably affecting developer shenanigans sailed long ago — on a ship a U-boat then torpedoed in some random WW2 naval sim...

But if this is to be the way releases happen, there is still a Proper Way to ensure that developer convenience doesn't undermine player enjoyment.

Bannerlord just happens to be the poster child for the correct way of doing things. While – over the course of three years – the game has undergone numerous changes, not a single one of them ever got in the way of the game's ability to run smoothly and, indeed, not crash (don't hold me to it, but – near as I recall – the game hasn't crashed once in three years and 36 patches).

So while Pyotr has been party to some weirdness – like quality modifiers stripped from his lovingly crafted weapons, opponents showing up to battle in invisible gear or entire units (like Hired Blades and Mercenary Cavalry) being retconned from existence – none of these alterations ever stopped his save state from loading or functioning correctly.

The unit retconning, especially, showed a lot of foresight: while the game no longer let you recruit the units, it still retained their stats and models, allowing them to be part of your army.

Which is not to say the process has been faultless: small refinements Bannerlord introduced over the years (like animations that herald plot progression or accompany certain events – like marriage); simply don't fire in Pyotr's five-year-old save and some bugs that were there on release day (like the gap between certain types of weapon components that results from improper scaling); yet persist.

However.

In terms of gameplay stability and new changes prohibitively affecting existing saves, TaleWorlds Entertainment did an excellent job that let me keep playing – on and off, from one patch to the next – for three years without any major worries...

Not so the new kids on the block.

Hampered as it was by a rocky initial release and compounded by the fact CDPR was battling on three fronts (refining a brand new, in-house-built engine, patching the game and doing a weird R&D shimmy which saw the initial game mechanics completely changed a few years down the road); Cyberpunk 2077's refinements were a sort of ongoing white phosphorous blaze that would see some issues extinguished, others flare up and others still smoldering by the wayside.

Worst of all, throughout the process, CDPR devs showed a complete disregard for making new changes backwards compatible with existing saves, which has lead to a slew of odd errors (like items you can't drop, quests not closing properly or mid-gig messages showing up actual years after a certain mission was completed); and a barrage of impromptu CTDs resulting from (I'm guessing) game world assets being updated without making sure the changes worked with previous versions of the game.

So while V(eronica)'s save state still loads – as it did a few days ago – and the game remains (largely) playable, I constantly keep running into issues like certain parts of the game world not loading, the UI crashing or just walking in a certain direction making the game CTD or (worse) corrupting an auto save file and crashing the entire game if I try to load it, rendering some 200+ hours of fun gameplay inaccessible.

And while I will concede that Cyberpunk's case is an extreme one (an overly ambitious undertaking that was needlessly rushed for little more than marketing); the fact remains that while CDPR did a solid job fixing its most noticeable issues, it did not do so in a constructive way — focusing largely on new playthrough stability and ignoring five years of complaints from its existing player base.

If – viewed in the terms of Existing Save Stability and Patching Effectiveness – Bannerlord is a win-win, then Cyberpunk (for all its rascally likability) is a lose-lose: old saves are sometimes irrevocably damaged and bugs that were present on release still do their wiggly best to undermine the experience.

From our lowly vantage as mere players and consumers (I mean, all we do is pay developers money which allows their companies to exist); there is little enough to be done to ensure that years of patching keeps a backward eye peeled so that new changes do not confound existing saves. The development process, as I mentioned, is what it is – shaped for the convenience of the people who make the games, rather than the ones who play them.

But should a dev happen to blunder in here and read this – please – take a moment to plan your changes in a way that accounts for the older code of existing save games. Fun as games are, time is finite and life has distractions aplenty.

And we can't keep starting afresh in the hope that – this patch – you will finally get things right.