Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 [Clair Obscur: Expedition 33] Manual save button

[ThrowAwayWowee500]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 / e33 / COE33

 

Expedition 33 has an autosave function that, when running, shows some saving text in the bottom left corner of the screen. It tends to save before some fights, after some fights, sometimes when collecting items, sometimes when changing between areas, and sometimes when approaching flags (checkpoints).

Unfortunately, the vanilla autosave leaves much to be desired. It's not very consistent. There are some situations in which it doesn't seem to want to save

(exploration progression spoiler below) 

Spoiler

... like when flying, it doesn't like autosaving. This is especially impactful with how many sky islands there are. If there's an enemy atop a sky island you might have to fly up there from the ground each attempt if you cannot get the autosave to put you up there. This might be an engine / safety limitation though.

The vanilla autosave also seems to have a cooldown interval of somewhere around 10-15 seconds before it can autosave again. This is quite frustrating because sometimes equipment changes won't be saved before you walk into a boss fight.

One workaround I've found is to open the party menu, change someone's equipped weapon from A to B, then back to A, and close the menu. This tries to prompt an autosave if it's not on cooldown. In some situations it just doesn't seem to work though, even if I wait for up to a minute. I'm not sure why.

This system becomes very frustrating from very early on in the game, as the game's nature is to let the player challenge tough side content at their leisure. Loadouts are a big part of this so it's annoying that they sometimes don't save, and even more annoying when you get sent back to a previous island 20 seconds away each attempt.

The addition of a manual save button in the pause (Select) menu would be great. Ideally even a gamepad hotkey that can be done without pausing, like L3 + R3 (both stick clicks together). If the UI addition is too difficult, even just a hotkey customisable through an .ini file? Heck, even a static hotkey would be better than nothing.

 

Here are four pause menu mockups. This is the menu accessed at most moments where the player has agency, by pressing Select (the left pause button on any controller). Note that this menu can also be accessed in combat during a player's turn. Allowing the player to save the game during combat may have horrible repercussions. However, the Load Previous Saves menu does have a cache of twenty previous saves in case of emergency.

Mockup:

1. Vanilla pause menu
2. Adding a save button between Expedition Basics and Load Previous Saves, with the following buttons being moved down one slot each.
3. Adding a save button at the bottom of the list.
4. No save button, but simply text drawn at the bottom of the list reminding the player that they can manually save with a hotkey.

 

Please end the suffering!

Edited June 16 by ThrowAwayWowee500
Added note about Load Previous Saves caching twenty old saves

[ThrowAwayWowee500]

2025/07/26: Portal3d made a mod to manual save with a keybind on 2025/07/23. https://www.nexusmods.com/clairobscurexpedition33/mods/421