Dragon’s Dogma 2 uses a lot of familiar RPG systems, but the way it handles saving your game is pretty far from standard. At a glance, you might think you intuitively understand the way saving works in this game from past experiences.
There’s an option to manually save, checkpoint-based auto-saving, and a save-on-rest feature. The way these three options interact with one another is nothing like what you’re probably used to, however, and realizing that fact too late can mean losing hours of progress.
Here’s a comparison of how each main save setting works in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Load from Last Inn Rest vs. Load from Last Save in Dragon’s Dogma 2
Every time you die or start the game back up after a break, you are given the option to load from your last save or load from your last inn rest. This choice feels fairly simple, but the fact that you can also manually save when quitting the game adds some confusion. Where do manual saves fit into the two options?
The best way to think about it is simply that manual saving is just telling the game to auto-save. The two options share one single save file, meaning that if you manually save and then do anything that prompts an auto-save, that manual save will be overwritten.
If you select the Load from Last Save option after dying or booting up the game, you will spawn at your latest manual or auto-save. What becomes dangerous to your progress is that selecting Load from Last Inn Rest will immediately reset your auto-save to that same point, which means you don’t have a manual save past that point either. Essentially, Load from Last Inn Rest deletes any and all saves that took place after that inn rest.
99 percent of the time, you will want to use Load from Last Save. The only exception would be if you’re actively trying to lose progress, maybe due to a dead pawn or a failed quest. Inns aren’t the only place you can rest in Dragon’s Dogma 2, though, and that makes knowing exactly what qualifies as an Inn Rest a little tricky.
Do campfire rests count as inn rests in Dragon’s Dogma 2?
Resting at a campfire does not count as an inn rest in Dragon’s Dogma 2. When you rest at a campfire, your health will fully be restored just like at an inn—however, the save point created is an auto-save, which means it will be overwritten by your next auto-save and will be erased from existence entirely if you choose Load from Last Inn rest at any point.
Campfire resting is great for rejuvenating your party while you’re out on an adventure, but you aren’t creating a “Rest” save point, even though you’re resting. If you want to have a place to load from that isn’t overwritten by auto-saves, you need to rest at an inn.
You should make sure you rest at an inn at least every couple of hours in Dragon’s Dogma 2 so that you have a safe “get out of jail free” fallback that won’t absolutely tank your progress in the game.
