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GOG will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st
(support.gog.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it's not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.
It was a lot worse with Skyrim's original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they're most likely to have poor data management in some mod.
Aha, so unexpectedly it's bad/inefficient code that's ultimately to blame
I wouldn't say bad, but inefficient might be fair. Unoptimized I think is more representative.
Inefficient/unoptimized would be an accurate description. I think it's important to add, for bethsoft games specifically, that the save includes all changes to objects, even if the player themselves didn't interact with them(e.g. Physics interactions, explosions moving things, npcs bumping stuff around), and also includes all NPC changes. Master files(ESMs) get loaded, then the save loads the changes it has baked in to the databases. So, when you load up a save that has traveled the world and loaded a lot of things into save memory, the engine has to sit there and reconcile all the changes with the ESMs, which can add up quick if you're playing modded.