Durante keeps making PC gaming better. The modder who fixed Dark Souls, has analyzed PC ports here at PC Gamer and written about the features all PC games should have, has more recently been working with localization studio XSeed to improve their PC games like Little King's Story and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. He's also working on the PC port for Trails of Cold Steel 2, coming in 2018, and posted a short Youtube clip of an in-progress feature that I instantly want in, oh, practically every PC game. Durante added a second launcher option for Cold Steel 2, available as a right-click option in Steam, that automatically loads your latest save. Instantly.
As you can see in the video above, it takes about a second to go from desktop to in-game, loaded up exactly where he left off his last save file. It's like the handy resume feature of a console like the PS4 or Switch, but better—instead of simply resuming the last game you were playing when you put the console down, with this feature, you could resume exactly where you left off in any game in your library that supported it.
The caveat, of course, is that implementing an instant resume like this takes work, will require different work from game to game, and probably wouldn't work at all in many games based on how their save systems are structured. It's also far more effective in a game like Cold Steel with very modest system requirements (Durante did lots of work to optimize the first game in the series) than it would be in, say GTA 5, which takes a good minute or two to load up.
But there are still loads of games on Steam that a "Continue from Latest Save" option would work brilliantly in. Hopefully it's such a hit in Trails of Cold Steel 2 that other developers take notice. In the meantime, we'll just keep modding out those 30 seconds of logo videos in front of every big game.
