I like Pacific Drive an awful lot—87 hours into it so far, so says Steam—but there's one thing about it that's always kind of irritated me: The lack of a mid-level save feature. I'm hardly alone in that feeling, as a quick dig through Reddit or the Steam forums will reveal, but the good news for all of us in that boat is that a mid-level "suspend and quit" feature is finally on the way.
Currently Pacific Drive auto-saves when you move between junctions, the locations you actually drive around in. The trouble comes when you're in the midst of exploring a junction and have to take a break for one reason or another: Your only options are to pause the game for however long you need to be away and hope the power doesn't go out and the cat doesn't step on your PC's power button, or abandon the junction and give up some or all of the progress you've made and stuff you've collected.
Junctions typically don't last more than 30 minutes so you're not losing a huge chunk of playtime if you have to bail out, but because each junction is randomized upon entry, it can be frustrating when you're in the middle of a really good one and have to walk away.
The upcoming Endless Expeditions update will add a new "Suspend Run" feature, "something that's been requested heavily by the community," giving players the ability to quit the game in the midst of a junction, and then return without losing any progress.
It's not a full-on manual save system, but I think it's a perfectly fair compromise: A way to accommodate the demands of real life without surrendering any of the tension of Pacific Drive's chaotic road trips. And really, it's what an awful lot of players have been asking for—not the ability to save-scum, which game director Seth Rosen said would suck the soul out of the game—but just a way to deal with the sort of "oh no the dog's on fire again" types of crises that confront us all from time to time.
The ability to halt the action mid-level without losing progress is obviously the highlight for me personally, but it's just one of several big things coming in the update. The biggest, at least going by the name of the update, is the addition of "Expeditions," described as "new continuous drives between multiple junctions," with unique rewards and dangers that "will test even the most seasoned breacher."
New maps, spawning systems, tools, "and so much more" are also coming, along with new cosmetics for your garage, more than an hour of new radio music—this is a big deal in its own right, because the Pacific Drive soundtrack is absolutely primo—and more weird, occasionally very creepy lore delivered via the fax machine. Developer Ironwood Studios says this is the largest Pacific Drive update yet, and after months away it may just be enough to put me behind the wheel again.
Pacific Drive's Endless Expeditions spring update is set to go live on April 3, which I expect is when we'll be able to lay eyes on the full patch notes.
A previous version of this article stated that developer Ironwood Studios 'changed its mind' about Pacific Drive's save system, citing a post by game director Seth Rosen in which he stated that the save system would not change. Rosen, who left Ironwood before the addition of Suspend Run, has since said that he does not consider the feature a change to the save system he described in that now-removed post, because it does not enable save scumming. We've removed the comment that Ironwood 'changed its mind' to reflect Rosen's stated intentions, and have adjusted some wording to avoid confusion over the distinction between 'runs' and 'junctions' in Pacific Drive.
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