Just imagine situation like this (I happened to me in vanilla game back in 1998). There were 2 or 3 unique monsters on Caves lv9 in my line of sight. I was so excited that I saved the game and rushed on them. Guess what happened. I died. So I loaded game, just to find myself again few steps from very strong monsters that I couldn't defeat. So every time when I loaded game I was F***ed. I haven't even had time (or space around) to cast TP to escape to town. Frustrating. Same crap happened when I finally saw Dark Lord (aka Diablo) for 1st time. I hit Save game and died 1 second later. I lost that character, as it was impossible to win or escape.
Anyway, that was 1998, W98 came and I had to move my savegames to new windows. 1,4MB - 4,2MB per SinglePlayer character. THATS A LOT! CONSIDERING NO GAMES ON THAT TIME HAD SAVES OVER 100kb. Especially when D1 MP chars were exactly 66kb (all of them).
It's all because of how game saves data. In SP, game saves entire memory dump that contains your character + map, objects on map, all dropped items, their location and full statistic, active spells.... Same applies to monsters. Were they activated and following you? Their stats, missing HP (if in combat), % of restored HP of every single MOB, direction they faces or action they executes. EVERYTHING is saved in such SP save.
For games like SimCity, CitiesSkylines, Black&White and even Witcher, such savefiles were growing up to 180MB PER SAVE! Thats a shitload of data, which drasticly lowers loading speed and uses enormous amount of RAM to postprocess all of operations.
Now we have D1 MOD. A game which works on totally new engine and number generator. An engine that contains new tabs in character screen, new items, new maps, new monsters, new spells, new prefixes, suffixes, and even allowing an items to contain dozen of stats instead of just 1-2 like in vanilla game, and because of that - new math code to generate that all, because old one was seriously flawed.
If you remember golden age of DialUp / IPX network and our fights, you probably remember, there was more items in MP than in SP. Some of them were exclusevly to each version.
Nowdays you can find a lot games using same save system like in D1 MultiPlayer, to avoid long loading times and to reduce RAM usage.
Also keep in mind that larger savefile is more prone to damages if you happen to have HDD failure or power down. A small saves, like we have now (I have 9 character) are between 10-25kb. THATS GREAT!
I know that it's a little frustrating to find free time as we gets older, but to be honest, D1 is my drug, and so requires few hours of trip ... so reserve your time, or start waking up on 4am, to play undisturbed, silently, before your city/country/family awake
