Purchasing Death Stranding on EGS now gave me the incentive to install the launcher for the first time. But before I venture on this Kojima journey, I've decided to take a look at
Alien Isolation first, after ignoring it for so long due to the save issue.
Turns out: with a bit of effort it's possible to play through the game normally WITH saving and loading without the epic launcher.
Contrary to the info in the spreadsheet, the game
actually saves to "%LOCALAPPDATA%\The Creative Assembly\Alien Isolation" and loading these savegames ingame works fine too.
What's not possible is the loading in the title screen after game start. So normally that would be a dealbreaker, right? Luckily AI has two alternating checkpoint save files (CHSV00.ais and CHSV01.ais) serving as a current and previous one. So when you want to continue your campaign after the next game start with your last save, you just have to start a new campaign (which overwrites your previous save and turning it into the current one). Then skip the two cutscenes and load the previous save (which is the last save from your previous run) after waking up from hypersleep. A bit of a hassle, sure, but doable in no more than 15s, if you really want the drm-free experience.
There are some cases, when this method doesn't work, for example when you didn't or forgot to save your game after starting a new campaign and loading your old save. Obviously your old save then gets overwritten the next time you want to continue. I've written a
start script, that handles these cases using savegame backups. See the comments in the script for further details.
I've been experiencing no errors or showstoppers (as some other user reported here in the past) playing this way.
What I couldn't test is if the dlcs are working without the launcher. Anyone tried yet?
I will get them when discounted.
edit:
Unfortunately, DLCs don't work without the launcher.
Some Notes: -start parameter "-EpicPortal" must be used
-
Alias Isolation is a must have, and it works just fine in the epic version (it's also used in my start script by default)
-same goes for the
Save confirmation dialog skipper, which also works without problem
-it doesn't matter what difficulty you choose at campaign start, since it's part of your save game
-using save files of the steam version is possible