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Lar stopped by at the Divine Divinity forums and explained the game save mechanism:If an object moves in the world, it's not going to take up extra space as a save-game contains the entire world to start with. If extra objects get created in the world, then it grows larger. The entire world compressed takes around 26Mb, and uncompressed it takes around 85Mb. The compression does take time however so we are delibirating between having 85Mb large savegames which save faster, or 26Mb ones which save slower. Saving a game is actually "only" copying the world files to a savegame folder and additionally compressing it if necessary, since all in game operations immediately happen on the disk image of the world, which is why there are no loading/saving levels, except for what we call the map switches (5 of them, comparable to acts in Diablo 2).
Divinity is vastly more complex than Diablo 2 - I'm not going to start with a list here, but I can assure that at times I wished Divinity was Diablo 2 because then we'd probably be finished by now. From my point of view Diablo 2's main strength was that they neared perfection in the way they executed the things they put in, but what they put in was relatively limited (thereby allowing them to reach near perfection). While I was originally impressed by Blizzard's balancing effort, I'm now double impressed because I now know first hand what the involved effort is.
Regarding the savegames : To put it bluntly and oversimplified - Divinity allows you to save at almost any time, and reload the game exactly as it was. Diablo 2 allowed you only to save your character state (which included the quests you did), and that was it. I can think of a number of reasons why they did that, but that's not for me to say. The difference is that that if you load a game in Div, you'll find that the monsters/npcs are standing at the place where you left them, that if you were in combat and had a meteor thrown at you at the moment you saved, the meteor still is the position it was at the time of saving etc... Since contains a large storyline, and quite some interactivity, both on the object and character level, saving all that takes some place, as those kind of things do come at a CPU/Memory price.
All objects that are not generated are present in the original world - monster loot for instance gets generated so it increases the size. If you buy something from a trader and then drop it, that's a zero sum operation, as the trader's inventory is part of the world - however, traders do generate items, so they can increase the size of the world, but they forget at generation time about the previous objects they generated, so it depends if they generate more than they previously had. If you eat something, the world size decreases, if you combine two objects into one object, the world size decreases etc... Again, all of this is oversimplified, but it should give you an idea.
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From the Divinity Forums
