Does changing a game break old saves?

The current IF platforms aren’t designed for this capability. Period. There are some hacks that one could implement, but as has been stated, none are friendly to author or programmer.

I can only envision some alternative as-yet unimplemented platform where “state” is maintained in some kind of graph data store. The “engine” just loads data and runs. Then game updates could be managed by implementing schema or data changes. One could even imagine such a platform allowing dynamic updates in the cloud. Such a platform would also enable multi-author development, add-ons, and clear versioning.

But we’re not there and there’s almost zero demand for such a platform.

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Thanks everyone for their input in this thread. I think it’s useful for Inform users to know and think about. And, as @severedhand points out, there are ways to mitigate the problem if you decide it’s important and are prepared for the extra work and associated limitations.

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