How to start a new game in Dragon's Dogma 2

Before I'd even taken five steps out of the character creator, I was wondering how to start a new game in Dragon's Dogma 2. Even with its detailed lighting options, it's very possible to accidentally make an Arisen you can't live with and want to start over right away rather than wait until you can change your appearance. My first hero turned out to have duck lips and embarrassingly short legs once I saw her gallivanting around in cutscenes. Even my pawns looked embarrassed. 

I was surprised to find there's no New Game option and no way to manage your single save. The only way to start over is to go outside the game and manually wipe your progress. But Capcom hasn't made it easy to figure out how to delete your Dragon's Dogma 2 save.

How to delete Steam Cloud saves for Dragon's Dogma 2 

The first thing you need to do is turn off cloud syncing in Steam—otherwise it won't matter if you delete your save, it'll simply be restored from the cloud. Then you need to find where your save files are hidden and delete them. Just follow these steps:

• Right click on the game in your Steam library, go to Properties, and then turn off cloud saves in the General tab.
• Find your save. It'll be pretty well hidden, but you should find it in a folder called something like:
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\33217548\2054970
• Delete all the files in that folder.
• Boot up Dragon's Dogma 2, start a new game, make your new character, and make sure you've saved.
• Turn cloud saves back on by the same process you followed to turn them off.

It may take a little hunting around to find the right save folder. It should definitely be in your Steam userdata folder, and the number of the folder should definitely be 2054970, but it is possible for the preceding numbered folder to be named differently, so you might need to hunt a little to find it.

Another option is to do a search for recently modified files, and see if the folder shows up there.

Once you've found the right place, simply dump your save by deleting all the contents of that folder. It might be worth backing the files up to a safe place if you think you might have any remorse and want to go back to your original character, but make sure you leave this specific folder completely clear. 

When you turn cloud saves back on, it should flag up a conflict between what's saved in the cloud and what's saved locally—you just need to select that you want your new local save to take precedence, and from there you're sorted.

On a second try, I was able to sculpt an elegant and normally proportioned Arisen, but if you do find yourself still not happy with your second character, you can simply follow these steps as many times as you need to start new saves. Just bear in mind that appearance is really the only reason to do this, and even then there are ways to change your appearance in-game. If you're unhappy with your starting vocation, that's also easily changed very early on at the first guild you come across, so it's not worth deleting your save over.