Let's talk autosave.

[GilloD]

Look, I grew up with Sierra adventure games. I have "Save early, save often" tattooed into whatever primal lizard mass is responsible for my survival. But on consoles, saving can be a pain in the ass: Hit Start, go to a sub menu, wait while it saves, come back out. Worse, the option is often buried somewhere as it ranks lower in the UI chain of command. So players get sent a lot of signals to rely on Auto Save. Which is fine, except that I've played at least a handful of titles whose Auto Save logic is so byzantine that its practically useless. Case in point: Kingdom of Amalur, a Fable-y action RPG. I completed 2 major story quests, a side quest, entered 3 new locations and at no point in that 50 minutes did the game save, a fact I didn't uncover until I died and suffered the game's weirdly punitive death penalty.

Is it so hard to just kick in an AS everytime I complete a quest or walk through a door? Jeebus. The original Mass Effect was also really awful about this. On the other hand, Uncharted 3 Auto Saves everytime you pause, which I appreciate.

[BobFromPikeCreek]

Haven't played it yet, but I think ME3 for consoles has the back button as quick save, which is GENIUS. WHY DONT MORE GAMES DO THAT?

[Great Rumbler]

Just about every game released this days, ESPECIALLY large, open-world games, should absolutely have auto-save and it should save quite regularly.

Dragon's Dogma has auto-save, but it's the worst ever. That's because there's only one save slot and the auto-save function OVERWRITES that one save space. Absolutely mind-boggling.

[Bildi]

That said, some games with only an autosave kind of suck.  Fable 2 (and I assume 3) was my most recent gripe - one save slot, and it's auto.

If we find it fun to try out various choices and reload is that so bad?  OMG I'm not playing your masterpiece exactly how you want me to!  As if I have time to play a game twice or more just to see how different choices play out.

[Great Rumbler]

Oh yeah, I really hate games that JUST have autosave. Sometimes I just want to quit but I don't remember how long it's been since the game saved. Or maybe I want several different save games.

[AdmiralViscen]

Haven't played it yet, but I think ME3 for consoles has the back button as quick save, which is GENIUS. WHY DONT MORE GAMES DO THAT?

Better with kinect (tm)

[Bildi]

Waggle to save?

[chronovore]

Look, I grew up with Sierra adventure games. I have "Save early, save often" tattooed into whatever primal lizard mass is responsible for my survival. But on consoles, saving can be a pain in the ass: Hit Start, go to a sub menu, wait while it saves, come back out. Worse, the option is often buried somewhere as it ranks lower in the UI chain of command. So players get sent a lot of signals to rely on Auto Save. Which is fine, except that I've played at least a handful of titles whose Auto Save logic is so byzantine that its practically useless. Case in point: Kingdom of Amalur, a Fable-y action RPG. I completed 2 major story quests, a side quest, entered 3 new locations and at no point in that 50 minutes did the game save, a fact I didn't uncover until I died and suffered the game's weirdly punitive death penalty.

Is it so hard to just kick in an AS everytime I complete a quest or walk through a door? Jeebus. The original Mass Effect was also really awful about this. On the other hand, Uncharted 3 Auto Saves everytime you pause, which I appreciate.

The difficulty of implementing an auto-save or active quick-save depends on the type of game.

There's also a valid question about game design here: does the designer want you to have the ability to hop back to an immediate place in the game. If you look at Fallout's ability to store every single piece of information about game-state, on command, immediately, wherever you like, and have multiple iterations saved -- that shapes the feel of the gameplay. In contrast, there's a higher suspense level in ICO, where you are always trying to get the girl to the next couch.

...that came out wrong.