I love and hate the autosave feature at the same time.
I don’t think that I am the only gamer who has a complicated relationship with autosave in video games. There are times when it’s a godsend, and times when it completely ruins your game.
There are some games I wished had the autosave features. Let me recount an experience that most gamers know all to well. Here you are, playing an RPG game and you’ve spent more than 6 hours playing. You’ve probably collected a rare weapon and beat an extremely difficult boss along the way.
For some reason, you’re always too lazy to save your game even if it only takes a minute. You’ll probably do so when you finally decide to stop playing, which we all know isn’t anytime soon. Everything is fine until your game freezes.
Your eyes widen and your heart felt like it stopped beating. You’ve lost everything and maybe you’ll hold out hope that it will unfreeze if you just keep waiting. Nothing happens and your game is gone forever. It either lacked an autosave feature or it was really crappy that the last checkpoint was hours before.
At one point, this seemed like a tempting idea:
I don’t know why, but there’s this intense feeling of loss whenever this happens. I feel like there’s an actual grieving process. I have to take a break from playing the game because the pain was still fresh. It’s like I needed time to grieve before I do everything all over again.
If the autosave worked well though, then it would have made my day. I probably wouldn’t have learnt my lesson and still find myself dependent on the feature if that was the case.
However, there are times that the existence of autosave ruins your entire game especially in choice driven video games. This is particularly evident in Quantic Dream games wherein it heavily relies on autosave to save your progress.
I’m not talking about the times you revert a decision that has dire consequences in the future. That’s cheating since the game was really designed to be suspenseful. However, my qualms are with the times when you accidentally select the wrong dialogue options.
Your game is now defined by something completely unintentional. I once killed a love interest from the Mass Effect games because of this. I also remember playing Heavy Rain and running towards the console to shut it off whenever this happened.
Otherwise:
I’ve realized that it’s good to have autosave though, but the feature really needs to be implemented well. I like the concept of having multiple slots for autosaves because it anticipates possible file corruptions and there are different points you can jump to.
Gamers can do this manually and it’s called “save whoring.” It’s a phrase that describes the act of saving in an absurd number of slots as a fail safe to jump into different points of time in the game.
What do you think about autosave?
5 comments
It’s a life save in Skyrim but I hate it at the same time when I do something stupid that I didn’t mean to… Then its just bullshit!
It’s like your family. Sometimes, you hate them, sometimes you love them. Some people prefer to live without them, others can’t live without them. I think I would rather have autosave than not have it… Because I hate having to do something over. Take my Skyrim game for example… My memory got corrupt twice due my stupidity and lost the game twice… Although Skyrim has a great replay value but I’m still playing it and its my third or fourth time now because of the number of times its destroyed everything… I would rather have my old game back because repeating an action that you’ve done before is not very appealing to me in general.
For example. If this reply didn’t post and got deleted. I wouldn’t go back to type it again. Just wouldn’t happen.
Yeah, good analogy with the comments. I’m the same too!
In an action game like Halo where you push forward on and on, autosave is a must, obviously, and I think it’s implemented pretty well in Bethesda games by saving when you rest and enter a building or dungeon, but in The Last of Us it was actually kind of annoying because sometimes after I killed a group of enemies I wanted to immediately restart the encounter and try it a different way and it would start me back at the moment I cleared the room instead of when I entered it. And manually saving before every encounter was a pain because it took too long. And yeah, in Heavy Rain, I ended up flying at the power button a few times over a mistake.
How about the autosave that occurs before a long unskippable cutscene that is before a boss that wipes you out forcing you to rewatch the long unskippable cutscene?
That is absolutely horrible. I just don’t understand why it doesn’t start after the cutscene… Just doesn’t make any sense.