I'm so very tired of games still limiting saves the way they do.

When it comes to video games I'm a frequent saver. I grew up in a time where autosaving was far from the norm, and playing my share of dastardly early PC games that were more than happy to kill you out of nowhere or drop you into an unwinnable situation meant that I got into the habit of saving frequently and keeping at least a few backups around in case surrendering an hour of progress was a more appealing prospect than bashing my head against a problem I didn't have the resources to solve.

Of course after the 7th generation, when hard drives became standard and games didn't have to take half a minute to save to a memory card on console, I got used to autosaves like everyone else, but I didn't stop manually saving in any game that would let me, nor leaving a trail of prior states I would likely never return to just in case. Get to an important inflection point in the story? Drop a save and check out one option, then switch to the other if you don't like the result. I remain a committed save scummer to this day, and I make no apologies for it. I played Bioshock 1 in 2021 without Vita Chambers but with plenty of save scumming and I cannot imagine a better way for me to enjoy that game.

The thing is that over time it seems more and more that developers want to control how players save their game along with everything else these days. Back in the console days when battery backups or passwords required saves to consist of tiny bits of data there were a lot of restrictions on saving made in order to accommodate that. If you restricted saves to in between levels or specific points you could very efficiently store a player's location in the game, allowing you to cram in additional info like inventory or EXP within the few bytes of data you had available. PC games generally didn't have such restrictions, at least not after the widespread adoption of hard drives (yes I am old enough to remember when not every PC had a hard drive.)

Of course the console restrictions did come with benefits, chief among them the risk/reward of spacing out save points, giving real tension to gamers as they fought to get to the next place to record their progress before running out of health or lives. Video games often struggle to create true stakes, and one of the ways they do this is by forcing the player to bet their time against the game, taking away chunks of progress if you aren't good enough and forcing you to replay segments multiple times to get them right. I'm not a fan of this mechanic and in some ways it has disappeared (think how few games actually have limited lives at this point) but there is value to it.

Over time as hard drives became standard in consoles saving became more liberal again, with many games allowing you to save whenever you wanted (at least out of combat) and others at least allowing frequent and unlimited saves. But it seems like in some ways this is being rolled back now.

The worst is when games offer absolutely no control over saves at all, not even multiple save slots. Not having multiple save slots is, frankly, inexcusable in 2023. Beyond the obvious fact that a parent might buy a game for their children to share (especially in the days of digital distribution when there might be no physical cartridge at all) or two spouses or roommates might share a game, even solo players might at least want a late game save and an early game save. Games without save slots are made by thoughtless or predatory developers (thinking this might somehow sell more copies.) To some degree they are offset because usually saves will be tied to one account, so you can have effective slots with multiple console accounts, but this practice sucks.

Then there are games that may or may not have multiple save slots but give the player no control over the saving, just autosaving whenever they feel like it. Sometimes this is acceptable, such as in a game that's intended to be hardcore and wants to discourage save scumming, though I actually think it's generally bad and anti-consumer. If a player wants to save scum...why not let them? They're having more fun that way and who, exactly, is getting hurt? Some developers love to micromanage how their players engage with their games, like whiny little authors standing over your shoulder telling you how to read. I really don't like this and I generally do not like punishing game design. But there is at least some thought put into it.

There are also games that limit your saves for what are likely reasons of developer resources. Garden Story only allows you to save between days despite being a light, simple, affair. I think this is probably because it's easier to limit the amount of data you have to track that way. I don't like it but I do understand it and I get that when you're a tiny indie you need to make careful resource allocation decisions and spending one or two weeks of developer time to implement a better save system might not be possible.

However games like Horizon: Forbidden West should let you save at virtually any point. This is a huge, sprawling, affair with a budget in the 9 figures. It is almost incomprehensively massive. Now this game makes the decision to autosave frequently and also let you manually save at specific points, of which there are many. This was probably done for technical reasons (again it's easier to save progress if you can just spawn a player at one of 100 fast travel points than save them literally anywhere on the map, especially in an open world game where they might save in the middle of an area full of enemies so you'd have to track what was dead when they saved) and also to create a bit of tension. Horizon isn't a hard game but it wants a tense atmosphere and limited saves do help with that.

What doesn't help with that is limiting me to five manual save slots. Why? This is a very long game. I think any limits are kind of shitty but a limit that low is just irritating. There are some minor choice points in the plot and missions someone might want to replay and I just don't see the reason for it. Even worse is AI: The Somnium Files, which limits you to 3. This game has a lot of very touchy trophies/achievements that require doing silly things, so save scumming them makes sense. Now you can chapter hop, so that ameliorates things somewhat, but why limit to 3?

I think 99% of the time where technically feasible games should let you save whenever you want, at least when you're not in danger. I think they should let you save whenever and wherever you want unless you are in mortal danger at the time (and sometimes even then, especially with an autosave backup at a safe location.) I think that not having manual saves is shitty for the most part, not having mid-game saves on lengthy Roguelites is very shitty, and having only one or a few slots is shitty. There's no reason for it 99% of the time.

Of course the shittiest of all are live services games. When it launched Marvel's Avengers not only didn't have any save slots but it didn't let you replay the single player game unless you deleted all your progress (including multiplayer) They did fix that, but it really shows how little developers cared about their players on that game. Save options are often a sign of how much developers considered their players' needs and wants when making a game. A game with crappy save options is often a game made by people who didn't care if you had a good time.

Now don't even get me started on pausing, which is even worse in some ways. There's NO excuse for not letting me pause when I'm playing single player. NONE!

This brings to mind that Zelda Breath of the Wild on Switch had only one save slot and could easily be overwritten if, for instance, my kid started a new game with my account. I don't know if that was ever fixed or Nintendo just rolled with that.

I mean, Pokemon hs a single save for obvious reasons but at least they don't allow you to save a new game over a previous save unless you go through a multi step process to erase your previous data. I'd much prefer that method if they insist on making a single save slot for a game.

Also, yes on being able to Paws on any single player game for real.

@chamurai: What's the obvious reason for Pokemon only having one save slot? It should have multiple.

People love running arbitrary Pokemon challenges like nuzlocke etc... They shouldn't have to give up their main save to do so, especially now when they may be playing competitive online too.

If the reason is to avoid people cheating the trade system then give people only one slot that can go online or trade but others that can do singleplayer without trading enabled.

@bigsocrates: Call me stubborn or delusional but with Pokemon, I feel that there is value in having just the one slot to give a percieved 'weight' to the pokemon you've caught/breeded. I feel like having multiple slots would make them feel, I don't know, less important. Isn't that why people play nuzlocke though because of that weight?

@chamurai: People play Nuzlock because it makes the games play differently. Many do it on emulated versions or even extra cartridges so they do not lose their primary saves.

I don't think having a single save slot adds or removes to the value of catching or breeding because you still have to do the work (unless you cheat.)

It's like any RPG with a lot of customization. You can make as many Shepherds or Diablo characters as you want but that doesn't devalue them.

And with Pokemon people already buy and play both versions so many people are already doing multiple saves in their own way.

Eh, I generally prefer games with (plentiful) save points / checkpoints etc. over save-anywhere. Save-anywhere inevitably makes me save-scum which isn't as fun, since I end up trying the same 2-second challenge over and over again until I get it right rather than forcing myself to react dynamically. Maybe they should include an option at the beginning whether to allow it or not.

@wollywoo: My view is that if some gamers can't hold themselves back from abusing a system it should not be removed for everyone. And that includes me. There are some systems that are not perfectly tuned for me because I tend to abuse them and might have more fun without them, but they work for others.

That being said I obviously would not object to a settings choice, just like I don't object to Iron Man options or the like. If it's optional it's fine.

And in general I don't mind games with decent checkpoint systems. Horizon: Forbidden Dawn only lets you save at save points or via autosave during missions, and it's fine. My complaint with that game is that there are very few save slots and there are a bunch of choices that impact the game and there's no technical reason that I shouldn't be able to have a bunch of saves right at those branches. The saves are 6.3 megabytes too! It's not like they take up a ton of space for a game that's over 88 gigabytes!

I've gotten into the habit of having multiple save states for some games, but mostly only if I'm replaying them and know the consequences for failure at a certain section are more immediate than they first appear. For example, I'm replaying the PS5 remaster of The Witcher 3 and, remembering that the Gwent tournament is absolutely and easily losable, made sure to make a save specifically for the tournament because I'd lost the last go around and wanted to see it all the way through this time.

That said, on my first time through a game I'm still pretty invested in the "my save is my save" lifestyle and it's probably why I've never fully clicked with games like XCOM or Hitman. Things go wrong, they go wrong, and that's the experience I'm having. One phrase early in your post (sorry, going to work so I skipped to the end shortly after this) was "Get to an important inflection point in the story? Drop a save and check out one option, then switch to the other if you don't like the result." While I suppose I have no reason at all to disagree with you that all games should allow players to do this, I would never want to. For example, I was trying to play a slightly more practical, less directly moral by modern standards Geralt in this Witcher run, which meant early on being a bit dismissive of the sorceress Kiera and kinda pissing her off. About sixty hours later I learned that meant she wouldn't be open to joining my merry gang for our big reunion to save the world.

Was I disappointed? Sure, I didn't want that. But it's what happened, and I like that I'm stuck with it.

@nodima: I generally play like this too, the exception being when there's some unforeseeable consequence that will dramatically impact the game negatively. Like the game forces you to choose left or right without further context and if you go left your favorite sidekick character dies and is unavailable for the rest of the game but if you go right they live and instead your least favorite side character dies. If I go left because the game didn't warn me you best believe I'm reverting my save and going right instead. But otherwise my choices are my choices.

HOWEVER! Once I'm DONE with the game, rather than do a complete new playthrough I am more likely to want to go back and see what happens if I make the other choice. That's why I want to drop and maintain the save before the inflection point. It's not that I'm save scumming my choices, it's that I'd like to see at least some of the other content without having to do a whole additional playthrough. And yes I could just Youtube it but I could just Youtube the whole whole game to begin with. That's not how I want to engage with it.

Of course I have no issues with people who only want one save or if the developer wants to include an optional one save only mode. I'm not trying to change how people play, I just want developers to leave the choice in the hands of the players.

Been playing a lot of the Witcher 3 lately, and that game has 1) checkpoints, 2) autosaves with a user-configurable time interval, 3) quicksaves, and 4) manual saves that work anywhere that's not in the middle of a dialogue sequence. Love it.