I didn't realize I liked auto save this much, until I didn't have it

In 2022, a lot of the games come with an autosave that on some varying intervals saves your game. And I didn't really think about it much until this week I booted up Knights of the Old Republic 2, kept playing for hours only to realize after dying in one of the missions, I was set back hours. Let's talk about that and other things related to saving your progress in video games.

The annoyance of manual-only saves in KOTOR 2

I absolutely love the Knights of the Old Republic games. Original published in 2003 and the sequel in 2004/2005, these games throw the player into the old times of the Star Wars universe and lore, way before the movies and tv shows.

They were also created in a time when "autosave everywhere" was not really a thing. So players knew to keep saving constantly and they provided a really nice and handy quick save feature to make it effortless. And it is effortless, until you forget because you've played autosave games for the past decade or so.

I felt the disturbance in the force for the first time not too far into the game when I first time died and had to reload from a small way back. After that, for the rest of that day I remembered to save after every quest and every fight. But on the following day, I had totally forgotten again, played for 3 hours and then died – only to realize that over 1.5 hours of that progress had not been saved. And the worst part was that I couldn't quite remember where I was in the story because Knights of the Old Republic 2's quest/journal system is bit hazy.

At that point, I turned off the game, switched to NHL for the day and had more fun without having to worry about saving.

That got me thinking how the saving systems have changed over the years, different ways games implement saving and some other things I decided to jot down to this blog post. Let's go for a tour!

Different methods of autosaving

There are different ways games approach auto save – and some don't at all – but these days it seems more and more common to have it. It's like that to the point that in the games where it doesn't exist, it's a design feature.

I play of lot sports games: FIFA, NHL, NFL, NBA and in a career/franchise/story mode, they save automatically after you finish a match and return to your hub screen. So the only time you ever need to save manually is if you make big changes to your roster, lineup or strategy after a game but before playing another. And in these cases, if you forget, it's usually not that much of a trouble.

And I play adventure games. Recently, I've played a lot of Watch Dogs 2 and Horizon: Forbidden West. Both of these have an autosave feature which I believe triggers when you start or finish a quest but I'm not sure. What I do know is that the only time I manually save is when I want to activate a new campfire in Horizon.

Other games like some platformers save your game after each screen or level so you don't have to start the game over after every death, which will be plentiful. In some games these are only checkpoint saves though, meaning that if you die, you can try immediately again but if you quit the game, you need to restart the level.

Intentional manual saves

Hollow Knight and  the Dark Souls games are designed in a way where you need to make progress and find a place to rest – benches in Hollow Knight and bonfires in Dark Souls. These games are meant to be challenging and require more intention from the player to reach the next save point.

In general, I don't personally like this system but I can respect it for its intentionality. It's not a missing feature in a way I would consider lacking of modern autosave for KOTOR 2. Rather, it's an integral part of the game's design. For me, the biggest annoyance with all of these is having to do a lot of slow, mundane and not challenging or interesting stuff over and over again.

That's been what has kept me away from Hollow Knight after it's original appeal.

Saving to take a break

As Mark Brown explains in his Game Maker's Toolkit video Playing Past Your Mistakes, Dark Souls allows players to save the game at any point but deletes that save when it's loaded. This allows players to take a break at any time but prevents save scumming where player keeps saving and loading to reset failures or unwanted results.

A 10-year old me would have loved this in games that would only allow saving in save points when my mom calls me for dinner. So many small arguments could have been avoided with this feature.

I really love how Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4 (if setting Keep application suspended is turned on in Power Saving Settings) allow you to stop the game at any point for a break without having to save. I use it all the time with my Switch and it's one of my favorite features on it. I can play for 5 minutes while waiting for the bus and just put the console into my bag and continue later exactly where I was.

Only allowing a single save

Another thing that annoys me a lot in modern video games is only allowing player to have a single game progress on-going at once. One of those "if you start a new game, we'll wipe your other game".

I never liked it for the original Pokemon games on Game Boy but it made sense there given the very limited storage space to store saves. But for a PC or console game in 2022, there's really no good reason for this. Wolfenstein: The New Order from 2014 is a good example of a game that does this.

The 2020 remake Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 is another example of this. You cannot have multiple progresses active at the same time – and even worse, there's no way to delete your progress in-game.

A workaround for these problems is to have multiple user accounts on your console but I feel that's such a cumbersome solution. It works if you and your roommate want to play your own games and own progresses while using the same machine but I live and play alone and still occasionally want to restart the game with new decisions or strategies without losing all my progress.

In Stardew Valley, which enables unlimited amount of saves, I have a few dozen different farms. Some are forgotten and abandoned but some I actively play and have different set of mods in them to provide variety and different challenges.

And something positive: cloud sync is amazing

I have two laptops right now and am waiting to get my Steam Deck delivered any day now. If some games make saving a pain, Steam's Cloud Sync makes them a joy. I can play on my main laptop at home and seaminglessly continue the game on the road with my other laptop or my future Steam Deck.

Sometimes I wish that existed for cross-platform games too (and there might be some that do it). I own Slay the Spire for both Switch and computer and would love to be able to sync my progression between those. It's not the end of the world for roguelike games like Slay the Spire but it would be a nice bonus.