Now what was it that reason again that I dislike Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, Spider-Man: The Movie (2002), BloodRayne, etc... ? Not autosaves, but the lack of frakking save game anytime anywhere system!

EDIT: Add Fable: The Lost Chapters to the list of games with weird (and useless for me) save game system.

LOL that's OK, I meant it as a bit of a 'bit' anyway - I've been watching a lot of James Rolfe's 'Angry Video Game Nerd' videos recently - doesn't make it any less true though! Damn things!

Beyond the tediousness of having to restart at the beginning of a level or whatever, checkpoints/autosaves are annoying because if you want to quit playing you have to either be willing to go back however long to your last save/checkpoint, or keep playing until you find a new one.

This isn't too bad and although it would gall me to have to replay even as short a time as a half hour, I could live with it once in a while.

This I have to strongly disagree with. It only takes the fluidity out of the game if you choose to use it often. You can easily opt not to if it bothers you to save a lot. Same goes for the tension. And while I can see an argument for it reducing the challenge, I still see no issue here, personally. Again, just choose to save less often.

Another replay-hater! Nowadays I've such low tolerance for this if I know I'll enjoy a game that I'm preparing to set up right I take some time and energy to see if I can solve the problem before hand e.g downloading saves on the net, looking up cheats etc..

It's just such a waste of time, adding frustration and (almost) worst of it all: belief it makes the game longer and harder.

Exactly.

Getting frustrated a bit with Mirror's Edge at the moment. There's a lot of trial and error involved in the game, and obviously, when you climb and jump around in vertiginous heights and take on special forces and snipers unarmed, the possibility of dying is always present, but the save system really discourages experimentation, because after the umpteenth time of having to do the same sequence over and over again it just isn't fun anymore to see what happens when you try this ... whoops, back to the beginning. The thing is, the game regularly saves and often in fair intervals, but sometimes it still isn't enough and I wish I could just have my manual save to save some of my time. It's also not very clear what progress during a mission the game will auto-save when I quit. Sometimes it lets me continue at the last checkpoint, other times it throws me back quite a bit and uses the second last or an even earlier checkpoint, like the mission start. I don't feel like I can trust the game when I quit mid-chapter. (And IMO losing progress by quitting is even worse than losing progress by dying; the latter can be ok if done with moderation).

I also shudder at the thought of Rayman Origins, in which your only autosave can automatically get corrupted and if you didn't back it up yourself, you lose all progress in the game and can completely start over.

But wasn't Bioshock Infinite the game where the checkpoint system appears quite pointless and just a relict that they left in for whatever strange reason (e.g. tradition)? I recall that I always feared having to restart at the last checkpoint until I died the first time and had to realize that I wouldn't lose any progress at all and instead I was resurrected by Elizabeth at (more or less) the same spot where I died, not at the last checkpoint. That's what I found so weird about it because that means that the checkpoint and autosave system isn't really connected to dying and therefor not a design decision in order to increase the challenge, but just a technical shortcoming or a leftover that has no impact on how you play the game but only prevents you from quitting whenever you want to ...

For me, that doesn't work at all. The mere certainty that you can save at any time influences the experience.

Also, of course, a game with a save anywhere function is designed around it. The way encounters are set up, the difficulty level, the flow of the game, the level structure... you obviously won't get the feeling of checkpoints by being parsimonious with the quicksave function, you'll only get a subpar experience that's neither here nor there.

Completely agree. In my opinion, self-imposed challenges are no challenges at all; fighting against something you cannot control only adds to the thrill. Besides, if a game is designed to have a certain kind of save system, it will revolve around it no matter what: player choice cannot change the basic structure of a game. For example, if you don't save often in Thief, you WILL regret it: the possibility to save anytime is compensated by the brutal difficulty. On the contrary, having the chance to save anywhere in the extremely easy Deus Ex: Human Revolution breaks the game for me. Anyway, I think that in many games saves should be better balanced: one thing is starting from the beginning in a 1-hour long arcade game like Volgarr the Viking, another one is losing 3 hours of play time and go back to level sections you know perfectly and will pose no challenge at all in a "standard" fps.

That's the thing, of course. I mentioned the GTA level "Vertical Bird" because it consists of three parts: a section where you simply have to swim to the next objective (absolutely no challenge at all), a stealth/action section that won't challenge any player at that point in the game, and a really tricky flying section where you actually have to learn the controls of a new vehicle. That's obviously just wrong.

FPS games that get away with "save anywhere" functionality:

The old Serious Sam games, where encounters consist of being attacked by many dozens of enemies and simply (ab)using the quicksave function won't get you anywhere. These fights demand copious amounts of skill, and require you to manage them well from the moment on you hear the screams of the onrushing monsters.

The classic Doom games, for I wager similar reasons and also because they somehow manage to get away with absolutely everything.

I'm also a believer in the maxim that if replaying a section of a game is so abhorrent, playing it for the first time can't have been all that much fun either. I play games to play them, not to finish them. I don't mind replaying a 30 minutes battle against the tactics version of Irenicus at all. That's fun, it doesn't magically cease to be that way after one try. Quite the opposite: I love having to adapt my tactics.

The most annoying things for me are saves that happen before a cut-scene starts, combined with cut-scenes that can't be skipped and no possibility to save after the cut-scene until you've got through a hard boss fight or something.

There was a difficult part in Broken Sword 3 where you had to run away from some enemies and when you die (which happened at lot for me because of a combination of awkward controls and horrid camera angles) you have to watch a minute long cut-scene before you can try again... and fall down a pit 3 seconds later...

Or it requires a different kind of imagination. Besides, there's a degree of control that if you have close to non at all the matter of choice and challenge becomes meaningless. For me that happens far sooner when I can't save anywhere. The loss of that thrill is miniscule compared to the annoyance of unnecessary replay (IMO).

Between those two I don't see much difference. If you had said at tops 5 to 10 minutes play time of when there's no challenge and you know where to go it makes a difference but it also makes it moot, why bother with a long transport distance for no purpose at all? So the choice of being able to save anywhere is preferable to no choice at all. I suppose the best would be to have the choice to turn off it on or just like many games offer to turn on and off auto saves.

Regardless of what you think about the game itself, Thief does have a good way to manage this very problem with the Customisation of the game that you set right at the beginning.

Currently I can save wherever I want, but I choose only to use the "custom checkpoint" function by climbing into a closet. When not in combat or danger this acts as a quick save. It is good, fits the game, and while you can choose to jump into a closet whenever you want (while not in combat), you can only do that where there is a closet available. To me this is the best of both worlds.

Of course, there are even harsher choices you can set that would either send you back to the beginning of the level, or even reset the whole game.



In other games, I do like set my own saves. I try to only use quick saves, but in games like Fallout 3 where this could get corrupted by anything at all, including whether my cat was in a good mood, I ended up with a couple hundred save points set up so I could at least not lose too much ground.

The thing is - if hard save / personal save save system is there but you choose not to use it, you have lost little, but if it is not there and you would rather it was there then you have lost more. But, if it is going to be a make or break decision for you as a gamer then it would be good to have this information ahead of time in order to make the most informed choice possible.

This is only my take, obviously, but my two cents for what it's worth!

LOL...your mind is capable of much evil...

Disclaimer: when I mentioned Thief, I meant "The Dark Project". What I said does not apply to the most recent one! Sorry, I should have been more precise! Publishers should abandon the bad habit of recycling names, imo. It's too easy to confuse them!
I played the First encounter recently: that game is great! And yes, I know what you mean because I regretted quicksaving a few times... you THINK you're safe so you save, but then you discover you were very, VERY wrong! :)
True, but I was referring to non-tactical games were more often than not there the AI will not no change its behavior... for example, imagine Painkiller without checkpoints! (shivers) Or, just as you said, that moment in GTA.
There is a consistent difference: Volgarr has a checkpoint every half level and was made to be "speedrunned"- the challenge stays precisely in finishing it as fast as possible in one shot. After a few tries you know where to go, so the path seems nothing new, but when you try to improve your run you'll have to change your approach to every level more than once, hence the great replayability. Levels are much shorter than 10 minutes, anyway!
Another good -and different- example could be Hitman: if you lose, you have to do everything from the beginning, and always find a way to overcome the unexpected. Once you do it right, every mission will last just a few minutes, but the sense of accomplishment after the success of a perfect plan is unique!
Then you have other games, like Bioshock Infinite, where you have to change almost nothing from playtrough to playtrough, so repeating the same sections with predictable outcomes can be very tedious.
That's just my opinion, though, I do not pretend to hold the truth! :)