One problem with games allowing you to save anywhere is that it is possible (especially in action games) to make saves that are doomed; it is impossible to continue the game from the save. For example, if you are over a pit and save the game, but you happen to be in a bad position (or perhaps the developer decided to be evil and put an invisible coin block right in the path of your jump that you could not possibly know about before saving) and therefore will always fall into a bottomless pit every time you reload. Or, perhaps, you are low on health and happened to save right where an enemy spawns when you reload (this happened to me in Ys III (and is impossible in OaF because you can only save at specific spots)), causing you to die before you can do anything.

Should developers limit saving to prevent this from happening, or include some sort of "emergency escape" feature? Or is it fine to allow the player to make a save that one can't continue from? (Interestingly enough, none of the games I can think of with "emergency escape" features are action games, but it feels like that's the genre that would need them the most if save anywhere is an option.)

Bump since this topic seems to have fallen through the cracks and somebody pressed the save button at the wrong time.

The best way to solve this issue is for the game to keep a backup of the last 1-2 quicksaves instead of overwriting them right away. In general though, I think it's the responsibility of the player to save often and in different slots and watch out for situations that are bound to cause trouble (e.g. with the PC in motion and in immediate proximity of something dangerous). I'd prefer that responibility over being limited, provided the game isn't too buggy.

3-5 rolling autosaves is a good way to prevent this. The player may lose some progress depending on the amount of time to the last autosave, but at least they'll be able to choose a point to go back to before before when they screwed things up.

IMO, if the game allows you to save pretty much anywhere and in multiple save slots, and yet the player still screws up so that the only save they have is a 'doomed' save... they've no one to blame but themself. So, in that situation, no, the devs shouldn't be expected to save the players from themselves.

No.

This. I assume it's a problem with auto saves, as anyone in their right mind knows to have multiple saves at different points. Gaming 101.

Depends on how often that actually happens. In the past, for some games, the idea was to save often. So that if there is one save that is effectively spoiled, it doesn't really matter, you just continue from the one before. That can be annoying in some cases if you forogot to save regularly (so auto-save every five minutes is basically a nice idea).

All in all my guess is that this is not much benefit for quite some effort (figuring out if a save is really doomed might be non-trivial). Better and much easier to implement a working auto-save.

This.

I've seen some game doing this but can't remember which one.

Disable saving when possible, but for the rest, the only solution is autosaves.
Maybe also a few checkpoints to avoid an (improbable) chain of doomed ones :O

Maybe it could be made into an achievement,
"You have hit a game breaking bug and we have autosaved your position at it, Uplay achievement unlocked"
Obviously replace Uplay with Galaxy.

Depends. During missions, I use 5 rolling manual saves (+ one quicksave) in Fallout Tactics (Redux 1.3 mod), and many times I've ended up in a situation that all those 5 saves have been so recent that I've made some mistake I can't get out of anymore alive, like engaging very hard enemies in a battle and they surround me or something. The game (mod) can be quite unforgiving at least in the hardest difficulty, like super mutants having rocket launchers that do 300+ points of damage to you even though you have the very best armor (advanced power armor), good AC and high levels.... Too bad you only have around 170 HP, so 300 points of damage kills you with one hit. Frankly, it seems the only feasible way to win such rocket launcher wielding super mutants is to snipe into their eyes so far that they can't hit you yet, and retry (save scum) so many times until your sniper rifle shot knocks them out, making them lose their consciousness. Then hurry near to them in order to kill them fast with bigger/energy weapons, hoping there are no other rocket launcher mutants nearby...

In those cases the only way out is to restart the whole mission. Just in case, I also keep a save from the base (before the mission) so that I can get back to there too in case I realize I shouldn't have entered the mission yet at all, e.g. I'm missing something vital for the mission.

For example, if the mission has lots of enemy robots but you don't have weapons that would make any real damage to them (like energy weapons or rocket launchers; your sniper rifles are near useless against them, as are almost all machine guns and such). Or one particular late mission where you were supposed to destroy six robot nodes at the same time (the easiest way to do that is to plant a remote controlled bomb on each node, and then blow them up with the remote controller at the same time). At least I couldn't find such bombs in the game, only timed bombs, so it was a good idea to buy six remote controlled bombs from the base, before you enter the mission.

In such cases I wish I could get back to the base, before I even started the mission.

As far as I remember, The Witcher 1 did the opposite pretty zealously, and permanently saved even all of your quicksaves.

I'd like to see games giving you several quicksave keys, like Quicksave F1-F4, Quickload F5-8, so you can save often in different slots, without having to open the menu every time.

No. The game shouldn't prevent saving anywhere. Just have a couple of quicksave/autosave slots that are used alternatingly so that, if the need arises, one can go one or two saves further back. There are many games that do it well but unfortunately there are also many games that do it really bad. Worst of all are those that don't allow free saving at all.