I don't blame you for not liking it but condemning the game like it's the worst thing ever is just a shame. Because it is a well made, beautiful game. Though it does resemble Hitman 2 more than Bloody Money (my favourite).

I haven't actually played Absolution yet. I never got into the original Hitman games (the lack of saving really put me off). I heard fans of the original games complaining that Absolution was watered down and too easy, so I figured I might actually like it then and I got it on a sale XD I haven't had a chance to play it though. I'm planning to catch up on a lot of games over the next few months once I have less work.

So how exactly does the saving work in Absolution? Is it regularly spaced checkpoints that trigger when I reach certain areas? Or is it more like the Prince of Persia games where there's a save item that I choose to interact with and can reuse if I want to? And then once I save, the enemies in the level respawn so I need to keep going forward without backtracking if I want to avoid redoing the same battles?

On normal difficulty you have 7 saves per mission in Hitman 2 and Blood Money and I believe it's the same for Contracts. It's only the first game that has neither in-mission saving or checkpoints, only saving the progress as you complete a mission at a time. Quite annoying if there's an obstacle at the end of the mission, or worse; a technical issue and trying to find a workaround can take ages which is why I gave up on it (I've completed 2nd and BM, enjoyed both a lot).

There is checkpoints dotted around a level and once you're done you find the check point, strike it and move on. You also get autosaves too. But it's not a difficult game, which in my opinion made it a bit more fun. Got a bit fed up of difficulty. However it's abit hard on the highest difficulty obviously. Someone new to the series can start here and do fine. :)

I presume "quicksave" here means "save anywhere"? I generally don't use quicksave at least if it uses only one gameslot (save just before dying, duh!), but save-anywhere by manually saving the game. That's good enough for me, as long as I am able to save at any time.

I'm fine with checkpoint systems as well, as long as they are placed sanely, e.g. always a checkpoint right before a hard part of a game so that I don't have to replay 10 minutes of easy boring parts, just to reach the hard part where I keep dying over and over again.

Then again, depending on the game, I might still want save-anywhere just so that I can easily experiment and try out stupid things in the game. That was why I much preferred the PC version of the original 1996 Tomb Raider (save anywhere) to the Playstation version (checkpoint save system). In the PC version, I could freely try dangerous jumps and stuff which I was not sure would be successful, ie. can I really reach that other ledge from this point. With the Playstation version, I wouldn't want to try things like that as they could mean having to replay big parts of the game again. So I'd try to play the Playstation version in a safer and more boring manner, never experimenting any difficult and dangerous stuff.

I admit that in e.g. mission based space combat sims and flight sims save-anywhere would probably feel wrong though, not sure why. As long as the missions are not too long.