Skyrim disagrees with you! :P

My opinion: I prefer having a method to quicksave/manually save (along with autosaves/checkpoints), rather than just checkpoint saves.

This isn't about me being weak, or "casual" or anything like that. This is about me having control over my gaming experience. As people have mentioned already, real life doesn't care about your game. So your game should care about real life. I consider the ability to save being up there along with the ability to pause, to skip dialogue/cutscenes, to have the damned computer turn OFF when I press the off button (when did that stop working? Why must I yank out the cable from the back now to do that? :( ) and so on.

To me, someone saying "No, but the design of this game is such that it wouldn't work if you had quicksaves/manual saves" is like someone showing me a painting, and when I say it looks rubbish, they tell me "No, but you have to look at it at a 108° angle horizontally, and 60° vertically to properly experience it!". Get lost, I'll experience it however I feel I wish to experience it. Another example of the same behaviour being games that pretend to be "free", but the moment you go in the opposite direction from where the developer wants you, the moment you shoot the blue guy first instead of the green guy, you get a big flashy warning and a game over if you continue that way (interesting how these are so often the kinds of games that utilise a checkpoint system with no saves). If I wanted such a restrictive and linear, on-the-rails experience, I'd read a book. And guess what- in a book, I can put the bookmark WHEREVER I want, I don't have to start from the beginning of the chapter!

Relying on a checkpoint system as a game mechanic is very poor game design in my opinion. Coupled with the fact that checkpoint systems are usually done because the programmers are too lazy to code a proper save function (in the same vein as what amok said), I don't look at a lack of saving options in a game kindly.

In older games, it was understandable. They were running up against the limits of the system. Maybe there wasn't enough space to properly save everything. Maybe it was a console without any writeable memory. So they used checkpoints or level codes/passwords and so on.
But I have to admit, I used save states in Another world when I played it again years later (before the rerelease). I guess that makes me a pussy :D.

So did I. I wouldn't of completed it otherwise. :P

Neither am I super hardcore nor do I assume that everyone else loads the quicksave every two seconds. Anyway, just imagine quick saving in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or the next Need for Speed or GRID and you get how I feel about saving in shooters and RPGs. :P

Also I'm not really accusing people of being pussies when they want quick saving (seriously: I'm being sarcastic). I just don't like some people's unwilingness to appreciate perfectly legitimate design decisions and begging for a terrible workaround in form of quick saving when the things they actually complain about are bad level or interface design.

TBH those games could use a save system. Playing a tournament in Street fighter of Mortal Kombat and woops the game crashes and erases your progress.

I meant within the match. And I actually agree with you there. :P

Some epic quicksave/load combo potential right there.

That's the difference then, an overpowered weapon is part of the game but saving isn't. You having a compulsive disorder to save even if you don't want to because you can is your problem, not a fault of the game. Seriously, is it that hard?

And some technical mean that isn't even really part of the game's design is the most powerful tool at the player's disposal. I don't see how that's a pro argument. :P

Ahh, I remember playing that WW2 game which had no savegame feature, its name is on the tip of my tongue... You could only save between missions, and the missions involved infiltrating enemy bases, while one or two bullets could mean death. Near the end of each mission it got very tense. You slowly creep towards the final objective, knowing that all of it will have been in vain if you get careless and let an enemy spot you first.

The ability to save aside, I'm actually surprised that even today games implement the quicksave feature poorly. They either create dozens of autosaves like The Witcher 2 and then make deleting them in-game involve too much clicking, or they have only one quicksave file, potentially creating frustration when you accidenally quicksave in an unwinnable state (e.g. win a gunfight ith very little health; or when you think you're safe in a stealth game, but there's a guard behind you about to bump into you). Those games should have at least two quicksave files and alternate between them each time you press the quicksave key.

I think it depends on the game you are playing. In RPGs I really like a quicksave function because that helps a lot if you want to try different choices or die because of something in real life. On the other hand there are also games were this would make no sense like jump and runs or racing games. It would be boring if you could just save after every jump but the automatic save points need to designed carefully, since it gets annoying if you have a difficult passage just before a save point and it takes a like a felt eternity just to run there again and again :D

When I played Quake back in the 90s, I used to like quicksaves because I haven't the skill required as I was a beginner. Then years later, I tend to not use them in FPS.
I did the same for cRPGs including randomness, but then again I stopped using quicksaves as I don't use 'quicksaves' in pen & paper RPGs, so I accepted random results even if sometimes I found game systems broken.

The last times I used them was for Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, because I played them Day-One, and you know, bugs...
But even then somehow the broken game tried to prevent me using quicksaves since quicksaves were totally broken and unusuable in Fallout New Vegas.

But I do not like checkpoints either.

I prefer 'normal' saves because it can be done almost everywhere, with a custom name to make an entry to AARs if I would like to do one, and it takes time for the player to create them, not automatic or almost automatic saves.

Not even the best educated guesses will work all the time. The first Mass Effect has a situation where choosing to say "calm down" to an agitated character leads to them being automatically killed by another character; the choice that doesn't result in death is worded more strongly.

That sounds like World War Zero. GOG sells the earlier version, Iron Storm, which does support saving normally.

Nah, it was Project IGI, I remember now. That game was really tense, but also frustrating. I would have preferred a few checkpoints within a single mission, rather than the game requiring you to complete the whole mission (some of which were quite long) without a single save. And the enemies were mean sharpshooters, too. You almost had to crawl the whole time to avoid detection, otherwise you got a bullet in the head and it was game over.

Yes, it can be very frustrating if the game doesn't have or disallowed manual saves in favour of automatic saving at checkpoints that might be too far apart. Given the current state of many graphic, memory and hard disk intensive games today, where the crash back to desktop with the program has stopped responding message, blue screens of death or entire computer system lockups still remain common occurences to this day, having save game checkpoints which are too far apart does really make games look more frustrating.

That was a really good game. Personally hated it for the lack of save system.