Same. I realized I could just wail on everyone with a wrench without consequence. Took the fun away.

EDIT: Though I did eventually replay it once through when I realized you could turn vita-chambers off. Much better.

But here's a big +1 for PS3 titles Demon's Souls. That game would be ruined by a save anywhere function. That game is awesome in part because you stand to lose so much.

Fable is an interesting case. The reason for this was so that you could save during quests but without quests having to have alternate outcomes (e.g. if you're supposed to save a damsel and she dies you're forced to reload instead of getting an alternate outcome to the quest). This made the gameplay shallower and things like rescuing damsels meaningless because you had no option but success.

A side-effect of the Hero Save was that you could deliberately exploit it to grind experience and items or even create ridiculous paradoxes in the plot--many players fondly recall a particular point where you could make the Evil choice of sacrificing a person's life to get a weapon of ultimate power, Hero Saving once the weapon is in your possession, and then finally loading the save to choose the Good option of destroying the weapon to save the person's life--while having the weapon you just destroyed sitting in your inventory.

We're specifically talking about games where failure leads to a forced Game Over. Demon's Soul's continues after your death, making dying a viable choice and the lack of saving a genuine mechanic rather than a cheap excuse to extend the game's length.

Sometime last year I was just started playing Fable: The Lost Chapters. That time because of my busy schedule, I could only play for about 30 minutes or so per day. So I saved, and came back the next day to find out I had to replay what I did the previous day, then the next day again, and again. I cursed at the imbecile save game system (strictly my opinion), uninstalled the game, and have never played it again since.

It's not because something is technically possible that it must be done. It depends on the game design whether it's better or not to have auto save points.

I agree that probably in the beginning of time it was just impossible to save in a game, like in the first Super Mario for example, then with new technology they added some saving possibilities and it was just an improvement for the most part.

However a video game remains a game, a concept. In this regard, I don't think it's fair to say that in general no save possibility leads to "artificial difficulty". Isn't a game artificial anyway?

It's one thing to prevent save use ruining the difficulty of a challenge and quite another to arbitrarily restrict saving between challenges. See tarangwydion's Fable example above your post; you can't ever do a proper "World Save" during a Fable quest, even if the quest takes you through a town or other non-combat area where you are in no danger and could logically catch your breath and save the game. This restriction led to him wasting his time because he couldn't always finish the current quest in a single sitting. It is not the player's responsibility to set aside an unknown period of time that has been chosen by the developer. This is not a legitimate design decision but simply bad design.

Mass Effect 2, Arkham Asylum and various other recent games allow you to save anywhere except when in combat or other special situations; nobody complained about this because it's a fair compromise that maintains the game's challenge without forcing you to replay challenges you have already completed or lose progress when you quit.

Let me give you an example of a game that does it wrong. Say a level has challenges A, B, and C, each in its own room or with other clear divisions of non-combat exploration or whatever. I complete challenge A and then proceed on to challenge B. Make no mistake: I have completed challenge A and it is now behind me. However, because the developers hate me, I must also beat challenge B before I have made any actual progress. It may take me a long time and many retries to complete B--not because B itself is difficult but because I must run through A each and every time even though I already completed it perfectly. If at any point I need to end the play session before I reach the save spot what choices do I have? Leave the game running--often a non-option, especially for PC gamers--or quit and lose all progress. Wow, what great options!

The inability to save between challenges is a key reason why I have left several games uncompleted. I don't like giving up on a game, but then again if the designers have no respect for my time then I have no need to have any respect for their game either.

Games are my entertainment, not my job.

Encounter balance and achievements, that's why they're doing it, not laziness.

Sorry, but achievements are pretty much the reason for most stuff that goes into games or doesn't go in these days.

I found in some games it's just because I'm not playing well that I get stuck (Castlevania: Lords of Shadow), or have not been using the full range of my abilities (Darksiders had a couple of brutal parts due to this).

I like games like New Vegas, but being able to save and try and crit the same deathclaw or group of cazadors over and over again kind of takes the challenge away. That's not why I play that game so I'm okay with it, but there's games that would just become dumb without the challenge to get better.

It's up to the player to stop themselves doing stuff like that - them messing up the experience for themselves is their own fault, not a fault of the save system.

Im in two minds over game saving, In one aspect I do like the ability to quicksave if anything im RL pops up I can just save the game, do what I need to do and when I get back to the game continue from the exact point I saved it, Though the use of checkpoints does to an extent emilinate this problem as in most games they seem to have a short span between them.

But nothing is more annoying if you balls something up and that checkpoint reached notice hits and your screwed as you dont have health/ammo etc to make it through.

In games otherwise I find it removes any difficulty if you frequently hit the autosave button I find I end up having a habit of hitting it before any potential bad situation, Ive been playing Undying and find I must be doing it 20 times a level, I guess it depends on wether a person is playing for the challenge or the experience.

If I like a challenge and have a large block of time, I do like the Resident Evil Typewriter kind of save where you have a limited amount of saves and are often a distance apart, Though I never did find I was able to complete an RE game saving less than 5 times(for the rocket launcher), I tried on the 3rd one and gave up as Nemesis would just appear and rip you a new one and that would be really irritating.

Some games would be screwed without checkpoints though, Imagine playing the oddworld games if you could only save once per level.

I don't understand why people need to defend this system on terms of difficulty, there is a lot of situations in which it does not apply. I give you two examples:

- Sometimes, the checkpoint triggers before you have done something, or you realize that you wanted to prepare in another way for a battle. In Alice for example, right now I have triggered a checkpoint before realizing there was a secret place, so now, every time I'm killed (as a complicated battle follows) I have to go back to the secret place, collect the secret collectible and advance to the battle. Why can't I save by myself after collecting the secret item? Or what about when you realize that you want to use a different equipment? You cannot undo a checkpoint, which, when a battle is complicated, it forces you to do the same changes again and again and again.

- Sometimes I want to leave the game, but forget when was the last time the checkpoint icon appeared, so I have to keep playing no matter what until another one appears. Why?

Achievements, really? As if I needed more reasons to hate achievements. Well, I don't really hate them, but I consider it bullshit how developers are forced to include then in any game. Can you explain a little bit further why achievements force checkpoint-based saving?

And also, as a game developer, can you tell why any modern game design trend is a step further on telling me how I have to play my games? Because I started playing games for the freedom they gave me and now all the games have become movies that continually tell me what button I have to press for the action to continue.

Well, I criticize this mostly form an adventure gamer point of view. I recall games like Deus Ex, Hitman or Thief and, of course RPGs like Elder Scrolls or Gothic. In those games, you didn't play in a straight line, you played levels that could be addressed in many ways and the enemies have to be there at all time, since they could cover a more extensive part of the level. That way, the gameplay was way richer, since you could lure enemies into traps, make them believe you where somewhere and then enter from another entrance, etc. You also had to be careful not to raise too much alarm, since that could alert more enemies at the same time.

Maybe it was not perfect, but the gameplay was very rich thanks to this system.

Now, look at most games of today, enemies are totally stupid, because their A.I. is only designed to work in a single room. And it shows. You know, I've been playing games for long, I can see the tricks and they are becoming very, very old. I'm kind of tired of doors or whatever closed behind me so I don't leave the battleground, or doors or whatever suddenly opening in front of me because I killed all the enemies. Oh!, this door was closed, but now that everyone is dead it has magically opened. Red Faction Armageddon, for instance, has a counter that kills you if you leave an area before killing all the enemies (WTF!).

And then you also see the stupidest things. In Dead Space 2, you cannot shoot through open doors that enemies cannot pass through, your bullets just don't harm them, you have to be in the same room to kill them. And when you leave a room, all the enemies forget about you and walk back to their hideouts waiting for you to appear again, even if you are looking at them from the other side of an open door! In Alpha Protocol, doors magically close behind you, and you cannot reopen them again. And, at many moments, you can see enemies span to the game world from thin air, because they were not ready to appear when you reached.

In summary, checkpoints transforms the game worlds into smaller zones that the developers can manage better, while gameplay is simplified for the players. Good for developers, bad for players.

alrighty then I get what you're saying

The first game that instantly came to mind would be Darksiders :) Amirite?

That's not to say I don't love the game to bits but I fucking hate missing a chest, getting to a zone where I know the boss is next and won't be able to go back for ages, and I turn around and see a hidden chest so every single time I die... Marathon.

I agree with you, it is very annoying when the game decides when i save and not me the player.

The games that i have found to let you save anytime are mostly on Nintendo DS (FF:Crystal Bearers, Phoenix Wright, Pokemon Games, Suikoden and many more RPGs).

Yet the only games i've really come across on Consoles that let you save anytime are games like Oblivion, Fallout and Valkyria Chronicles amongst others but it's really very rare.

The thing is people can choose for themselves what they enjoy most. Not every PC gamer cares about being a hardcore elite player and compare themselves to others. If someone wants his game challenging that's fine, if someone else saves after each blunderbuss hit on the final boss and takes away the challenge in your eyes, I think that's fine, too, if they enjoy it that way.

Some people mentioned you can just turn down the difficulty but that's not true for all games, and besides, it would only make surviving easier but not necessarily save you a lot of time (not to mention that often the real difficulty has to do with clumsy controls, badly designed arcade elements or counterproductive camera angles in which cases the difficulty settings won't do anything to help you) . Like I said, I think the most horrible thing about these systems is that they're dictating how much time you have to spend with the game before you can quit, and if there's one thing about PC gamers, I think it's that they like to stay in control of things, as opposed to being lead by the hand and "coddled" in whatever way, including the designers taking care of your savegames for you so you don't have to think about them anymore. ;)