So I've been playing fairly regularly the past few weeks with no issues. I'm a quicksave whore- hitting F5 pretty much before every fight or conversation (sometimes as bad as two or three times within the span of a minute) - and haven't had any issues because quicksaves typically only take 2-5 seconds. But I just started playing after a 4-day hiatus and now saving takes 20-30 seconds. With my compulsive saving habit this is a problem. I've tried restarting my computer and it doesn't help. I've tried clearing all but the most recent save from the save directory and it didn't help. Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this issue?

You could try defragmenting your hard drive.

Also, are you running anything in the background now that you weren't running before?

Saved games get larger as the game goes on. Saved games from the Prologue are usually under 10 MB apiece, but by the end of the game, they're around twice that size. Still, I wouldn't expect that to make a big difference in save times unless your hard drive needs defragmenting or you're running something in the background that takes up a lot of your computer's resources.

Defrag is auto-scheduled and just ran early this morning. each save is 25MB, but they were that size when I was playing a few days ago as well, and only today did I start having trouble. there are no new programs running in the background. I uninstalled to try a clean install but that didn't do anything either.

It's as if it's freezing several times while saving, because while in windowed mode the screen turns grey off and on if i click during the save screen. *EDIT* Load screens do not do this, and finish within 5-10 seconds

*EDIT:* It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the save file size, either. I started a new game, made a save, and the fresh 9MB save took the same amount of time as the 25MB saves.

Ok the issue seems to have fixed itself after Alt+Tabbing to Google for a while and leaving the game running. Not sure how that works out, but as long as it's working I'm happy.

I had this problem, it was because I had so many saves they just got bigger. I removed 75% of the files from the folder and it solved my problem. It might not work but just thought id let you know. :)

He said that he'd already removed all but the most recent save file; that's why no one suggested this. See that line, "I've tried clearing all but the most recent save from the save directory and it didn't help."

But you're right, in general; if someone hasn't purged their saves folder, then doing so can reduce loading times.

and I was just saying...