Edit a few hours later: I just want to thank you all for a nice discussion of the topic, I certainly learned a lot about how things work in the background. Doesn’t change how I find it annoying but it makes it more understandable!
Just need to vent this into the great emptiness that is the internet. What is going on with providing proper save capabilities in games today? Is it really that hard to save the state the game is in, when I exit it? It seems to be, because I keep seeing games where only at specific times an autosave is triggered, and honestly, it’s annoying.
Latest offender, The Fall of Porcupine, actually looks like a cool game, if you would actually be able to save when you exit it. Instead it saves at seemingly random times. Now I am trying to play that with my kid, and we got to watch our screentime a bit. It happened now twice we weren’t sure how to trigger a save by going anywhere, nothing we could do would trigger it. So we lost progress… again. Probably not going to continue this one.
Even really great games do this. I finally got Dave The Diver and at least you get to save on exit everytime you can exit. What I didn’t know until playing it for a while, there’s times where the game does not allow you to exit, what in the world is up with that? Apparently it is really really important to finish this silly cooking minigame right now, as there is no option to return to menu. Similar in some other sequences of triggering a boss fight. Just now I was at a place in the game where 3 separate boss fights got triggered with no indication its going to happen and of course no way to exit. Other than killing the game, but I guess that wouldn’t save it.
Aaand Stardew Valley, I really love it, great game. But only being able to save when ending the day, seriously? I read the mobile version can save anytime, why not all others too?
Ok, done, you can now ignore me or share your own stories if you like…
It’s not so much about time (although I have played a couple of things that would take a ridiculously long time to save or load), it’s about the number of chances to make a mistake. If you only save ten values, it’s really easy for a programmer to verify that they’ve got everything right, but if they save ten million, there are a million times more opportunities for mistakes to sneak in and it’s much harder to notice each mistake, let alone fix it.
Fallout 4 is a bit of an odd duck here as the save format for the BGS games is basically just another ESM file, so reuses all the same serialisation and deserialisation mechanisms. Most games don’t have multiple places the game data can come from and a way to combine them as they’ve not got an engine designed with this kind of modding in mind, so there’s nothing to reuse in this way for saves. Given the general standards of engineering from that studio, if they didn’t have this as a core feature of their custom engine for nearly three decades, and instead had to come up with something from scratch, they’d absolutely mess it up or have to simplify the saving system.