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…
I can’t say this is true for every sort of game, but lot of games failure is part of the gameplay loop. If you can’t lose your progress, then there is no fear of losing a life, and therefore no tension is created. In example where this makes sense are Dark Souls and Resident Evil games. In Resident Evil you can only save if you find an object and consume it to safe… But also doing it like Stardew Valley to save only at specific points only means, its less work for the dev to figure out all possible details to safe and its more consistent with updates of the game, so it does not break the safe file. Even more so, if the game is multi platform. If the mobile version does save anytime, then it might use a different technology to do that. Not sure if it does and how it differs.
Just some thoughts about this subject. I personally find it totally normal and acceptable that games save on specific times only. In some cases not being able to save anytime is part of the gameplay experience and games are designed with that in mind.
In the case of dark souls, you can quit out at any time and your progress is saved. If you’re in a boss fight, it’ll just put you in front of the boss door when you reload your save. It’s saving automatically constantly. Bonfires are more for setting your respawn point when you die, and fast travel, among other features that vary from game to game. That level of tension can absolutely be done without forcing you to lose progress if say, your power goes out or you have to go.