#autosaves

When I gripe about things like this, I do like to include some sort of anecdote on what most recently brought the subject to mind. Recently I have been having a Particularly Bad Time because I swear everyone in the world started plastering images and video clips of a stalker of mine everywhere I looked and CPTSD can get really bad. So a couple people just spontaneously threw some games at me and it just so happened SnowRunner was both near the top of my steam wish list and pretty heavily on sale at the time.

SnowRunner is an absolutely ridiculously sprawling game where the starting area is just "Michigan" and has something like 100 missions and pickups and such to go find. With DLC and such there are apparently 19 of these regions.

And the premise of the thing is that you are some sort of human-shaped hermit crab that cannot survive outside the confines of a truck going around this basically post-apocalyptic world scrounging up new trucks and upgrades and cash for more trucks and upgrades while dealing with the fact that the entire world is made out of honestly super impressive soft-body physics and it is both possible and hilariously frequent that when driving on what looks like a pretty safe dirt road, a patch in the middle of it will actually be loose soft mud, and practically before you know it your truck has turned into the horse from The Neverending Story and/or the trailer you're hauling has rolled off a cliff into the middle of a river.

The former issue isn't that much of a problem because you can teleport back to a garage at any time, but that does not apply to trailers, they'll stay behind, and selling empty trailers off once they've served their purpose is a good way to get money, a finite resource. Additionally, as games that are this physics-y and this much of a (very loose, soft) sandbox of a design tend to do, they added some real quick unsticking features where you can just outright delete any cargo or trailers in the area that are causing you some sort of problem, without any sort of confirmation. And then as a couple nails in my personal anxiety coffin, there are no confirmation checks when spending your finite money on new trucks or upgrades, or selling the ones you have, and a hell of a lot of people either hit a bug or just a really poorly documented feature early on when first entering a proper garage where the tutorial decides you need to pack a truck into a pocket dimension and take it to Alaska, and it isn't asking, where your trucks will maybe... go away. Or stay on the first map anyway, which the tutorial won't let you return to until you drive around Alaska a little.

All of this, plus accidentally deleting crates needed for a mission when trying to work out how loading and unloading worked, and stranding a mission critical trailer in some mud I couldn't deal with freaked me out badly enough to want to reload, but, no can do. This is a constant auto-saving game. So I restarted and played back through the first hour or two of the game a couple of times before my anxiety got too bad and I had to put it down.

The good news with this particular game is I happen to know someone who loves it to death and has been trying to push it on people for quite some time now, and when I mentioned it stressing me out she actually just kind of immediately jumped into a multiplayer session to explain some of the more opaque mechanics/generally show me some ropes. Here's her streaming this very game recently, which by new policy I suppose Twitch will delete within a few days of me posting this, and her Youtube channel while I'm at it.

As it turns out, aside from just generally coming across as a far more evil game than it really is by giving you just The Worst Trucks at the start and not conveying how badly they suck or how you can just hop into non-functioning wrecks and teleport those home for free repairs, while money IS technically a finite resource, all things are bought and sold at the exact same price, and there are enough missions to eventually just sort of afford everything, so it's more of a supply cap limit than a carefully plan your purchases and deal with the longterm consequences issue. And you can restart missions. So all I really have to do is avoid that "delete trailers" and this game is not completely ruined by its auto-saves only nature.

Meanwhile the other big one that comes to mind is always going to be Dawn of War 2, with its boardgame-y campaign mode in which enemy forces conquer territory whenever your turn ends, which happens either when you finish a mission and return to the map, or if you quit the game and back later, and also you get permanently locked out of bonus objectives if you misread the 50/50 of which point on the map is the main objective and which is the bonus.

Even UFO 50 gets in on this, with a deeply secret hidden game with a brickable puzzle, which can only be restarted if you start an entirely new UFO 50 save, and in which I tried using the workbench in Pilot's Quest not realizing I was slightly out of position and actually clicking the science bench a few times. An irrevocable error which thanks to auto-saving cost me something like 5 hours of idling to recover from.

I've also just lost save files to corruption because an auto-save happened while my internet was blinking and Steam cloud saves couldn't deal, and in power outages (which COULD still happen with manual saves, but, being in control makes it a bit less likely).

And outside of doomsday scenarios like those, I still hate auto-saves because I never really know when or if they're coming. Sure, technically games almost always say "hey when the little rotating mariachi appears in the corner, the game is saving, don't quit while that's up" but that's such a boilerplate I no longer really see it, people tend to make those as unobtrusive as they can, and some games save so fast you can blink and miss it. So I never know just when my last save was, I'm often not sure if a game is saving at all, and if I'm worried, and trying to play until the next one, it's entirely possible I'll miss that too.

I'm not one to argue that you should absolutely always be able to save every game at any instant you might care to. There's design reasons for stuff like "no saving inside dungeons" or "only saves between levels" and such (although where possible I'd encourage people doing those to allow "suspend" saves anywhere that delete themselves on load whenever possible because sometimes you need to turn things off and run out doors). Space your saves out as much as you need to. I just want a big huge prompt when you do them asking me if I want to save, both because sometimes I honestly don't, and even if I clearly always would, having to confirm a big dialog box means I am acknowledging that a save is happening now. I can't not notice it.

Also this of course doesn't have to be a pick a side issue. So long as I can also save manually, feel free to include an auto-save on the side, update it as much as you want. Sometimes people do forget to save regularly and all, it can be a nice feature. But I have literally dropped games completely before purely on the basis of doing auto-saves and nothing but, and like... there's next to no cost in letting me do it by hand.