[quote=“RoyBread, post:99, topic:23965”]
I see a lot of people talking about loss of progress being a negative of autosave only. This makes little sense seeing as the game would also be autosaved upon quitting.[/quote]
IMHO, the argument against autosave-only makes a lot of sense if the game has a main storyline with much of the content built around it. In such cases, all roads eventually lead to the same main story encounters. Thus, if you die in one of these and can’t save immediately beforehand, you definitely lose some amount of progress, either to the very beginning (only 1 autosave file) or to some arbitrary checkpoint not of your own choosing. Either way, you’re forced into repeating stuff you’ve already done to get back to the point you died, which you have to pass to see anything new. And the harder that encounter is, the more likely you are to die, so the more repetition you have to do.
The problem with such repetition is that it negatively impacts the player’s attachment to the game. Instead of everything being new and different all the way through, now much of the player’s experience is been-there-done-that mechanical grinding. Thus, the fun quotient decreases. Furthermore, no matter how much somebody might like the game, he will only want to play it more or less exclusively for some finite period of time before burning out on it and needing a break. The more repetition he has to do, the sooner this will happen, leading many folks abandoning the game prior to finishing it.
Even worse IMHO, this repetition destroys the game’s replay value by consuming it all on the 1st play-through. The more of the game the player has to repeat after death, and the more often he has to do this, the more he memorizes the content, and the more options he will try along the way in hopes of improving his odds in the main encounter that keeps killing him. Thus, when (or if) he ever finishes the game, he will see little reason ever to play it again because he already has, many times, and can quote every line of NPC dialog from start to finish.
Thus, I think devs do themselves a disservice by putting harsh limits on saves. They put a lot of work into the whole thing, much of which will go unappreciated by many players due to the grindy repetition. Further, the player base will have a high turnover due to the 1-and-done nature of gameplay, instead of being composed of longterm, highly devoted fans.
This can all be avoided by letting players save whenever they want to. Those who don’t want to take advantage of this feature have the freedom to ignore it, while it’s available for those who’d rather have it. Thus, everybody is happy and the game and its community prosper.