Autosave & quicksave

[lietu]

Regardless of what you decide to do about the saving system (there are polls about that going on), you absolutely need to include a good backup system for at least autosave and quicksave slots.

These days the save systems should be stable enough in all games, that you can just play through the game and only consider saving in case you're quitting, and still be able to jump back enough in time to recover from bugs and other issues you might encounter.

I suggest that you keep a total of 4 different copies of any save. So in case of autosave and quicksave, there would be the current one, and up to three previous copies. Same be done if you have a named savegame system, e.g. if I was naming my saves "Character 1", there should still be the same 3 previous copies backed up.

Also, since most people aren't that good with computers, you should just add a "show backups" checkbox to the load game screen and also show the timestamps (preferably both human time and game time) they were saved.

I for example personally prefer to just play with quicksave, and sometimes do end up hitting quicksave just after jumping off a cliff or something similar, if the game has backups, I'll just go back to the previous one, if not, I'll try console cheats, if there's no console, I'll probably just stop playing then.

[Interloper]

This seems like a pretty good idea - I prefer rather than backups, just having multiple quick/autosave slots which you cycle through as you play, so then you can travel back incremental amounts if you make a mistake and only realize later.

[lietu]

Well, the underlying implementation doesn't matter to me really, as long as it's possible to go back at least 3 saves. It is easily possible to do a few saves before realizing that something is horribly wrong and you want to go back.

However, if you just go with multiple slots for autosave and quicksave, it won't save your named savegames from being broken..