I was playing The Sims 3 yesterday (don't start) when I had a very sudden and completly random crash to desktop (CTD). "Well that's annoying," I thought, "I'll loose the five minutes since the last autosave." What actually happened was that I lost three hours, one marriage and ownership of most of the town since my last manual save, since the game doesn't have an autosave feature.
Damn. (My exact thoughts at this point were rather stronger worded, but I'll leave them to your imagination.)
One ragequit later I came to my senses enough to think about this; while the loss of my time is annoying I have difficulty blaming The Sims for it: its designers made a desision to not have an autosave feature or, at the very least, I didn't check that it had one and I hadn't saved my game for too long.
No what really annoys me are games where you have to activate the autosave. Annoyingly I can't actually think of any games to use as an example here, but I can remember the frustration of playing some. To me, autosave is not something intended to be actually used. It's a failsafe, a fallback plan incase the game crashed, or develops a fatal bug, or there's a power outage and your computer/consol reboots. I've always thought that games which include an autosave feature should have it enabled by default, possibly disable-able and definatly not saving over your 'main' file, but always on and running from the start so that, if something goes wrong, it's just there without any extra fiddling with settings or frustration because it takes one crash and a lost afternoon to realise it wasn't enabled in the first place.
So that's my opinion, what do the escapists think of autosave? Should it be enabled by default; should all games, no matter the genre, include it; should it be disable-able at all? Are there any other variables or settings you would use for it? Do you use it regularly in games which have it, and not just as a fallback? And finally, can somebody please tell me one of the games in which you do have to enable the autosave option because it's driving me mad not being able to name one.
Damn. (My exact thoughts at this point were rather stronger worded, but I'll leave them to your imagination.)
One ragequit later I came to my senses enough to think about this; while the loss of my time is annoying I have difficulty blaming The Sims for it: its designers made a desision to not have an autosave feature or, at the very least, I didn't check that it had one and I hadn't saved my game for too long.
No what really annoys me are games where you have to activate the autosave. Annoyingly I can't actually think of any games to use as an example here, but I can remember the frustration of playing some. To me, autosave is not something intended to be actually used. It's a failsafe, a fallback plan incase the game crashed, or develops a fatal bug, or there's a power outage and your computer/consol reboots. I've always thought that games which include an autosave feature should have it enabled by default, possibly disable-able and definatly not saving over your 'main' file, but always on and running from the start so that, if something goes wrong, it's just there without any extra fiddling with settings or frustration because it takes one crash and a lost afternoon to realise it wasn't enabled in the first place.
So that's my opinion, what do the escapists think of autosave? Should it be enabled by default; should all games, no matter the genre, include it; should it be disable-able at all? Are there any other variables or settings you would use for it? Do you use it regularly in games which have it, and not just as a fallback? And finally, can somebody please tell me one of the games in which you do have to enable the autosave option because it's driving me mad not being able to name one.
