There's also a place in hell for devs who don't include a "save and quit" in rogue like games because they're worried people will save scum. As if honest people who can't devote enough time for a full playthrough are less important than people lying about progress in a non competitive single player game.
I assume it's more about the hassle of implementing a way of serializing the game state for storage in most cases but if people want to cheat in a single player game let them or better yet seed the rng so that the outcome is the same anyways.
Idk, I feel that’s okay as long as the saves are incredibly frequent and reliable.
I’ve never lost progress in a From Software game for instance, and they have an only auto save system, but it saves literally everything you do as soon as you do it, so unless you deliberately alt-F4 instantly after doing something, you won’t lose any progress.
Can you reload old saves, or only the most recent?
I think being able to reload an older save is important in the case of glitches (NPC walks through wall and is unreachable etc)
That's harder to implement. Suddenly you need to store that extra state somewhere and don't mess it up. The last save should already have a timestamp and is immutable. A lot less likely to get bugs that way.
They could improve this so much by saying something like "the last 2 minutes and 24 seconds of unsaved progress will be lost" instead. Just need to keep a time counter from last save, that's not too much overhead.
One time during the final mission in Batman Arkham City I hit the power button at the same frame the auto-save turned on. My save was corrupted and I had to speedrun the story again. Thank god I wasn’t doing Riddler trophies I would’ve gone insane.
The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There's no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.
And no matter what, no matter how long it's been, it asks about it, like: "Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?"