Edit a few hours later: I just want to thank you all for a nice discussion of the topic, I certainly learned a lot about how things work in the background. Doesn’t change how I find it annoying but it makes it more understandable!
Just need to vent this into the great emptiness that is the internet. What is going on with providing proper save capabilities in games today? Is it really that hard to save the state the game is in, when I exit it? It seems to be, because I keep seeing games where only at specific times an autosave is triggered, and honestly, it’s annoying.
Latest offender, The Fall of Porcupine, actually looks like a cool game, if you would actually be able to save when you exit it. Instead it saves at seemingly random times. Now I am trying to play that with my kid, and we got to watch our screentime a bit. It happened now twice we weren’t sure how to trigger a save by going anywhere, nothing we could do would trigger it. So we lost progress… again. Probably not going to continue this one.
Even really great games do this. I finally got Dave The Diver and at least you get to save on exit everytime you can exit. What I didn’t know until playing it for a while, there’s times where the game does not allow you to exit, what in the world is up with that? Apparently it is really really important to finish this silly cooking minigame right now, as there is no option to return to menu. Similar in some other sequences of triggering a boss fight. Just now I was at a place in the game where 3 separate boss fights got triggered with no indication its going to happen and of course no way to exit. Other than killing the game, but I guess that wouldn’t save it.
Aaand Stardew Valley, I really love it, great game. But only being able to save when ending the day, seriously? I read the mobile version can save anytime, why not all others too?
Ok, done, you can now ignore me or share your own stories if you like…
If the game has no manual save but random auto saves like the op’s first example, then all your points are moot as the game still needs to have the save feature working properly. It just doesn’t respect the user enough to let them save on their own terms
I recommend you try implementing a save feature in a game engine then you might have a little more respect for the difficulty of the problem you’re irritated by.
Developers aren’t being unthoughtful or lazy, you’re just trivialising a rather complex software engineering problem that isn’t easy to solve and one solution over another has trade offs / weaknesses.
The context is explicitly a game where the engine supports saving at any time exists and it is not available for the user.
I am well aware of the difficulty of implementing such features so respect is given where it’s due.
I don’t think you understand what “the engine supports saving at any time” entails.
Having the ability to serialise objects is not the same as handling the input and output of serialisation.
You might as well be annoyed by why aren’t all developers letting us rewind time in games? Load from our last save? No thanks. Developers are so disrespectful of my time. You just need to log all the changes that happen and play them backwards. Every engine supports that.