Are you tired of the older generation of gamers feeling superior?

[Psychotic]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

I don't want autosave for that reason because it either makes things too easy or it risks messing things if the game offers many possibilities and some are triggered in a way that's not immediately evident. Anyhow, in most games, either saving is possible only during quiet moments, so you can't divide a big battle in many easy chunks, or if it's left possible it isn't a wise choice anyway, because you could reload in a situation in which you haven't enough time to react. BTW this is a flaw in some games with worlds divided in small parts united by load points, like Thief III mission levels and central hub, or like when going from outdoors to indoors and vice versa in Morrowind, where the part you leave remains frozen at the moment you left it, so if you were escaping, chased by enemies, you could be trapped and being immediately hit by them as soon as you reenter that world section without time to react, dodge or parry their blows, unless there are other load points to reenter it.
In Gothic 1 and 2 you can lure away from large groups a few enemies that don't gang together like others, or that belong to smaller groups inside larger ones, to make the fight a little easier, but it's not always possible, and unless it's a very small group, it's a tactic that must be combined with others to succeed. And saving during melee battle with many enemies is suicide, the strongest ones can kill even medium-high level players with very few hits, particularly skeletons, that have crappy armour level and rusty weapons, but more than make up for that being very skilled and fast with swords, reloading in the middle of a battle would automatically concede them the first hit.
In free or almost free-roaming games, and even more in sandbox games, free saving, possibly with the aforementioned limitation, is the only way possible, save points need at least some order to make players arrive to them in a consistent way, without missing them completely or without unwillingly skipping a previous part they'd have liked to play because some shortcut made them arrive to the save point earlier than they wanted. About this, the only thing I didn't like in the first Tomb Raider was that many levels had points of no return, once gone past them it wasn't possible to complete the exploration of the previous part of the level if it hadn't already been completed, the only way was to play the whole level again from the start.

What ruins it for me in RPGs especially - is that if a conversation doesn't go the way you want it to, you can just simplly reload and try again. For example if you fail a speech check in Fallout 3 or you don't have a high enough skill/attribute in Fallout: New Vegas, you can just reload, change your gear, buff yourself and do the conversation again...

When I think about, I think the best system is in Diablo 2 and the Souls series - the game autosaves every few seconds and doesn't support multiple saves, so no second attempts, no quicksave/quickload, every mistake is punished. It adds so much to the experience.