I might be able to deal with this argument in one pop: Who cares what other people do in their game? It doesn't affect you. Autosave would be very useful to more people than it would cause offensive to, and again, who cares if some random person out there experiences an 'easier' game than others? Their choice. For those that can't resist having an autosave to fall back on: Play multiplayer. Servers tend to have their own autobackup systems which players don't have access to, so you'd have the (relative) safety of autosave without the ability to activate it whenever you choose. If it's Really Such an Issue to the anti-save group, we can add a yaml option, defaulted to on, so they can edit the file and turn autosaving off. Or an 'Ironman' type option when games are started.
While agreeing with what you wrote, I have to answer for this one : the developer cares. And by trying to see with the "developer's perspective" (which relies highly on speculation) it might be easier to find solutions that can satisfy the greater number because they represent $$$. This becomes very apparent when seeing how many times players try to solve issues by suggesting "make it an option/ toggle". This is equivalent to giving all developer's abilities to each player by making the game options work like a software editor. And that's something that I thought about when reading @Starwing6 post above, when she mentioned Tod Howard (Bethesda) : this guy's "success" is due in good part to the fact that he benefitted from what the game's communities have brought as "added value" to his products via mods, showing that even if Empyrion would go the "hard survivalist's way" its success would still rely on the ability for players to customize their gaming experience to their liking. I can bet that if Empyrion would focus only on the "survival" aspect, many "builders" would just leave the game as well as a good lot of casual players, since they were attracted to Empyrion by other aspects. This comes back to what I wrote previously : Eleon wants to get as many players as possible to buy the game, but they can't just advertise it as a "hardcore survival experience" to achieve this, so they make a vague statement embracing many genres in a "unique blend" etc.
At first when I saw this thread I thought do we really need an autosave in this survival game? Seems sort of ridiculous. Then I bumped into a mass of patrols that demolished me. My backpack was gone, I thought maybe under map. Went into gm, Backpack was there and empty instead of being ready for anything. Thought an autosave would have been nice.
Yeah, I'm not specifically against autosave, but just saying that I think it's pretty standard to not have it in these types of games. I really like how customizable the game is already--with options for almost all aspects of the gameplay! I know there's a limit to that too, because the devs have their vision for how the game will play out. A lot of AAA games that have modding support don't have it at launch though, so we're so lucky to be able to modify our game as much as we can in Alpha! More features are always being added too, so there's no harm in talking about features that could be added and how it might work. For my part, I think the game should present more and clearer information for new players to help them get into the fun as fast as possible. I remember a steep learning curve when I started playing. In SP I must've started over 4 or 5 times before I really started to figure out what I was doing (that was last year though). I think the Robinson Protocol is pretty good but could be a lot better with some hints to help players avoid unnecessary risks--basically to help players know what the risks are before they experience negative outcomes to learn from.
If they just included a way to control how many back-ups to keep (vs the long list that needs to be manually purged), the system as it stands really does work for me. I've had those moments where I thought "why didn't you back this up before doing that?" That is on me, and I'm ok with it. That said, I've been backing up because the game crashes and the live save, when I get back in game, has lost all of the FoW data. The back ups still contain the breadcrumb system. With the large planets taking literally hours to reveal, losing that data bums me out. It hurts my OCD.
There is definitely a self-control aspect to it. As mentioned previously, the likelihood that someone is going to cheat in any situation is relative to how accessible those cheats are. I used to habitually save-scum in skyrim to try and get perfect outcomes, so I unbound the key (and added a few mods to balance out a 'saveless' skyrim). It was still there, but not having an easily-accessible button for it helped me train myself not to use it, and I both became a better player and enjoyed the game more because of it. And the fact of the matter is that there's always some alternative to 'hours of farming'. You're supposed to be encouraged to find more intelligent solutions to the challenges the game throws at you - that's part of survival too. If you don't like hours of farming, then you're rewarded for finding better and more efficient ways to gather resources, or better ways not to waste those resources.
Yes auto save please. First time I played this game for a week for the game file to become corrupt when I tunneled into a POI and a drone tried to shoot me underground. Now after playing for a month the game file again has become corrupt because I had a power outage. Restarting from scratch because the game is so easily corrupted is a complete fail of a game.
Or rather just a lack of self discipline... Do you make your Breakfast each morning yourself or does it be done by itself?
ESC > create backup. Do this every once in awhile while playing. You can also make a backup of a save from the resume game menu. You'll probably want to clean out old saves every so often as well.
Simple reason why Eleon don't add autosaves is likely: the file sizes of savegames are too big, it abuses your disk space.
Exactly correct. This isn't like a lot of games where the save file is only a few megabytes. I think our server is currently close to 20GB.
I find the current save system very good actually, you have all at your disposal to make backups, deletions, copies and changing names, even during game sessions. But you need to know how it works or you may lose your game progress. Maybe Eleon should add some tips in the Empyriopedia about the save system.
