tsunamayo
commented
2 months ago @Dwarf-LordPangolin Hi, so I was going to go for the minecraft way of doing, with the main reason being the size of world save being huge. If you think about manual save then I guess you would want an history of them to choose from, and with save being several 100mb I think it is out of the question. Is there some size issues in SE, and is there an save history selection?
This suggestion was prompted by two things.
The first is the recent crash I had as described here while testing survival; people's computers are always going to crash for a number of reasons, which might not be game-related at all, and power outages or other problems are going to cause the computer to shut down at a bad moment. Giving the players more control over their saves will reduce frustration; additionally, a lot of people don't trust autosave to pick a good time to save. My own experience with auto-saving in games is that it often picks the moment right before I die to save, so I make sure to manually save at good times instead. The option to manually save will help make sure the player has more control of their game.
The second is something I've been thinking about for a while. Space Engineers used to automatically save players' games for them, but this was extremely unpopular with players. The reason was that if something went wrong, the game would inevitably pick that exact moment to save and it drove people nuts, to the point where Keen Software House added an option to disable auto-save because it was just that annoying. The same thing is likely to happen here; for example, players will want to try something new, it will go badly, they'll lose a ton of progress, and the game will save.
It's true that some players will prefer an ironman setting where you're committed to whatever decisions you make, in which case autosave and exit saves are a perfect option for them, but an awful lot won't. And obviously there will be players who want an autosave as a backup, and it would probably be a good idea for the game to have it On but default, because people will forget to manually save and then be very sad that they lost a ton of progress.
But giving people the option to disable autosave and manually control their saves will make everyone happy.