It really doesn't. Not for me. Never did. I am honestly flabbergasted by the very idea. Though I guess I asked for something like that when starting this topic.

Alright, I can get you may want autosave in case you forget to save. Fine. Reasonable. But isn't having an option to also save manually whenever you want better? Is it really an improvement to be at the mercy of checkpoints? Have to quit the game? Well tough shit, have to find a checkpoint first or lose the last 15 minutes. Died? Well let's go through the same easy 10 minutes again to get to the difficult part again. And now let's do that five more times.

For Valen's sake, we're not talking about the future of technology and mankind, it's not the Three Laws of Robotics we're discussing. It's saving in video games. Call me crazy, but I don't think manual saving in games is impeding our growth as a species.

So, basically the answer to my question is "yes". Well, sorry to hear that. It must be very inconvenient for you.

I'm talking about an intelligently implemented auto-save that would save continuously.

The harder way to implement it would be to segment the game experience into noteworth transitions (ie, finished a fight, reached a destination, put a new object in his backpack, moved X distance, etc, etc). Of course, this requires specific knowledge of a particular game's domain and is not very portable across games, but would certainly make for a fascinating problem for a programmer to solve.

A simpler more globally effective scheme might be to save every minute which would be an apt tradeoff between performance and saving often enough.

They could even make it so that it saves every minute, phased over 10 save games, so that you could go up to 10 minutes in the past, by minute decrements.

If you want to make it more customize-able, let the gamer decide how often he wants his game to auto-save and over how many save games.

The point is that while it isn't as straightforward as programming a calculator, this isn't rocket science either. They have solved far more complex problems with "AI" and expert systems.

I think it all touches that argument: When is the machine doing too much for me? Shouldn't a human be doing that?

For me, it always come down to: Is this something only a human can do? Is this even interesting? No? Then, let the machine do it.

I've yet to notice a gamer rave about how fascinating saving his game is and how much depth it adds to the experience.

And all that would still be inferior to the simplicity an infinite usefulness of manual saving, at the moments you choose, preferably with the option to name your saves. At least in strategy games and RPG's that will always be better. What if I want to go waaaay back, not minutes. What if I'm about to do somethin balls-out insane and want to save now, and name the save "balls-out" so I can easily find it if I need to go back after the crazy thing gets me killed an hour or more later?

Have your autosave too, if it's that much of an effort for you to save. But not at the cost of removing manual saving. Don't make my life harder with your "improvements". I'm doing fine with my antiquated manual saving, I don't exert myself saving, and I prefer to do stuff on my own.

In general, people are accustomed to the idea that games require save files in order to bookmark your progress. As such it should be no more of an immersion breaker to deal with save games than it is to deal with other meta- factors which come as part and parcel of gaming, like changing your volume, following button prompts, reading subtitles, performing complex control inputs and so forth. Autosaving should be a fall back, not a replacement, for manual saves.

There are very few games which implement autosaves intelligently. Developers often don't show enough rigour in quality assurance to play through their game and figure out all the sweet spots where an autosave would be highly desirable. Even when they do, their opinions are unlikely to align with 100% of players. The best game I've played for intuitive autosaves was Batman: Arkham City, which autosaved after every collectible (of which there were 3-400), every interior/exterior switch, after most significant fights and after most significant exchanges of dialogue. Even then, I've watched people play it who complained about not knowing when it saves or not knowing how to make it save when they want to quit, since in an open world game you can spend quite a long time traversing the map and mucking about without ever triggering anything 'significant'. That kind of worry sort of eclipses the minor convenience of never having to manual save.

Autosaves generally have to come with an onscreen indicator, so that the user knows not to quit out mid save, and I find this indicator popup no less immersion breaking than a manual quicksave. Also immersion breaking is having to wait in anticipation for such a moment, watching for the save indicator in the hopes that the game you're playing is smart enough to save when you want it to, for example when you want to quit or you've just performed something difficult. Added to that, the more frequently you make autosaves, the more likely you are to have cataclysmic save corruption in the event of a game crash, simply because more background saves means more likelihood a crash will occur during one. Saving also tends to cause hitches in graphical smoothness in some games, which is a big problem if it's going on all the time.

Until all that is resolved across the board in gaming, I don't think there's any argument to be made that autosaving should be a replacement for manual saves, as opposed to just a supplement.