So if you haven’t guessed by now this is a rebuttal to Gunsage’s rant that he just posted.  It’s right below mine, so if you haven’t read it yet, do that and then come back.  Anyway let’s get started.  Here’s my two cents on autosaves.

As we all know games today can reach crazy amounts of play-through time, with a lot of games easily reaching 100+ hours. Compare this to older “retro” games that couldn’t necessarily give you a 30 hour experience right off the bat.  Earlier games didn’t have the vast amount of content that games today do, so how did these older games increase their play through time to reasonable lengths?  Easy, the lack of autosaving did it for them.  Older games extended their playthough time by limiting saves or spacing out checkpoints, thus making a game in turn have better longevity.

Beating a game was the last thing that developers wanted you to do, it was one way to make sure you got the most out of what you paid for.  The longer you stayed interested on a game, the longer you would have to tell your friends about it and the longer the game would be distracting you from it’s competition.  That said, reaching the final screen in a Megaman game back in the 80’s I’m sure was a much more rewarding experience than reaching the final screen in the the quick save, checkpoint plenty games of today.  But that’s the point; developers today don’t necessarily want you to trudge though their games, or even care about you reaching the credits.  As much as I hate to admit it my generation has shorter attention spans.  If you were to cut out the auto save feature in games today, much of my generation’s gamers would go crazy, we were brought up with autosave, and it’s sad but true, but we’re too lazy to go to the start menu and press the save button.  I think we mentioned this on a Wonderpod episode not too long ago.

Forgetting to save is a problem that plagues this nation's youth and baked citizens.

It’s also important to note that games today aren’t stand alone products anymore.  Now you can buy DLC and map packs among other things, and the quicker you beat a game, the quicker you are to possibly buy the DLC for said game, thus the developer acquires more currency.

Why even bother trying to reach the end? We put games in your game so you can game while you game.

The gaming industry is a changing market, with an ever changing business model, atuosaves included.  There’s nothing wrong with preferring the games you grew up with, but you also have to realize that there is nothing majorly wrong (cough besides DLC cough) with games today.  It’s easily comparable to the art world, sure you may have grown up with “realsim” and it’s totally fine if that’s what you enjoy, but now people are talking about this new thing called “impressionsim” and man is it whack.  As an artist you can either keep up with the new trends or curate a museum for the old ones.  Times change, and I’d like to think they’ve changed for the better.  I’m sorry if I have disturbed any of you fine gentleman, if so I will get off your lawn now.