There are many, many things that professional game development could take from mods: better UIs, cooler weapons, what if everyone was naked all the time. But the one that most sticks out to me—that I think almost every single game could learn from and that I am baffled they still haven’t—is IStewieAI’s Auto-Save Manager (ASM) for Fallout: New Vegas.
It rules. Its options are numerous and robust. In place of a ho-hum, standard autosave that updates and overwrites itself whenever you enter a new cell, ASM lets you get weird with it.
Want to autosave every X amount of seconds? You can do that, and you can change what X means yourself. Want to have more than one autosave—a list that will fill and then begin overwriting itself from the oldest save up? You can do that too, and you can set the number you have anywhere from two to the double-digits. Want to do the same thing to your quicksaves? Fill your boots. Want the saves you create to generate a templated name? Go nuts, tiger.
It’s true save freedom, and so obviously a good idea that I can’t help but feel hemmed in every time I play pretty much any other game ever made. Our regular saves in regular games are nowhere near this versatile. Autosaves? You get one. Quicksaves? You get one, and if you’re playing on a gamepad you probably have to pause and then hit Y or something to use it, rather than just being able to punch F5 like god intended.
Save yourselves
This is, of course, the worst thing that has ever happened. The summit of human evil. That we have let this situation continue for years (years!) is an argument that we all ought to pack up our things and return, hand-in-hand, to the sea.
Because it leaves you with two options. The first: in order to keep a decent list of backup safety saves, you have to go through the laborious process of opening up the full save menu, selecting ‘new save’, naming it, then adding it to your big, messy list of other saves.
Option two: you just YOLO it and rely on a quicksave plus an autosave, hoping they never get corrupted or you never do the thing where you try to hit quickload right before you die to fall damage or a headshot and accidentally quicksave instead, trapping yourself in a kind of endless Promethean torment.
My ancestors, Estonian peasants on the island of Hiiumaa, were saving like this in the days of the Tsar. Surely we have progressed further? Surely adding in a layer of customisability—letting me set how many quicksaves and autosaves I want so I always have backups even if I’m not constantly generating hard saves—is within our power in the era of fusion energy and space travel and advances in science that let us make computers which lie to us?
My ancestors, Estonian peasants on the island of Hiiumaa, were saving like this in the days of the Tsar
It’s not. We can do it if we unite. In fact, I’ll go you one further: not only is a brighter saving future just there, just in reach, but I think we should even make hardware changes to accommodate it. Let’s bring back the black and white keys on Xbox gamepads. Not for in-game actions—that would be terrible—but to act as handy-dandy quicksave and quickload buttons for when we’re playing on our TVs.
This all seems eminently doable to me. A future so possible that modders are out there creating it in their spare time on a game-by-game basis, which makes it all the more tragic whenever I fire up the hot new game of the moment and learn that I get one (1) autosave and one (1) quicksave and am expected to be happy about it. Demand better, my friends.
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