Autosave vs manual save

I come from the time when you had to manually save, which isn´t a problem for me, and it often meant that you´d save a lot just to be certain. I think one of the worst things that can happen to you in a game is that you lose all your progress, so saving a lot is always recommended. Unfortunately things could go wrong, you´d sometimes have corrupted save files or you accidently saved one game over another. So about ten years ago I saw several games that had a autosave, no longer did I needed to think about saving but of course I couldn´t help but do so anyway. Because it´s not easy to let go of something you´ve been doing for years, especially when it´s about something important. All the hours you put in a game are hours you don´t want to lose, because that would mean you´ve wasted a lot of time for nothing. Some people might find playing games a waste of time, but if you lost all your progress in a game then it truly was a waste of time!

I´m certain that autosave has been there for quite some time but I first really noticed it in Mass Effect, it wasn´t a save that happened that frequently but it definately helped if you got an autosave just before a big fight. Unfortunately you sometimes would encounter a boss fight that would kill you and the autosave was 30 minutes ago, moments like that make you wish you thought more about it and saved a lot more manually. I must admit that this happened to me when I went back to Mass Effect last year, I was so used to autosave and that it saves almost every ten minutes that I didn´t think about saving it manually. Well I just lost almost an hour of gaming because of that mistake, it was a good reminder that you should always save manually and not completely depend on autosave. But a lot of times autosave can really save your ass, because in Skyrim the game would sometimes get stuck in an infinite loading screen, which meant I had to restart my console. If I didn´t had autosave every time I enter a building or exit it then I´d probably had lost a lot of progress. The only problem autosave might give you is when you start a new game, then the autosaves of your first character will be overwritten by the autosaves of your new character. So never forget to manually save when you want to switch to a new character!

Saving manually is no longer needed? With modern technology you´d think that we don´t need to do such things anymore, why save manually when the game can do that for you? But how does a game know exactly when you want to save, I mean at important moments in the game it´s nice that you get an autosave but what if you have to leave suddenly? The game can´t know that, so how can it save your progress? I would always prefer to save manually, because that gives me the option to save when I want to and I´m not waiting for the game to do that for me. This also means that I can leave whenever I want, so I don´t have to wait for the game to be ready to save. This really gives me troubles in GTA Online, because the save system is so unreliable! Now I constantly check if I see this bronze looking circle in the corner of my screen, because that means that your progress is being saved on the cloud server. Of course some people say that your progress is saved if you go back to the story mode, well guess what? It doesn´t!!! I´ve lost several times progress in the game because I left the game correctly and then the next day I lost all my progress. So the key to saving in GTA Online is waiting until you see that bronze looking circle in the corner of your screen and then you can exit. It probably sounds silly but I don´t feel like you´re in control in GTA Online, you´re at the mercy of whatever is controlling that. Which makes it very nerve wrecking every time you start up the game to check if your progress is saved. I wish you had a manual save system in GTA Online, because that game so desperately needs one!