10 Popular Video Game Mechanics The Industry ABANDONED

While there's an undeniable convenience factor to autosaving, which theoretically prevents you from losing progress in the event that you forget to save or suffer a power outage, there's no beating the flexibility of a manual save.

Being able to pause the game and save at any time was a common feature once upon a time, especially in PC games, allowing you to exit at a moment's notice without losing any progress, and also promoting experimentation with risky gameplay via "save-scumming."

Even accepting that it's not always possible to save at any point, the number of major AAA games which allow players to save whenever they want has dwindled massively in recent years.

The uptick in autosave functionality is certainly partly to blame, and also that so many modern games are developed first with consoles in mind, which with their more limited hard drive capacities can't necessarily support hundreds of manual save files for huge RPGs.

All the same, options are certainly a nice thing, and while manual saves aren't really necessary for short, linear indie games, for more wide-open titles where freedom is encouraged, they should be an absolute must.

As it stands, though, bar some outliers the industry as a whole is moving away from allowing players control over their game saves.