Have you ever stopped playing, or skipped playing a game because of how it saves?

i HATE how witcher 1 and 2 save. i quick save like every 5 minuts

and in witcher 1 it makes a new save every time. so after a few hours of playing i have like 2gb of saves and i have to go delete like 1k saves and it takes forever

Every once in a while a really good game will lose me because of a save glitch. It's really sad, but trying to clear through up to a couple hours of content I've already cleared because there was a bad save/corrupted save/no save is annoying.

Yes happened to me recently with Scourge: Outbreak, the game wasn't great to start with plus it has the most bullshit checkpoints/saves ever. I did beat a long level, and even a boss, I thought it would have saved and turned off the console, played it again I had to redo one of the most frustrating boss of the game, I've dropped the game for a few days before coming back to it. :)

When I lose progress I tend to stop playing, at least for a while. It's not always the game's fault, but the save system of course plays into that.

Shadowrun Returns is one games I stopped playing due to checkpoint saves + bug. Played it on Android, and switching apps caused the game to be evicted from memory. Happened a couple of times, each time causing me to wait. When they finally introduced a save system the game update caused me to lose my hires and I didn't have enough nuyen to buy them again. So I plan to start again, one of these days (actually started creating a character the other day, but then decided to play something else and uninstalled to get some more space).

I have stopped playing games for many reasons but the save system is not one of them, I have rarely run into a situation where I have had to repeat more than about 5 minutes of game play because I quit between save points. Personally I think this is a pretty pathetic thing to complain about.

Being a casual gamer, I generally dislike the checkpoint saving system. It bothers me a lot, though I usually don't stop playing the game because of it.

In some games, checkpoints are done so well that even I don't mind (for example Mark of the Ninja had brilliant checkpoint placement and so had Nihilumbra). In some other games, the checkpoints are so bad that it makes me wonder if the developers even bothered to playtest their game.
To answer your question, there is one game that I remember I stopped playing because of the saving. Trine.

The in-levels checkpoints were fine I think, but when I had to quit the game, it never returned me to the last checkpoint I passed. To this day I'm not sure if it was meant that way or if something was wrong with my copy of the game :D
Either way, having to repeat the same part of the level over and over again, I was unable to make any progress and so I finally said "screw this!" and stopped playing Trine altogether.

It happened twice:

1. Borderlands: the game automaticaly saved when I was trapped in a bug and couldn't get away.
2. Fez: my PS3 crashed when I was really close to 100% of the game and suddenly all the data of the game vanished, so I rage-forever-quitted

Happend twice:
Splinter Cell Conviction and Prince of Persia: The two Thrones
It was coupled with the game crashing too. I had to redo a passage 5 times and couldnt skip the cutscene in there so I decided I had enough and just clicked on the deinstall button. The next time I tried reintalling Uplay messed up and I couldn't even launch it. So it's further delayed until I'll try to play it again.
For PoP: There is a chariot-passage right before a boss fight and the autosave just was always at the start of that passage. Lost too much health during that ection and couldn't beat the boss because of it, so I quited. About 2-3 years later I treid it again and it worked first try though :D
Somehow I had no problems with Darksiders or any other (action) game I remember

Virtua Tennis 4 and its fucking GFWL saving. Enough said.

To be honest,

I've never completely quit a game because of it's stupid save options, or lack thereof. I've stopped playing for a while, but eventually came back and finished the game, if I was really into it.

My favorite Save option is the Quicksave / instantsave-at-the-press-of-a-button idea. I feel that you can't go wrong with that, as long as you know when to press the button. (i.e. it so often happens that I quicksave just a glimpse of a second before I die, and no matter what I do at the load, I can't stop the death, and so I have to start all over)

Other than that, I can understand why certain games only allow you to save at certain checkpoints or times. It just makes the game a little more immersive (I'm talking about games like GTA or Sleeping Dogs here). By adding the option to only save at certain places, for example, makes the game feel a little more realistic.

I'm having much less of a problem with it these days compared to the old days.
That Lion King 2D game had no saves at all, you had to replay the whole game whenever you quit or failed. Tomb Raider 3 had limited saves, so I'd replay entire levels dozens of times without saving to conserve saves. Prince of Persia Two Thrones had me clear an area of enemies that kept respawning, then figure out a puzzle, then find a hard to see climbing path, then clear another area with tons of respawning enemies, plus several lengthy cutscenes, just to get to a sodding save fountain. Meanwhile my family was waiting to get the TV back, because I hadn't saved for two hours and didn't know how far the next fountain was.

Right now, Metro Redux is getting a bit on my nerves. It's hard to predict when it saves, and I like to search every nook and cranny since I'm playing on ranger mode. Too bad that whenever the game forces me to fight a mutant horde, I'll die dozens of times, resetting me to some point before when I was searching the area.
Then I must figure out which areas I hadn't searched before the checkpoint, and collect all this stuff again just to die again at the mutant horde. After five times, I just run around to pass every hidden stash as fast as possible. Discovering them for the first time is fun, but this is a chore and it ruins the experience. I just don't feel like playing where I stopped last week.

Yes, there hare been a handful. Mainly awkward save systems just make me play the game less (i play the game when I know that I can fit in enough time to reach the next save point), but sometimes the save systems are just so annoying that I stop playing.

Silver is actually a pretty good game, with the exception of the save system. Not only do you have save points, that are about as far from each other as those in an older Final fantasy game, but the save points are single use only! You can only save at each save point once, then they disappear, and there is no "overworld", where you have infinite save possibilities.

Alien vs Predator from 1999. Unpatched, this game did not allow mid-level saves. And the levels were long. Luckily they fixed this.

Resident Evil Original version. I just found the way they spaced out save points to be infuriating.

I think it depends on how saves relate to the game as a whole, not just the save system itself. The main question is generally "is there any value to replaying this section?"

Some games are designed so there's a lot of value to replaying parts. For instance, Hitman levels (at least the better ones) tend to be short if you know how to complete them but very 'broad' in terms of options, so restarting gives you a chance to explore different solutions rather than just tediously doing the same thing over and over again.

Heavily skill-based games (like rhythm games or certain kinds of Meat Boy style platformers) are mostly about mastering a specific skill. In a good one, you have to replay a section until you master it, but once you've mastered it, you can beat it in heartbeats. Games like these tend to have frequent checkpoints or short levels, forcing you to replay short segments repeatedly, but not forcing you to constantly redo stuff you've clearly mastered -- the ones that make you redo stuff you've already mastered (and which aren't designed so that you can get through it easily once you've mastered it) tend to suck.

Even infamously-difficult games like I Wanna Be the Guy or Dark Souls tend to fall into this sort of framework to an extent (in that it's often not hard to get past an area once you know all its tricks.)

Roguelikes send you back to the beginning when you die, but since everything is randomly generated, you're not forced to redo stuff. The good ones also tend to give you major options at the start that keep the early game from getting repetitive.

On the other hand, if a game is focused heavily on narrative, exploration, or getting into your character in some other way, redoing large areas tends to strike me as a bad thing. It's not just boring, it makes it harder to get into the game to go through stuff you already did -- story and exploration really only have their magic the first time. Making players redo large easy sections where they have few choices tends to be tedious, too (the worst GTA missions are guilty of this. Remember that damn train in GTA:SA? Boringly easy up until the last few seconds, when you could fail with little warning, making you go through the entire boring part again?)

This tends to be a particular problem in survival horror games. Yes, they make you replay areas because they want you to fear death. But the problem is that at the same time, a zombie jumping through a window isn't very scary when you know he's coming; if playing the game involves replaying large segments when you fail, then a lot of the gameplay is going to be boring, which will sap the fun from the whole thing.

I generally dislike the idea of "punitive" save systems. A good game should be fun all the time, even when you're losing; it might be very very difficult, but failures should let you leap right back into the meat of the problem to try and tackle it again.

Probably when I was a bit younger but I don't really quit a game anymore unless I just don't like it. If there's a lack of saves it's just more of a challenge.

I was over the top excited when I discovered the first announcements of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I followed the development process closely, watched videos about the devs taking so much consideration about immersion, and what I heard and saw thrilled me. I was believing they'd be developing MY game of the century. I paid pre-order price, which I rarely do. And when it finally arrived it had the worst ever imaginable save system that broke ALL immersion for me completely. Instead of letting people roam around freely and discover whatever they liked you had to completely solve a riddle or else progress wasn't saved and you had to start from anew next time you started the game. I played about an hour, left, and when I returned to the game next time almost all I had done was reverted. I never touched it again. I'm still sooo mad about the devs. Infuriated even. Full of themselves a*holes promising things...... argh

Yes. I stopped playing Far Cry 3 precisely because of this.

It's even more annoying because I own Far Cry 2 on a disk and it saves fine, quicksaves work, little thumbnails of where you were, and then you have Far Cry 3, which only saves when it wants to save and never lets you do anything about it.

the only game i remember quitting because of an issue with saves is assassin's creed 4. that issue is that they decided to stop cloud saving it and i hadn't manually copied my save when i reinstalled my computer, so i started it up again to find all my progress gone. i'll start it again someday down the line, but i had put in 40 hours and uplay makes the experience a lot worse but at least it used to mean i didn't have to back up my saves before reinstalling...

Not really. Only time I've ever quit a game was because someone had told me some major spoilers.

Dead Space 3 and Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4, both of those game's save systems deleted my saves a few times each, so I gave up trying them.

I've got no problem with sensible auto-saves (like after each mission for most open-world games.) That's a convenience I've gotten used to. Same with JRPGs that now auto-save in specific room instead of using manual savepoints in the same rooms. 'course if a game doesn't use auto-saves and I'm really into it, I'll get used to manual saving quickly :)

'Course, it's also those JRPGs where issues show up - if checkpoints are too far apart, you tend to lose a lot of time as well.

I'm totally fine with "checkpoints" but only with two conditions:

• level has to be at most ~45min long
• there should not be things being able to kill you which you can't react to (things you can avoid only already knowing they are there because you played the level before, with less words: bad game development)

On that second point, I hate for example disappearing floors you can't know they disappear until you actually see them disappear (no hints on textures or such), same goes for traps (again without any kind of warning), or for example playing Valkyria Chronicles: in-field cinematic, new units spawn on my side, end of my turn, enemies attack and kill all my newly spawned units, game over... what about LETTING ME KNOW WHERE THE UNITS WOULD HAVE SPAWNED instead of reloading after 20m of perfect game?

Many games using checkpoints have problem with bad checkpoint placement. For example save before encounter and not after, so I don't have to do exploration again after every death. Ideally games should have quicksaves, at least when not in battle or whatever

Saving is over rated. Prefer Hardcore.

I kind of did that for Hitman, since it was really hard and the missions could fail so easily...but I'm older now, maybe I'll give it another chance.

During the GWFL days saves do not always save and sometimes I have to start all over from the beginning