Briefly: Autosaving at beginning of “level”, good. (It’s nice when all levels completed are available for arbitrary replay later.)
Autosaving before boss fight, also good.
Bookmarking progress in long levels, also good, as I have to stop for food, sleep, calls of nature and other interruptions, like many of us humans, and especially when you have children.

Wandered in from Above49.ca

Given a good enough implementation of that, I’m happy for the game to manage the save slot for me (as Jorge mentioned in his first comment), including auto-saving after I make a big choice (which I don’t care about but which other people, including I think you, do).

It’s interesting how save/load was, way back in the day, initially merely a way of bookmarking progress. It’s now become a more complex mechanism with various consequence as discussed here and elsewhere. I think a first step toward address this issue (where appropriate, of course) is to separate the bookmarking functionality any other save/load mechanism.

Any game that needs a save system to restore progress ought to provide a bookmark save system independent of other save/load systems. Similar to what more and more portable games off, a one-time save/load slot. There is then more latitude to implement the save/load system without worry about it meeting (or failing to meet) the requirement to provide bookmarking.

And really, with the technology we have now, shouldn’t “save anywhere” be the norm? It’s not like it makes games easier, it just gives us more control over our leisure time. My biggest gripe with the otherwise-excellent Castlevania 2D DS games is their reliance on “save points” that, should I die suddenly after making a wrong turn, erase the experience points and rare items I had earned since last saving. Saving protects my “investment” in the game, it doesn’t remove the challenge of fighting the enemies or exploring the dungeons.

I have long been an advocate for what I see as a mostly Western-style save system, which consists of auto-save and saving anywhere. Mass Effect does a real great job with auto-saving, and at 15 hours in, I’m only at 40 saves. I have never gone back to re-attempt a dialogue option because I’m trying to make my playing experience as legitimate as possible, and not going out of my way to abuse the system. I know that Mass Effect is a pretty forgiving game, and that its game world is not going to punish me too much if I should venture the wrong way.

FFIV on the other hand has a terrible knack for putting an almost painful amount of distance between saves, and it makes me want to play it less when I know I’m about to enter a dungeon and that I’m going to have to commit a significant amount of time to the game until I can see a save point or visit the world map again. Knowing the amount of grinding I’ll have to do between saves really dampens the experience. The difference between FFIV and ME is kind of like the differences outlined on slides 59 and 60 in the powerpoint.

And on a totally different hand, I have had 400+ saves in my 80+ hours in Fallout 3, usually with 7 actual save slots available at various points in time, but the only times I’ve gone back to reload something are due to bugs or glitches. I always save and say “Oh, I’ll go back and try out dialogue option X” or whatever, but I never do. I guess I just like to know that the option to go back and do it is there for a while until I realize I never will and save over that slot anyway. I do this for every RPG, and always have a bevy of saves on hand, and never actually return to them to try things differently.

But I too am a compulsive saver, especially when it comes to first-person shooter games. I’ll typically save at the end of each level (really, a proxy for the beginning of the next level) and play and restart enough times until I feel I’m satisfied with how well I’ve been able to get through the level. Just getting through isn’t enough.

In most of the games I’ve played there isn’t even a huge penalty for dying. Usually you get respawned with 100% health but no or only basic weapons. This is true of GTA, Doom, Quake, and Descent, the games with which I’m most familiar. But collecting weapons and armor and stuff is enough of an investment that I want to hang on to it.

A notable exception is Myst, where you basically can’t make any fatal mistakes… until the very end, when there are a couple decisions that have serious consequences. I was pretty sure I knew the outcome, but of course I had to save and try all the possibilities just the same.

Another notable exception is the “rogue” character-based dungeon game. (Remember that?) The authors had a particularly strict view of saving. If I recall correctly, you could have ONE saved game, and you were only allowed to restart and continue ONCE. If you were killed, you were NOT allowed to restart from where you had saved previously. The game also took great pains to prevent this policy from being circumvented, e.g. by checking the inode-change time, checksumming the file contents, removing the save file after restore, etc.

This took a significant amount of fun out of the game for me. Especially in the upper levels, when you can encounter monsters that can kill you in one or two turns. Sometimes death is unavoidable. It’s quite a time investment to get a powerful character deep into the dungeon, and if you’re killed immediately stepping into a room it’s just a huge bummer.

So, one of the first things I did when I got my hands on the source code was to disable the strict only-one-restart policy. That made it fun again.

Much like you describe, I find myself saving/reloading when I feel that I’ve made a tactical choice that could cripple me down the line. Defeating a difficult battle in sub-optimal condition usually isn’t enough, but realizing I’ve made a critical error in my balance of forces, or leveled up a character completely incorrectly usually hits that threshold.

If a game did both of those things, I’d be happy basically never doing explicit saves. 3-D Mario games are an example of this; they have a save function, but from my point of view it’s largely vestigial.