Forum Overview :: FarCry 3 :: Expansive open-world action-RPGs definitely benefit the most from quicksaves.

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]Save stations. Not only do they preserve game balance, they also contribute to the illusion that you're actually moving about in a virtual space - kind of the whole point of the "roaming" genre. (If your primary concerns are convenience and making efficient use of your time, there are a lot more parts of an open world game you could replace with a menu than just the save system.)[/quote] How does a save station preserve more balance than letting me save whenever I want? If I want to stop playing under a save station, I have to trek back to some place I have already been (I guess that "I also like to live dangerously" Austin Powers meme would be appropriate for running <i>towards</i> a save station you haven't been to yet) and for games that have respawning enemies, that means that there is an ammo cost to saving. I don't think that's very balanced. But here's how awful Far Cry 3 is, when it comes to saving: (They really outdid themselves here. Every time I think it can't get worse, a new layer of terrible appears, like another package of well-boiled Ramen.) At the beginning, the game is spamming text at you and each quadrant of your monitor is begging for your attention. So it's easy to miss when the game says, in a quiet, humble 10pt font <i>"Saving..."</i> for two seconds. I think the font they used was Bitch Titus. As a result <b>there is no way to reliably tell when the game has saved.</b> You could <i>again</i> live dangerously and hit the Quickload button, I guess, but you can't go to the save slots and see where it saved because you have to Quit to the Main Menu to do that. !!! Tell me that makes sense. Tell me that's sane! The only way to see where it saved is to quit playing. If you miss the two seconds where it says "Saving..." in the upper-left hand corner of the game and therefore can't recall when it saved, Far Cry 3 really thinks you can go fuck yourself. It's certainly not going to tell you. Speaking of useless, releasing information on when this game saved ought to be what Uplay does. That ought to be the point of Uplay. This game should let you send an in-game @reply to @Uplay, and then the game could reply a few minutes later. "I hate to disturb you while you are loving Far Cry 3, but we last decided to save for you at the part where everything was green and there was a mountain you couldn't quite get up. Keep trying! Ta ta!" And then the game could tell you a minute later that the guy with the mohawk "favorited" your tweet, which would be really creepy of him and intense!!!!! I guess the only downside would be a completely new interface to learn for sending in-game tweets, and they seem to really want to avoid that sort of thing in this game. With how many keys they want to map, Richard Garriott joke. Now I'm done. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey![/quote]