The save game model was this game's biggest flaw

Unless I missed something and there's a way to manually save your game. Yesterday I lost about fifteen minutes of progress because I got stuck in a firefight and didn't have time to run and find a checkpoint before I had to leave for work. And there were two or three times last night when I was beating the game that I wanted to take an hour or so break and turn the system off, only to find out that the most recent save was 25 minutes from the time I was trying to quit.

It seems pretty..."irrational" to me that these guys didn't clock any major QA sessions, glance at the clock and see they only have five minutes left in their workday and go to quit the game only to find that their clock says "4:55PM" and their game says "4:29:13 PM". I didn't know any games that saved like this still existed...is this a PC thing because of save states, or just a total oversight for consoles? Or did I miss something?

I agree.

And yes you are right, theres no other way to save progress in the game. I always had to check if the game was actually saving my profile before i quit the game. For me it actually was no big problem because I had enoguh time when I was playing the game but I can imagine that this can be pretty annoying if you don't have enough time for a fight or a chapter of the game. I also don't understand why they did something like this. I can't imagine programming/including a manual save option would be that hard.

I have the game installed on an SSD so the "updating profile" thing in the top right corner is only ever there for a fraction of a second. Because of this I never notice it while I'm playing. I'm sure they made it this way to have something unobtrusive, but I would have preferred something more in-your-face. When I want to quit the game I have to run through doors staring in the corner to watch it flicker. I know you can check the last checkpoint time when you go to quit as well, but I like exiting a game right where I left it.

But yes, this game is fantastic and this is the only thing that has rubbed me wrong so far.

Yeah, I'd agree, it's a little annoying. They should have either let you manually save or made the checkpoints more frequent.

Yep, probably my only complaint so far. The fact that you cannot manually save is ridiculous, considering in the first Bioshock you could.

its bad, bad ,bad. having to keep an eye out for the little save icon so i can quit is pants.

Yeah I don't get it either specially as far as I know: There is only one ending so whats the point? It's not as if you can make a save right before the ending reload and see the second one right away or something.

That's why I played through the entire game in one 12 hour sitting. Saving is for jerks.

Did you marathon the game and rush? It easily took me over 25 hours because I went off and explored every nook and cranny and still somehow missed out on all the infusion perks, radio things, and sight seeing items.

@golguin: I didn't rush, I played on Normal and still tried to go into every room I saw. I picked up all but 5ish of the audio logs, so I feel good about it. I mostly just wanted to finish so I wouldn't have to worry about spoilers and also I didn't want to spread it out over a whole week. I'm going to go back in on Hard and take my time the second time around, it's well worth it.

I'm going to give it a few days until the guides show the locations of all the collectibles (I only missed a few). I was surprised to see that I still needed like 7 Infusion perks to max out all 3. I couldn't have missed 7 of them.

Yes, those golden days of PC gaming when you would loose a whole half an hour of your play time.

I laugh at your quandary I used to start Super Mario 3 on Friday after coming home from school, play the same game all weekend, with out saving, ( because there were no saves ) only to lose to Bowser on world 8, on Sunday.

You people have gone soft.

I used to use the internet at 56kb/s, too. Doesn't really make me soft that I wouldn't want that now.

It's one of the game's two biggest flaws for me, the other one being the inability to hold all the guns. I just don't see why that isn't more common. How is it not more fun to have everything on your person? And don't say "you have to choose" when an RPG might be what you need next or it might be a sniper rifle or it might be a shotgun, and one of your weapons has to be a general all-purpose sort of weapon so you can't take two of those along with you. That one little thing frustrated me fairly often throughout the game.

FUCK this save system they got going on. I had to re-do this long ass fight at one point because the game glitched out on me, all could've been avoided if I was able to save whenever the fuck I wanted

Didn't really have issues cause I would only quit after entering/leaving a new area. Dead Space 3's shitty save system made me more careful about automatic saving/checkpoints.

Yup, lack of quick save really bothered me. Luckily the stretches that I played it for were so long, that I hardly noticed.

I don't think it'd be impossible to patch in.

I was playing it for the first time last night and I was going to quit to go to sleep but I had to constantly go to the quit game screen to see at what time did the game last saved. This is not good design.

Personally I think the boring weapons are, and 2 slots. I have no idea why they decided to do that after the first and second games allowed around 8 + different ammo types...

Another odd note (two, actually), at least on the PS3:

It's really strange that this game displays the XMB "Saving..." graphic in the lower right hand corner, I feel like I haven't seen that since the earliest days of the system. But more strangely, you know how they have the "Load Chapter" option? That's what the "Saving..." graphic is for. You don't have one big Bioshock Infinite save (for now, just the PS3 version that I know of) in your Save Data folder: each of those chapter selects is an individual save! I currently have 46 Bioshock Infinite save files on my PS3 (yes, it doesn't overwrite your old playthrough of a chapter; every segment of your play is 'bookmarked', as the file puts it!) and the game's been on my system for three days.

This is an overall crazy way to handle saves. On the one hand, it's [i]very[/i] interesting to me that you can start the game from any transitional moment from any point during any of your playthroughs. On the other...this makes scrolling through the Save Game folder a [i]son of a bitch[/i] and can obviously become a hell of a storage shrinker if you're as into the gameplay as the initial experience.

i like the way the save game thing worked but they should have had them at better times. i liked not being able to go back on my decisions.

I dunno didn't bother me any and I was constantly re-loading due to dying on 1999 when I played. You've just got to preemptively quit when you know it has saved.

You can kind of cheese the save system by running to a zone load, like an elevator or something, it's not ideal and not always an option, but it helps if you've collected a lot of stuff and don't want to have to run back around to do it again or lose something you picked up that might not be there the next time. There was one instance right before the final battle with Lady Comstock where I had picked up a perk that gave a 40% chance to get salts off of someone you killed, and I made sure to run to the elevator in the bank and use it before I went to fight her just to it would save.

I think the check points are too far apart in some areas but otherwise it works about as well as an auto-save setup should work.

Yep. Also I probably have 25 files from autosaves on my PS3 and that is really annoying.

I never really found it to be that huge of an issue and it's strange to hear so many people have so many issues with it. There were times when I would find a new piece of gear and know that I need to hit a checkpoint to keep it but other than that I never lost progress or missed work or anything because of it. I suppose the checkpointing could have been a bit more frequent but it wasn't anything game breakingly bad for me.

I think it great that you cant save. Battles become more important and you wont go quick save crazy.
Although it was big problem for me because the game kept crashing every 30 minutes but still i prefer save points because it is much more challenging. Without saves you are more careful and try harder and you are actually worried about staying alive.

Sucks that so many people had issues with autosaves. I had 0 issues playing through on hard. Honestly, every time I checked my last save it was always within 2 or 3 minutes.

@olavi said:

As much as I hated the selective autosaves, this is actually a great point. Most games, I hit "save" almost as much as I hit "shoot", and not being able to absolutely put the pressure on during combat. Although the autosaves that the game made were much too far apart for even that suspenseful aspect of it to be rewarding.

Maybe a great compromise could be manual saves anytime, except for during fights. All the stress, less annoyance.

If I'd known about this I'd have not purchased the game early. This kind of thing is just shoddy. Its like going to a fancy meal and being informed there will be no silverware provided. Its just basic. That someone spent so much time developing such an excellent game only to leave in a perpetual annoyance like this save game crap is a travesty and that it hasn't been fixed yet makes it worse. This also makes it a perpetual pain when you are not the only one playing the game in the house. I've given up on finishing the game. I just am disgusted with it. Not everyone has 25 hours to play a game straight through and who in the hell wants to play 10 hours only to find all their progress is gone because of something idiotic the developer failed to fix.

Does this apply to the PC version, too? No quick-saves there?

Hmm, I never hard a problem with it.

I never hard a problem with it. Don't start playing a game if you know you have to leave soon.

Because it's my fault that I played Halo 4 for two hours and have to play those two hours over again because I didn't put in the extra one. (Wordy, but I hope my point got across.)

Are you saying that Halo 4 has checkpoints 3 hours apart? I mean I didn't play it, you might be right, but you're probably not.

I also never had an issue with saving in Bioshock Infinite and I played it in multiple sittings. It wasn't like Shadowrun where the save system really IS messed up. The autosaves were more or less in between the fights so as long as you finished some combat scenario and moved on a bit there should have been a save. It is safe to say Infinite isn't a game you should be hopping into for 30 minutes for you have to leave for work.

Sort of. It took me three hours to get to the part where the spaceship crashes into the jungle (or whatever), and I had to play that part over again because of a lack of auto-save. The game has checkpoints, but apparently, they don't count as auto-saves.

Silent hill downpour was worse.

@video_game_king: If it's anything like Halo Reach then you have to go into the menu and manually save or else the checkpoints won't register as a "hard" save. It's kind of weird.

@video_game_king: y'know what I take it back. Just played Shadowrun Returns. Holy shit now THAT'S a broken save system. If not broken, very very inconvenient and crazy-making.

The saves, the gameplay being too easy and too wub-wub actiony, no stealth, weapon upgrades don't effect the weapon model at all and two weapons.

I actually liked the game, but it's a huge step down gameplaywise from even Bioshock 2.

I had some big save issues...I lost something like a couple hours and had no idea why. The game said autosaving, but it did not autosave

@believer258: I have totally agree. Only the guns are limited in quantity while you can have multiple vigors and clothes.

But as far as the saving goes, it really is complete shit. I actually notice the autosave icon on the top right ,especially if you just finished a battle or you went through a door where you have to leave the scene and it blacks out. At those moments, I try to quit the game, but the last save is always at least an hour ago... I'm playing the game and I'm really considering an all-nighter.