By Alec Meer on November 21st, 2008 at 8:30 pm.
You know what I hate? Accidentally hitting quicksave when you meant to hit quickload, leaving yourself trapped in some ostensibly unwinnable situation and sobbing like a child about a terrible turn of events that you can blame no-one but yourself for.
You know what I love? Managing to win that unwinnable situation anyway: ultimate triumph in the face of self-made adversity.
Everyone’s done it. We gamers are rarely creatures of patience, and the usually reliable presence of one-button saving and loading has only exacerbated our desire for nownownow. We don’t let in-game failure sink in – we immediately want to try again. There are times when I swear I reach for Quickload before I’m conciously aware the situation’s gone belly-up. Something in me has already ascertained that I am about to lose my last scrap of health, or fall off a ledge, or fire my last rocket, or say the wrong thing. Something else in me feels that, if the final, fatal act doesn’t actually happen, I haven’t really failed. So I impatiently reach for quickload before the bitter end hits, and I try again.
The trouble is that the familiar upwards reach towards the central cluster of F5 keys is more muscle memory than concious act after all these years. Sometimes, I get it wrong. When it’s a game that thinks making the quickload/save keys adjacent is a smart idea, I get it wrong a bit too often. But I can’t blame just that – I’ve definitely hit F6 when I should have hit F9 in the past.
Whine, whine, whine. That’s not what I mean to post about though. Sometimes, a fudged quicksave means I’ve simply saved as my character dies, and that’s pretty miserable. Other times, it’s just before my character dies – when the straits are dire, when my window of opportunity is a fraction of a second. That’s not miserable. That’s a challenge.
My cludgy hands means this happens fairly often. Recently, I had a misjudged quicksave in Stalker that was milliseconds before a bloke with a shotgun unloaded both barrels into my face. Upon reloading, I died immediately. My last save was getting on for half an hour’s worth of progress back, and there was no way I wanted to repeat that. So, over the course of a couple of dozen attempts, I finally established the exact moment I could hit the crouch key as the loading screen dissipated, which took me safely beneath his deadly blast and able to spray his ankles with machinegun bullets before he let off a second shot. It took about 20 minutes and grueling trial and error, but I did it. It’ll never impress anyone, except me – because I beat my own failure.
The only such instance I was truly proud of, though, was Half-Life. I managed to hit quicksave just as the infamous Black Ops assassin ladies showed up for the first time. I meant to hit quickload, because at that point I had only 1% health and these super-speedy guys looked serious. So I reached up towards the saintly F keys and… oops. Yeah, those guys were serious. Especially when 99% of my health was missing.
I replayed that battle so very many times. I was a truly terrible FPS player at that point, so my hope of making it through on reflex and precision alone were non-existent. If they saw me, I was dead. My only hope was not to out-shoot them, but to out-smart them. Over the course of almost two hours, I constructed every satchel charge and trip mine traps in every variation I could think of. Of course, the damnably agile women rarely went the same direction twice, so I had to plan for multiple routes, elaborate networks of explosive roadblocks.
It seemed like a dream when I finally did it, my mind a mess of plans and counter-plans. I just remember the muted thud of the last tripmine, and then the silence. I’d done it. I’d beaten my own ineptitude. I celebrated with a quicksave.
It’s happened to you too. Share!
21/11/2008 at 20:38 Switchbreak says:
What’s really bad is when you accidentally hit quickload right after finally beating the situation.
21/11/2008 at 20:41 AksumkA says:
HA! I quicksaved in HL1 by accident too!
It was my first time playing it, and I was in the Blast Pit level and I was trying to get past that monster thing (forgot what it was called). I was on a ladder and figured I made it far enough and did not want to risk anything so I quicksaved. As soon as my finger came off the key, BANG! killed. Oh crap… The game loaded again, and BANG! Shit… I opened my saved game window only to find the next available load was way back in Office Complex.
After I cried for a few minutes, I tried with all my might to not get killed. I jumped at the right time and managed to not get killed instantly. After a few more ties, I managed to get away.
Now every time I go for the quick save, I make sure there is absolutely nothing that will kill me the instant the game loads.
21/11/2008 at 20:42 Doctor_Hellsturm says:
@Switchbreak: Classic!
21/11/2008 at 20:48 Turin Turambar says:
Ohhh satchel charges and tripmines. Explosives to play with, another reason of why HL1 is better than HL2.
21/11/2008 at 20:48 nabeel says:
That’s pretty awesome, Alec. Thank heavens for Far Cry 2 and its individual quick saves, eh? If I make this mistake, I usually err on the side of loading instead of saving. These days I hit quick load when I mean to take a screenshot, which is a whole other annoyance.
nabeel
21/11/2008 at 20:49 subedii says:
Oh good grief I’ve done that more than once as well Switchbreak. You finally beat the scenario that’s been hounding you since half past eternity, and then when you finally do, you hit the quickload button. Followed by profuse crying and swearing.
These days I almost never bother quicksaving in FPS’s. The checkpoints are good enough, and quicksaving all the time just destroys any tension that could come from the game (something that SWAT 4 knocked out of me very, very painfully).
Having said that, some of my best triumphs in a game have been from where my savegame dumped me low on health right in front of a squad or angry dudes. In FEAR it was the invisible Ninja’s. Try going through that section whilst trying not to take a single hit and you’ll feel like the Terminator mixed with a dash of Bruce Lee.
21/11/2008 at 20:50 garren says:
My accidental save-button occasions happen often when there’s a grenade next to me that explodes 0,5 seconds later.
Then I reload and reload and reload and try to find just the right angle to jump out of the way in time. Sometimes I get out of the way, too often I die no matter what.
21/11/2008 at 20:51 cocain says:
recently while playing fallout. it happens alot, but im just glad fallout has the quicksave and quick load buttons so far away from each other.
21/11/2008 at 20:52 Turin Turambar says:
And also, why HL1 firefights were so fun. They gave you more lethal enemies to play with, but also more tools to use your smarts against them.
21/11/2008 at 20:58 Deadpan says:
Worse is when you’re in a game that quicksaves when you hit a location.
In Crysis, after clearing the mining complex, I thought I’d tempt fate by jumping across the gap to the mine instead of walking. Damn thing quicksaves in midair, overrides the last ten minutes since I last quicksaved, etc. And of course, I fall to my death.
I LOL’D.
Thankfully newer games make quicksaves into whole saves you can reload.
21/11/2008 at 21:03 Yhancik says:
It happened to me so many tiiimes.
When doing a Fallout 3 weekend not so long ago, one of my friend quicksaved as he was falling from a bridge.
The funny thing is that, when you reload, you only fall from the height from which you quicksaved. Thus he was able to survive from a “not so high fall”.
Totally exploitable :p
21/11/2008 at 21:10 GothikX says:
Now, I can’t remember what game it was, but I definitely remember quicksaving (by instinct alone) before something was about to go terribly wrong, and I was terribly happy about it when it did. So I quickloaded just after it did… and I went on for about two hours trying with all my might to defeat the undefeatable, quickloading every time just before the inevitable happened. I was starting to think that the developers were inhuman, because it just wasn’t possible to come out well out of the situation… so I was about to give up, and just didn’t quickload, throwing my hands up in despair. Surely enough, after a few seconds a cutscene kicked in; I was SUPPOSED to fail, wouldn’t you know it.
21/11/2008 at 21:11 Mman says:
I can’t seem to remember any specific instance (I think I had a moment in Stalker like the one mentioned in the article though), but I’ve certainly had various instances where I saved in a bad position and managed to work my way out of it.
Actually one that does stick out is when I was playing Halo 2 and an auto-checkpoint happened at almost the exact moment I was about to die. After dying several games the game set me back to the checkpoint before the one I was screwed at. It sticks out because it struck me as being a really good idea to use a system like that in a game with auto-checkpoints.
21/11/2008 at 21:13 KindredPhantom says:
Heh i had a similar problem with the black op lady assassins whilst playing opposing force. I found a solution similar to yours, i satchel charged and trap mined a crucial corner corridor then proceed forward to trigger them then run off back up the corridor avoiding setting off my own trap. After a couple of attempts it worked.
21/11/2008 at 21:15 Nero says:
Can’t recall a specific game but of course this has happened to me. Quicksaving a second before you die etc, pushing the wrong button. So much fun every time.
21/11/2008 at 21:17 Smee says:
Not really a quicksave story, but while playing Half Life 2 I had just destroyed the helicopter gunship at the end of Route Canal, and the game duly autosaved. However, said helicopter gunship was above me at the time, and said helicopter gunship duly plummeted in a rain of fire and metal onto my head. Click – Autoload. Blam, whoosh, dead. Click – Autoload. Blam, whoosh, dead. Click – Autoload. Blam, whoosh, dead. You get the idea. Somehow I eventually managed to hit the accelerator at just the right time to avoid a direct hit, probably in the same way as your crouch move in Stalker. Took a while, though.
21/11/2008 at 21:19 Radiant says:
I have 3 saves.
One which I use when I think “right this is safe enough” and another for when I’ve made some progress past the first but not enough to erase my opening gambit.
The final save is ostensibly called “GOOOOOOOOOO!”
And is for those times when I’m making my push, my big move and my chips are all in.
I have 30 medium tanks, some planes and smattering of guys I got at the start of the level all ready to roll on that one tesla coil.
It’s use is usually followed by a loading screen to the first save.
Actual quicksaves and quickloads are banned since June ’98.
And we don’t talk about June ’98.
21/11/2008 at 21:30 Doug F says:
GothikX – I did that with Deus Ex, as I emerged from the subway to find Gunther, ad robot, and half the army waiting for me.
21/11/2008 at 21:37 vordhosbn says:
Don’t the Half-Life games actually rotate through two different quicksave slots? Because I remember thinking that was the best feature ever and I’m bummed it’s still not very common in modern games.
21/11/2008 at 21:45 Radiant says:
@Smee
Ah christ the mid point autosave!
Halo 3 was the worst for this as it was completely arbitrary.
I’d traipsed 30 minutes through to this forest clearing [2 battles, all my grenades and very little health into the level] and the game saved itself before it made me fight a whole grip of brutes surrounded by guys with sniper rifles.
I say ‘guys’ but I mean ‘wankers’.
After trying to win this fight for an hour and a half the game saved ITSELF just as I slipped down this cliff to a tiny ledge surrounded by water and skybox.
This hurt me twice.
Once on the outside as the xbox joypad is not designed to be smashed into the floor and still be ergonomic.
And again on the inside because the save system thought I was so shit at the game that it saved me 30 seconds after the last autosave.
21/11/2008 at 21:48 Eyre says:
Yeah…quick save and quick load seems kinda pointless to me. I always use the save/load options from the menu, no matter what game. Prevents accidentally overwriting something I don’t want to. I don’t have all the time in the world to play games (wish I did) so I won’t settle for screw ups like this. If I get stuck somewhere on a save, well, time for God Mode for a few minutes until I’m out of the woods. I don’t play games that make me continually repeat sections, even if its because of mistakes I made. Too many games, not enough time.
21/11/2008 at 21:56 IvanHoeHo says:
I don’t understand why every game can’t have backup copies (5 of ‘em, let’s say) of quick files. It literally takes up less than 1mb and it can’t be that hard to program.
21/11/2008 at 21:59 Kast says:
My first experience of HL, watching a friend play it, ended with him pretty furious with me when I hit quicksave on his keyboard as he was falling to his death.
“What did you do that for?!”
“Huh… that’s not quickload?”
“No, that’s quicksave!”
“Um, it’s usually quickload.”
21/11/2008 at 22:20 JonFitt says:
I have done this a few memorable times, both were in the games you mentioned.
In HL1 I quicksaved on low health right in the middle of a Gargantuan fight, and in Stalker I quicksaved on purpose, but in a place where it turned out that I was seconds away from being ganked by raiders from two directions at once.
They both took many tries, but eventually I was successful.
Ooh one other, in the original Descent. I was in a boss fight with 2 huge cloaking robots who fired homing death missiles, and took forever to kill. I accidentally quicksaved as one missile was incoming, and had to replay many times trying to avoid it.
Oh, and it wasn’t an accident, but I used to replay X-Com savegames many many many times trying to avoid a seemingly inevitable death. I played all the traditional X-Com games without ever losing an agent.
21/11/2008 at 22:31 lethu says:
As far as I can remember, I met the same kind of misfortune since Unreal 2 (the singleplayer game that dared to happen during the wrong era), same quick load/quick save story in all its possible variations, accross games and years. But… there is another type of similar clumsiness, the one that happens when pushing the lil’ flag key, and particularily while playing online games. That was a real pain, stronger than the singleplayer variety. I can’t remember one single major online game where I didn’t encounter such humiliating mishap at least once… Until I got the G15!
I’d beaten my ineptitude too, in my own way.
21/11/2008 at 22:33 Jonny Robson says:
Did this in HL1 as I was falling down a fecking lift shaft :(
I tried for about 10 minutes quick-loading to move myself to the edge of the shaft as I was falling to try to land on a sticky-out bit. Then I gave up and started the chapter again…
21/11/2008 at 23:08 Sensitive Artist says:
After experiencing the quicksave/quickload button mishap only a few times, I now remap quicksave far away from quickload. Of course, I’m one of the non-WASD folks (I prefer the keypad for movement), so I remap pretty much everything anyway.
21/11/2008 at 23:21 PaulMorel says:
I’m with you switchbreak! I have accidentally quickloaded after a glorious victory many times.
Recently, I screwed up QS/QL in Fallout 3, but luckily, the game is such that you can almost always work your way out of any situation.
21/11/2008 at 23:26 Suprore says:
uh, to all of the people with hl1/2 and falling to death problems… noclip.
I guess i just dont see the joy in quickloading a thousand times only to fall to my death and dont think it’s that objectionable to cheat my way out.
21/11/2008 at 23:38 FhnuZoag says:
You’d think developers would be much smarter about this.
Listen up, any game developers who are listening, who may be considering a quicksave system. This is what to do:
Allocate three or more save slots. Keep a counter of the ‘current’ save slot.
When quickload is pressed, load the current save slot.
When quicksave is pressed, move on to the next save slot in the cycle, and so save over that one.
So if the player accidentally saves incorrectly, he can still access the previous quicksave through the normal load/save game menu.
It’s not rocket science, jeez.
21/11/2008 at 23:40 Butler` says:
Can honestly say I’ve never done this :S
21/11/2008 at 23:42 unique_identifier says:
In STALKER clear sky I ended up with the most fantastic quicksave: every time I loaded it the game would crash shortly afterwards, with the time from load to crash decreasing each time I retried it. After five or so attempts the game relaxed into crashing during the loading screen.
On another note, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that my Far Cry 2 quicksave folder is about 1.3 gigs.
21/11/2008 at 23:43 MedO says:
Doug F: If you put all upgrades into strength, you can use the invisibility armor to come out of the subway without being seen, and lift away some of the crates surronding the area and “escape” (make sure you put it back to stop Gunther from following). You don’t get anywhere interesting though, as far as I can tell; everything in the surrounding area that you can’t see from the subway entrance is bare, reduced geometry and in parts unlighted.
You can also get out without the upgrade by stacking stuff against the big crates and climbing over (that’s more difficult and doesn’t work on all crates though, since the skybox hangs quite low).
Yeah, I spent quite some time playing with that situation, and similar ones (Trying to exit the 747 without Lebedev OR Navarre getting dying, for example (no success there)). When a game throws a supposedly impossible fight at me, I love to take it as a challenge.
21/11/2008 at 23:48 unique_identifier says:
FhnuZoag: I was thinking of exactly that system. An enhancement might be to only cycle forward a slot if the time elapsed since last save was greater than some threshold – say 10 minutes.
21/11/2008 at 23:52 MedO says:
By the way (missing edit button), I ended up tasing Lebedev and carried his unconscious body all the way to the Unatco HQ medical facilities, but the game still treated that if I had killed him :(
21/11/2008 at 23:54 DBeaver says:
Original “Commandos” – Just before a squad of german soldiers catches the Green Beret with a body on his shoulder. Then it became a clickfest with the pistol icon, which took up to 20 times to win… I must have done that in almost every level in the game
21/11/2008 at 23:59 Down Rodeo says:
A non-WSAD user? Heathen! :p
@FhnuZoag: that’s the son-father-grandfather system, used by many companies to back up data.
Personally I have never really used the quicksave or quickload buttons. In HL2 I made extensive use of the save function but always through the menu. I’m sure I have my share of gaffes though (thinking about it they all seem to be from dirty, dirty consoles).
22/11/2008 at 00:01 qrter says:
I had that too. It meant that when I wanted to make a ‘security save’ (one of those manual saves you make every few hours to help if you really cock up a quicksave somewhere) the game would say it was opening the saves folder (or whatever it was called) and it would literally take about 3 or 4 minutes.
I then decided I’d want to delete most of those saves, which the game would let you do but only one by one and having to reopen the saves folder every time after you just deleted one. So I deleted them outside of the game, ofcourse.
22/11/2008 at 00:02 Ishy says:
Happened a good amount to me…
Generally easy solutions: Bind a key to god or noclip cheats.
More developers need to save the second quicksave as well as fairly frequent autosaves…
22/11/2008 at 00:25 Nehr says:
Alec, you’re pretty young? Since you were a bad FPS-player when Half-Life came out.
Can’t you remap the F5/F6 keys in most games?
22/11/2008 at 00:28 Noc says:
I used to be really paranoid about saving in a bad spot, even with normal saves. So I’d keep a bunch of layered files; a main one for safe points, then a temp file for points inside of an area and a second temp file for anywhere really risky. It worked out pretty well; when I started quicksaving by habit, that usually took the place of my second temp file, and I still used the first two as normal.
. . .
Sticking points do happen to me, though, but it’s usually a matter of console shooters that lack quicksavery in favor of checkpoints. Back when I was playing through Halo (and sequels) on Legendary, for example, every second checkpoint would seem to land me in some obnoxious situation, crouched behind something with no shields and little ammo with aliens swarming around both sides.
In retrospect, this probably contributed quite a bit to my enjoyment of the game. Since each section became an exercise in creative problem solving, instead of just another gaggle of monsters to be gunned down on the way to the next gaggle of monsters.
My old roommate, though, had a habit of saving at the absolute worst times in HL2. Which was hilarious, because he’d get progressively angrier as the process went on and he kept getting gunned down moments after reloading.
Good times.
22/11/2008 at 00:33 Gap Gen says:
If you’re stealthy, you can crossbow all the black-ops guys without them going into ninja-mode. But yes, 20 minutes of reloading probably is excessive.
22/11/2008 at 00:36 kalgor says:
“The trouble is that the familiar upwards reach towards the central cluster of F5 keys is more muscle memory than concious act after all these years.”
Have you ever felt the need to quicksave or quick load in “real life”?, you know to cheat a hard test or maybe win at the casino?
22/11/2008 at 00:44 Alex says:
MedO: Given that when you knock someone unconscious in Deus Ex, you can hit them until they explode into pieces without ever waking up, I always felt that unconciousness in that game was the developers’ way of still letting you feel like a pacifistic type even as you slaughtered your way through half the respective populations of New York, Hong Kong, Paris etc. Telling you that you ‘found a body’ when you pick them up doesn’t help either. ;)
I haven’t really worked my way out of a quicksave-fail situation, but mostly that’s because I’m cheating scum when it comes to single-player games. I have experienced the horror of the impossible quicksave, though. Playing Splinter Cell (I forget which one) and quicksaving having set off two alarms already, only to turn a corner to encounter seemingly a dozen Chinese embassy guards, with Sam standing in the middle of a beam of light carrying the body of one of their mates, was simultaneously one of the funnier and more frustrating things I’ve ever done.
22/11/2008 at 00:44 exleus says:
Man, way back in the original Tomb Raider I accidentally saved once Lara started to scream as she fell into a pit.
Once loaded, poor girl would have a little more than a second to contemplate her demise at the hands of gravity.
22/11/2008 at 00:45 PleasingFungus says:
Been playing King’s Bounty obsessively – which of course is a name never before heard on RPS – and it does the multiple-quicksaves thing. It cycles between three slots. Been quite glad of that a few times.
Fallout 3, on the other hand, does not have multiple quicksaves. At one point, I ended up in a difficult fight with some Raiders – I wasn’t very high level, and one of the scum had a rocket launcher. I eventually managed to win the fight, but then noticed that a nearby car was afire. In Fallout 3, damaged cars eventually explode rather violently. So I got a safe distance away, turned to watch the car explode harmlessly, quicksaved…
It is important to note here that I was on a highway, clogged with ancient, useless, and now burning cars.
I tried roughly a half a dozen times to correct my error, but the result was always the same.
Lost about fifteen minutes progress because the game hadn’t autosaved when I thought it had, too. So sad! But I wiped out the Raiders anyway, and replicated the explosion later for some pretty screenshots. So no hard feelings.
22/11/2008 at 00:45 Noc says:
@kalgor: A few months ago, I received an e-mail saying that I’d gotten turned down for a job I’d interviewed for a few days previously. So, of course my first response was to hit the quickload key.
My second response was to blink, wonder why I hadn’t jumped back to the previous week, and swear as I concluded that I must’ve hit quicksave instead.
22/11/2008 at 00:52 Dr Evanzan says:
I’ve certainly made the QL/QS mistake on more than one occasion. It’s certainly very satisfying when you manage to work your way out of the situation. However, the memory that comes to mind for me is with a related phenomenon.
In the last level of Thief 2, having fallen from a great height and knocked myself down to 1 shield of health I knew I’d have to reload. However, I kept going to scout out the area. The part of the level I had fallen to involves creeping though a large ‘Star Wars: Episode 2′-style machine conveyor belt of crushing blocks, flames, spikes, etc. I deftly made it through the entire section unscathed and promptly decided it was better to reload and do that section with full health.
Of course, upon reloading and attempting with full health I end up getting caught and killed in the machine every frickin’ subsequent time for the next hour before I can make it through again.
Quickload-Fail: the Ecstasy and the (repeated) Agony?
22/11/2008 at 01:22 Bill says:
@Switchbreak – that’s the same mistake I make most of the time.
Speaking of HL1, my fave goofy cheat was to use notarget to attach laser mines to the backs of the blue guards. Move away, notarget off, and watch them blow up when they turned around.
22/11/2008 at 01:25 obo says:
Not a quicksave issue, but I accidentally saved over my campaign during a base invasion in X-Com 1.
I only had one guy on duty in the base and a full stock of plain bullet rifles and ammo, against those snake dudes and the speedy black zombifying bug bastards.
I think I played it for a month and finally won by finding some higher ground and waiting them out. That seems way too dull in retrospect to have felt as exhilarating as it did to finish.
22/11/2008 at 02:43 Thrawny says:
Some friends and i had just killed a tank in Left 4 Dead, and i immediately reached for the quicksave key, it’s programmed into me after years of fps games, i even curse games that have “checkpoints”.
22/11/2008 at 03:11 Ed says:
I wanted to quicksave during my driving theory test. Damn thing is so unpredictable.
I passed without it.
22/11/2008 at 03:14 Death by Toast says:
This is the exact reason I set quicksave to mouse4 and quickload somewhere on the keyboard. This helps a LOT.
Generally when this happens though, hitting quickload after finishing something ridiculous, I just stop. I can’t bear to do it all again. Walk away, have a good cry, and come back an hour or a day later and do it all over. Such frustration…
22/11/2008 at 03:32 Caiman says:
The non-gaming equivalent of this is making a bunch of radical changes to your document, intending to save it under a different name, and then clicking on “Save” instead of “Save as…”. Aargh!
I want these kinds of things as far apart as possible (on the screen, on the keyboard, wherever!) so in my fumbling ineptitude I make fewer mistakes.
22/11/2008 at 03:58 Greyface says:
My Rome – Total War installation (after several reinstalls ;.;) has a tendency to crash as I complete a battle, -during- or -caused- by the programmed autosave. So, the game crashes when I try to start from my last saved, and I rarely ‘real’ save. Although, it is a fine opportunity to re-make some dodgy choices. >.>
22/11/2008 at 04:21 James T says:
I could swear I’ve done the same thing, although it was probably Ctrl-Z — a save/load neurosis is a virtue in Photoshop-land. In fact, I made a mistake whilst drawing something awhile back, and reached my hand to the upper left of the paper to select Edit/Undo. There’s multiple brainwrongs with that one.
Using the ‘several quicksaves stored’ system would be nice, but keeping every one of them permanently can be a real nuisance — especially in combination with that consolitis symptom of not being able to name or comment saves (for some reason The Witcher is one sufferer of this combo, despite being purely for PC). Doesn’t matter if you only quicksave ‘sensibly’, the saves-list gets fer-LUDDED, usually with saves you couldn’t hope to identify, and have to pick and choose through at random for ages if you want to go back to somewhere significant (and eventually it devours a huge amount of space if the game is, for example, Far Cry 2).
Man, you must have about three saves in there! Wocka wocka wocka.
22/11/2008 at 04:25 James T says:
If you’ll allow me to take off my ‘actor’ pants and pull my ‘analrapist’ stocking over my head for a second, I think the lesson here is that one should always do the ‘save as’ before instituting the massive changes! Also, ctrl-A, ctrl-X, ctrl-V (rather than ctrl-C, so you know it really went to clipboard) before you make any giant forum posts, kids!
22/11/2008 at 05:10 chesh says:
Mine was actually in the original Half-Life as well. I don’t think it was even a mistaken quick-save, just a very ill-judged one. Somewhere in Nihilanth (or however it’s spelled), with just a few magnum bullets and like five of those flying-brain fuckers behind the next turn. I think it actually took me about an hour, spaced over a few weeks, to get through it.
22/11/2008 at 05:17 El says:
I do this all the time, only intentionally. I love the challenge you describe, and I felt so elated that I wasn’t the only person that felt accomplished when doing this that I felt compelled to post.
I guess I mainly did this in Fallout, where I oftentimes made multiple saves during the same impossibly stacked gunfight. I never, EVER, moved away from the leather jacket armor, and with this method, I went all the way through the mutant military base, where if I was hit more than once before it was my turn, hah, I was dead. So was dogmeat. It was impossible, and I loved it. I would seriously rather play the same encounter 30+ times to get the ending I wanted rather than grind my character to the level he should have been to do what I did.
22/11/2008 at 06:30 Nimic says:
I quicksaved (on purpose) in the middle of the last boss-fight in Crysis. Unfortunately, it took all of half a second before I got hit with something massive and unavoidable. I tried it a few times before admitting to myself it was futile, and just stopped playing the game. Events like that are liable to permanently damage my ‘relationship’ with a game. Luckily I had already finished the game once (yes, I thought Crysis was a good game!), so it was more of a “I’m such an idiot” moment than a “I hate this game!” moment.
22/11/2008 at 06:33 JM_Zen says:
This has happened to me in Max Payne, where you’re battling your way up that tower (the last level). There’s this point where you had to jump over these red tripwires, or summon a bunch of guards. Anyway, I jumped, hit F5, jumped again, hit F5 again, etc. When it came to the last one, I had just landed and hit F5 when some rent-a-cop pops from around the corner and kills me with a single shot.
Quickloading did nothing, as I had *just* landed when the guy pops me. But thinking back to a PC Gamer article, I remembered that the bullet trajectories were random. So I just kept quickloading until that fateful first bullet missed me.
Anyway, then I fired back, killed him, stocked up on painkillers, and won the day. Woo hoo.
22/11/2008 at 07:06 waffles says:
in hardwar, i always hit quicksave whenever some guy with a neotiger or something bum rushed me, forcing me to learn to use skyscrapers as cover.
22/11/2008 at 07:10 Corion says:
I have longed for many years to create a sort of Wario Ware style game full of small 3d FPS-style minigames.
The title of the game would be something like “5 Seconds To Live”, and is basically the same situation you describe that I have found myself in countless times before.
Essentially, in the game, you’d be treated to a semi-randomized cutscene or user-controlled stroll through an environment (usually something busy), when the words “X Seconds To Live!” would flash on your screen as an announcer said the same (the game would save when this happens). At this point, you have that many seconds to figure out what is going to kill or injure you and a way to stop it.
It would be part puzzle-solving, part reflexes, part trial-and-error. Sometimes though, there would be multiple ways to save yourself, and you’d get points for creativity. You might also have the chance to save others as well (or even instead of yourself), and you’d get points for that too.
Occasionally the game would do tricky things, like warn you that you’re about to die when all you have to do is something as simple as ducking or jumping, and any other action would surely result in failure (though it may not be that obvious until after you try it).
I’ve made the Quicksave mistake many times before. What’s even worse though, is when you reflexively hit Quickload when you mean to save, or hadn’t saved for a very, very, very long time.
22/11/2008 at 07:29 omicron1 says:
What’s nice is games that feature more than one quicksave. (say, a pool of your three most recent ones)
22/11/2008 at 09:12 Aftershock says:
HL2 autosaves when you kill the chopper in Route Canal.
I just happened to be underneath it. Took me many a quickload to get out of the way before it killed me.
Having only started to play Deus Ex recently, i can say that the lack of autosaving really hurt me a fair few times. Just playing and playing without saving until i die, and then BAM. Hours of game lost..
22/11/2008 at 09:58 Valentin Galea says:
I propose a scientific term for this situation:
Quickscrewed!
22/11/2008 at 10:39 Broslovski says:
IIRC, the Max Payne games had a system of two alternating quicksave slots. I wish every game since had adopted the system. Very handy for backtracking out of ‘quickscrewed’ situations. Of course, it does make it more of a ‘not-so-quicksave’, but hey…
22/11/2008 at 11:16 eyemessiah says:
I quickscrewed on the way to the bottom of the hanging crates jumping puzzle near the start of HL1. Quickloading rewarded me with 1 second of freefall then my body smashing at the bottom of the inexplicably pit.
I often rebind quicksave to f5 and quickload to f12 for this very reason.
22/11/2008 at 11:19 Donald Duck says:
Fallout 3s mines are a great way to get into a quickscrew, especially the bigger ones. The challenge is that they take long before they explode, so when I hear something suspicious and nothing happens within a few seconds I’ll think I’m safe and quicksave. Don’t know how many times I’ve done that.
22/11/2008 at 11:26 StenL says:
I don’t have any quicksave related situations, but I also jumped into the mine in Crysis, just as it auto-saved. I found out that furiously mashing the E key every time I loaded the checkpoint did one of three things, first option was that nothing happened and I died, second, and the most common option was that I appeared on top of the wrecked car with about half my life gone, and the third option was that the camera went insane, spun around and did other assorted tricks, and then I would just spawn with full health at some random point in the mine with no car in sight.
22/11/2008 at 11:38 Smee says:
Oh, I remember another one. I’m not sure how I managed it, but I ended up having to repeat THAT BIT in Meat Circus from Psychonauts after I completed it for the first time (having just spent half an hour on those 7 seconds of gameplay). I almost died.
22/11/2008 at 12:17 CJD says:
Not quite sure how you can make a quicksave mistake in Half Life as it is one of the few games i can remember that actually alternates between 2 quicksaves – so even if you mess one up you have the other one.
22/11/2008 at 12:53 Q.Q says:
I had a similar experience in STALKER too. Fortunately, i learned a trick: when the “synchronizing” text appears on the loading screen, i pressed the pause key and when the save loads, the game is paused.
22/11/2008 at 13:02 Erez says:
You got me wondering…
how much can you actually learn about a person only from their saving habits ?
22/11/2008 at 13:36 Arzar says:
I have a nice story of quickscrewed.
Actually it’s in FarCry 1, so it’s not exactly quicksave/quickload, but damned checkpoints. I was near the end of the game in a military complex and reached a checkpoint. I was very low in ammo and life, and guess what come right after checkpoint in every game since the Creation ? Yes, a new wave of monster.
I spent the next 15 minutes without fighting, just observing how the monsters came in the room. It appeared that each monster popped exactly at the same place and at the same time, so I took another 15 minutes to craft my Grand War Plan. A perfect string of well-timed move, designed to kill every monster efficiently without take any damage. Something along the lines of :
0s: Loading complete. Run forward.
10s : Hide behind pillar #1. Wait.
12.5s : Strafe right.
12.75s: Headshot in monster #1 with the last bullet of the shotgun.
13.0s: Strafe right.
13.5s: Turn around pillar #2 while switching to pistol.
14.0: Headshots in monster #2 with the last four bullets of the pistol.
14.5: Launch grenade toward two new monsters. Azimuth : 59° elevation 42°
14.6: Dodge bullets of monster #3
etc. etc.
I had to repeat the plan and practice practice practice during an entire HOUR, to finally made the ULTIMATE run, reach PERFECTION, TRANSCEND myself, KILL every monster in a Matrix-like choreography… and err.. continue FarCry :)
It was a lot of fun.
22/11/2008 at 14:20 roBurky says:
This has never happened to me, because I never use quicksave/quickload unless the game forces me to.
22/11/2008 at 14:33 Saflo says:
Not quite sure how you can make a quicksave mistake in Half Life as it is one of the few games i can remember that actually alternates between 2 quicksaves – so even if you mess one up you have the other one.
I think they only started that with the sequel.
22/11/2008 at 16:29 Pod says:
Quicksave ruined half life 1 for me, in a way. I think it was the first game that I’d used the feature in. Anyway, it turned into a complete farse and I would reload after every battle and do it again, and again, and eventually I completely the game and I don’t think I ever went under 85% health (and if I did I quick loaded…).
Very sad :(
22/11/2008 at 17:51 Cashii says:
I once accidentally quicksaved in Max Payne 1′s outdoor elevator in the Aesir building – with about half a second of a time frame to somehow dodge the machine gun fire from the attack helicopter in front of me. It blasted me to a fine mist dozens of times. After about half an hour of boldly jumping into the other elevator and dying just as boldly, I finally lived. The whole scene, from quickload to death, never took longer than three seconds.
I set quicksave far away from quickload ever since.
22/11/2008 at 18:37 Yutani says:
Thief is one of the worst for this, A couple of times I’ve thought I was safe, while actually I’d just been spotted by a Hammer Haunt… I think I restarted in the end, though that was partly due to my perfectly rational fear of Haunts at that time.
22/11/2008 at 19:24 shloop says:
The worst is when you quicksave after you’ve jumped to your death, but before you hit the ground.
22/11/2008 at 20:07 SlappyBag says:
On the subject of muscle memory, the thing I do all the damn time is going to press CTRL-F when I’ve lost something, obviously I don’t move my hand or anything but my brain just runs the command that makes me want to CTRL-F.
22/11/2008 at 20:54 Eli Just says:
The Far Cry 2 quicksave system is TERRIBLE. In STALKER I quicksave every 10-60 seconds and it just updates my 1 save file. I was playing that right up into FC2, so after a couple hours I have hundreds and hundreds of save files, and it takes almost 5 minutes to load the save game browser. It’s terrible.
22/11/2008 at 21:15 Noc says:
Oh, I just recalled something else that’s happened to me because of quicksave abuse.
A bit back I was playing through Final Fantasy 9 on an emulator, because I don’t own a Playstation. And never have, which is why I missed it the first time around. But anyways, the emulator came with the ubiquitous Save State and Load State functions . . . so I could quicksave and quickload at will.
So it’s a Final Fantasy game. And that means scads and scads of random encounters jumping you on your way to places. These started bugging me, since I wasn’t going out and looking for fights, I was trying to walk to the other end of the hallway.
So I’d quicksave every few steps, and quickload my way out when the random encounters started getting too obnoxious. Of course, this means that when I got to the Endgame I was woefully underleveled, and got slaughtered, and never finished it. This would have been a story of a clever comeback, but the way out of this predicament was just to go back and grind crap. So, yeah, that didn’t happen.
23/11/2008 at 02:37 Fumarole says:
Does no one rebind the keys? I rebind every key as needed before ever starting up any game. That eliminates all the woes but the quicksave immediately before perishing horribly. But resisting the temptation to quicksave constantly should mitigate that.
23/11/2008 at 06:43 Desi says:
In Stalker: Clear Sky there’s a rare bug involving ragdoll animations; when a character is killed he’s often thrown backwards and sometimes the ragdoll makes him collide with something, or never settle, and then the game crashes. About twenty seconds after a quicksave the game would crash, and I eventually realised that it was because a Snork was owning some Stalker and throwing his corpse around. In the twenty seconds available I basically had to run from one end of the base to the other, kill the Snork and all his friends, and ensure no Stalkers died. It was great.
23/11/2008 at 11:01 James T says:
I’m surprised Deus Ex didn’t draw more gamers away from using function keys for quicksave/load (they’re reserved for augmentations in DX). I use numpad minus and plus now; apart from one or two slip-ups when I first played DX, it’s been great ever since — and pleasingly close to the mouse, to boot. “Small key to save… big key to load…”
24/11/2008 at 10:44 Bobsy says:
I did this aged 10 or something while playing Frontier (although in those days there were no quicksaves or loads). On being intercepted by the biggest baddest pirate that could possibly be generated by the game (Imperial Courier, 100mwt laser, orange shields) I immediately went to load an earlier game and ended up saving over the last point of safety.
Of course, after many tries I finally won and felt pretty goddamn proud of my iddy biddy self. I can’t remember what ship I was in at the time but at a guess it was something crappy and useless like an Adder (brick with a windscreen)
24/11/2008 at 12:01 mbp says:
Lovely article Alec. These days I have got so used to regularly spaced checkpoints that I rarely use quick save but it used to be a major feature of my gaming and I remember the pain you describe.
24/11/2008 at 14:20 Drakanr says:
I used to quick-save/quick-load the hell out of Max Payne and had more then one occasion where I quick-saved right before imminent doom. I have to agree though that managing to escape certain death is probably one of the most satisfying things a gamer can experience.
Great article.
24/11/2008 at 15:38 Michael America says:
I used to try to stubbornly bull ahead at imminent doom scenarios, but I found it’s a lot faster and easier on the nerves to just suck it up and go to a previous save. Of course, I usually have 3 or 4 saves going at once, depending on the Threat level.
In Fallout 3, I have 1 save which is always in my home, a save before I would start a quest, the autosave for the various areas within the quest, and the quicksave for where I’m about to do something reckless/stupid “That Mr Gutsy’s a little close, but let me lob a nuka-grenade anyway…”
24/11/2008 at 16:24 Hermit says:
Yeah, I’ve had various experiences of this in the past, though I can’t remember any exact examples offhand.
Totally agree about the reflex action though. Earlier in the year I’d been playing Bioshock for a couple of hours. Took a break and logged on for a game of TF2. Ran out of spawn as a soldier, shot a couple of people, and promptly pressed F6 to quicksave it. I felt slightly silly afterwards.
24/11/2008 at 20:49 zanbowser says:
As a programmer, I’ve thought of how one would properly do up savegames, and I really think humble SVN is the perfect answer.
You wind up with a database of saves, each only dumping on the pile the diff of the previous versions (no FC2 issue, unless you’re a quicksave/newset MANIAC). Then, with a sufficiently capable save browser (and set tagging?), you could go back to all previous saves in a specific set – say, F6 for quicksave, F8 for new set, F10 for save browser.
Someone steal this idea, pronto. ^_~
25/11/2008 at 13:56 Tom Davies says:
Friend of mine ‘completed’ the first Tomb Raider game and celebrated with a quicksave. Being a tool he had no other saves, and being another bigger tool he had just jumped to his death down a large ravine.
It still amuses me to think the only reward for days and hours of gaming is being able to see Lara Croft fall to her death time and time again.
25/11/2008 at 14:21 Pod says:
Did he just leave his computer on each day, or did he completel TR1 in one sitting?
26/11/2008 at 13:37 Duncan says:
I have a friend who once used quick-save to play through the entirety of HL1 without getting hit. The moment he took a single point of avoidable damage, he reloaded. It took him weeks and weeks, but he did it.
26/11/2008 at 17:11 Michael America says:
Holy shit, I remember reading about that! I can’t remember where, but I was like:
“That… is a dude with a lot of time on his hands.”
while at the same time being totally impressed with the accomplishment.
29/11/2008 at 08:52 Axon says:
Half-Life 2: I’m in the square outside with Alyx (with the force field we need to get down, and there’s a broken bridge behind it). The Combine is killing us all over, all my squad members are dead and I just wasted my last MedKit. The gate finally opens and we run to safety, then I want to save the game and I press quickload! Fuck, I was pissed because I was at the beginning again, all that work for nothing.
19/01/2009 at 14:53 Mat says:
Lol! I hate to say it but i totally sympathise and all having done it myself with almost all the mentioned games and i just think fucking hell thats the best times i had with the games. And you learn (sometimes) from the heartbreak.
Bring on darwinism. Keep the ‘Quick-screwing feature’ (although for the record no other item on THE list should be omitted from any game ever made. In fact a shitcaek of publishers should get to work making these changes to old games. Especially any old games which have a surviving company! Might even make some money from it =)
05/05/2009 at 01:30 Nic says:
I was playing HL1 too when I did this. I was on the alien planet with little health. I was being shot in the air by some thing and I knew the impact would kill me and I accidentally hit quicksave. This resulted in hours of shooting myself in the direction of a floating platform while being a second away from falling. somehow I did it.
07/05/2009 at 03:27 Hahaha..ha..ha says:
Oh man. I played through Final Fantasy X. I went through at a leisurely pace. I ended up taking all of my male characters through Auron’s path. I had a kick ass group. My brother also played FFX, and his saved game was right below mine on the memory card. When we were called by my parents to do something, we had to do it right away or risk losing our system for some period of time. SO, I got into the habit of pressing the series of buttons to save on my specific slot very quickly. Then one day, my brother went to the bathroom and told me to play his game (i had about 30 hours played, he had about 5), I got called and immediately saved the game. I stared in disbelief at the loss of my work.
15/12/2009 at 04:16 Turbo says:
This brings back some terrible thoughts on my first romp through Max Payne, where I’d watch myself get killed over and over again because I accidently quick-saved just before or after dying. Oh, bitter, bitter memories…
11/11/2010 at 22:57 phenom_x8 says:
Im just LOL very hard after read this old comments and article.Alec (and the commentator) what all of you’ve been describe is right exactly what I’ve been through as a pc gamer all this time. Oh,looks like we all have the same problem anyway!
11/11/2010 at 23:15 Jimbo says:
I don’t believe you can ever truly appreciate the extremes of bitterness and sweetness this scenario is capable of inflicting until you have played through Commandos co-op. It can take hours to play through a single mission, and the only save option is a single quicksave slot. And it is oh so easy to save yourself into a doomed position in that game.