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!
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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”.
I wanted to quicksave during my driving theory test. Damn thing is so unpredictable.
I passed without it.
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…
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.
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. >.>
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s nice is games that feature more than one quicksave. (say, a pool of your three most recent ones)
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..
I propose a scientific term for this situation:
Quickscrewed!
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You got me wondering…
how much can you actually learn about a person only from their saving habits ?
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.
This has never happened to me, because I never use quicksave/quickload unless the game forces me to.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
The worst is when you quicksave after you’ve jumped to your death, but before you hit the ground.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
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)
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.
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.
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…”
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.
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. ^_~
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.
Did he just leave his computer on each day, or did he completel TR1 in one sitting?
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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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.