I complete the civilization phase, on hard, after a fair amount of work.

Suddenly, an error message.

Spore: looks like you invested a lot of hard work there! Time for me to crash! Have fun playing again from the beginning of this phase!

Given the games severe, rampant, indeed unusual level of instability, an autosave feature would have done a lot to prevent the headaches that a significant fraction of Spore players are having.

I am appalled, absolutely appalled, at the sheer number of abject common-sense mistakes made by a development house with such a pedigree. Have you guys been putting mercury in the office coffee? How do such experienced people amass such a collection of "duh! even I knew better!" mistakes?

I understand hype can lead to higher than possible expectations, but Maxis has not released a game with this many apparent, severely counter-intuitive flaws in recent memory. Phoned-in at the 11th hour it seems.

My sentiments, also.

Auto-save option would be nice.

Game crashes for too many people, too often, for too many reasons.

No autosave is needed.

Just press CTRL+S, as easy as that.

This Scenario: You made a terrible mistake, you're on the edge of losing the game: Poof! Autosave.

This would cause you to restart the entire phase, since loading the game would take you back to losing the stage.




Just press CTRL+S when you've reached something you want to be saved. In my case, that's like every 5 minutes or less.

I aggree, autosave can be deadly, I would only aggree if you have more then one places to save the same game. But I dunno how the saving is implemented into spore, so it could be a big change to have several save places for the same game.

deathtrail wrote:No autosave is needed.

Just press CTRL+S, as easy as that.

This Scenario: You made a terrible mistake, you're on the edge of losing the game: Poof! Autosave.

This would cause you to restart the entire phase, since loading the game would take you back to losing the stage.




Just press CTRL+S when you've reached something you want to be saved. In my case, that's like every 5 minutes or less.

I didn't think to look up a shortcut (silly me), but that would make it easier to do, yes. Thank you for that.

Though as for the problem you explained: yes that would be bad, except that many games, whose makers had their heads on right about savegames, store autosaves and manual saves as separate entities. It's not necessarily Maxis' forté in recent games, but simply prompting whether to load from autosave or manual save would remedy that entirely. Or having loading default to the latest manual save unless you hit the auto-load hotkey. Whatever, there are a lot of simple, elegant solutions to that problem.

Foregoing autosave entirely, especially when the game is so unstable (seriously, there is no reason on this earth that Spore should not run without a hitch on my system, I made sure of that), is not the most sensible course of action.

it should auto save in every milestone

Eg: conquer a city; do an achievement

I like that it does not save. Wanted to try to do the Speed Freek/Speed Demon/Economically Terrific/Rolling Thunder/Space God Achievement and not mess up my universe. I just wish it did not save my creatures which look like crap.

An auto save option would be great with three settings: none, end of each phase, and every splash screen.

ascus wrote:I like that it does not save. Wanted to try to do the Speed Freek/Speed Demon/Economically Terrific/Rolling Thunder/Space God Achievement and not mess up my universe. I just wish it did not save my creatures which look like crap.

An auto save option would be great with three settings: none, end of each phase, and every splash screen.

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Those who prefer ctrl-s really shouldn't be objecting to the OPTION of an auto save on/off feature.

The above variable choices for auto-save would be very nice.

If they did something like this, it would have to be an option in the settings, and it would have to be off by default. I do not want my games autosaving at arbitrary points. I do a lot of experimenting that I do NOT want saved without my consent.

ytram wrote:If they did something like this, it would have to be an option in the settings, and it would have to be off by default. I do not want my games autosaving at arbitrary points. I do a lot of experimenting that I do NOT want saved without my consent.

By logic, it would have to start as off ...

But, then, a lot of the way Spore was programmed doesn't follow logic...

:/

It would change too much to suddenly throw an always on auto-save feature into the game.

But adding the option to turn one on shouldn't complicate much of anything for anybody (other than the programmers, who should've done a better job the first time around in the first place)...

So ... Yes, adding it with default OFF is fine ... just so long as the OPTION is there ...

I find it perplexing why they didn't think think out the save system better. On the one hand, there's no auto-save, so it sends you back to your last save. If the game crashes, as it has for me twice in the space period (that there aren't more crashes says something, though), you may lose hours and hours of game time if you forgot to save. This should at least be an option.

But then, if you DO save often manually, this gets you in horrible spots. I was on the losing side of a civilization stage game, thinking I might be able to pull out of it, when I stopped to eat dinner. Well, I'm unable to pull out of it, and now my most recent save (i.e. the only save) is past the moment when defeat is inevitable. So, the whole evolution of that creature is lost.

This issue is so fundamental, that I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in beta-testing, and this is a feature that you find in basically ANY RTS of the last 10 years. The whole RTS dimension of Spore is often so unbalanced (sometimes too easy, and sometimes impossibly hard), you have to wonder if they missed the RTS 101 class. And that's a shame, because it's not the RTS dimension of the game that really shines or was even meant to shine, but it seems to be the botched RTS components that are souring so many people on the game.

cortez09 wrote:it should auto save in every milestone

Eg: conquer a city; do an achievement

Yeah. And each file should have the ability to restart from the beginning of the current era.

I would like an autosave. but have differant options for it like never autosave, automactly ask if you want to save after you do something, or automactly save without asking. for me autosave would be awesome since my game freezes alot when i'm in space and every so often in other stages.

ytram wrote:If they did something like this, it would have to be an option in the settings, and it would have to be off by default. I do not want my games autosaving at arbitrary points. I do a lot of experimenting that I do NOT want saved without my consent.

Perfectly reasonable expectations, and the default settings are exactly as you describe in many games (but you probably know that, forgive me if I sound patronizing, it's not intended).

Having a togglable option in the settings that I could use to turn autosaves on is fine with me. It'd just be nice not to have to trust that I remembered to manually save the game recently when a CTD happens.

It really sucks to pull off a nice little streak of progress and then crash before I can save. Autosaves would really work against that and it's an easy thing to add into the game in a way that keeps everyone happy.

You know, maybe I'm just crazy, but it seems pretty easy to make both parties happy. Having an autosave feature doesn't mean that it uses the same save as your regular saves. Usually (i.e., since the 90s), games with an autosave have an autosave file and your regular saves go into a separate file.

It's not rocket science, people!