I keep needing to delete saves in Baldur’s Gate 3. It autosaves so much, and you can save manually at any time, so as a lecherous save scummer, I quickly fill up all the available slots before I know it. Deleting them is a pain in the butt, but at least I have all the freedom I could possibly need to do so. It’s the sort of game where knowing you have saved progress ready to revert to at any given moment is essential, and preventing us from doing so during cutscenes or in the middle of battle would make it actively less enjoyable.

The majority of modern games are incredibly generous when it comes to checkpoints, autosaves, and making sure players never have to replay sections of the game because of a sudden death or bug. At times though, there is a welcome joy to titles that aren’t afraid to toy with the idea of limiting your saves, and how it can, in the right circumstances, become a mechanic in itself. Even games built around narrative hardship and extreme violence like The Last of Us Part 2 wouldn’t dare make you start over more than five seconds after biting the dust. Most of these situations are welcome, but I want saving my game to feel like a relief, or a morbid challenge that I need to overcome.

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In Baldur's Gate 3, It Is Impossible To Save Everyone

Larian understands how much we care for its RPG characters, even if some are destined to perish.

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I grew up on a steady diet of parental neglect and JRPGs, and both taught me about there being a time and place to gather your thoughts and relax. Games like Final Fantasy 7 and Legend of Dragoon can be daunting gauntlets, where later stages of the game throw loads of battles at you in quick succession with no opportunity to heal or formulate strategies. Go in unprepared, and chances are you’ll need to go through it all again. The save points found prior to these points are paramount, as are ones situated ahead of boss rooms or in massive dungeons where safety feels like a distant impossibility. I remember when save points never used to heal you either, so the only choice was to waste all of your MP or binge a bunch of healing items that you’d probably need in the battles to come.

Nier Automata is the distant cousin of games like this, and I’ve always adored how the first 40 minutes or so of Yoko Taro’s masterpiece must be completed with dying. If you bite the dust, instead of giving you a checkpoint or save to reload, you receive a unique ending for being a filthy casual. The game treats many of the mechanics we take for granted, such as health bars, user interface elements, and saving your game as chips of the androids we’ll come to play as, so much so that equipping them from the menu will cause them to vanish.

It’s a unique approach to design conventions that fold into saving our game, and how, in the opening set piece and narrative setup, for roughly 30 minutes, we are completely unsafe, and must learn how to move, fight, and defend ourselves without meeting death. The section isn’t especially hard to conquer, but knowing a single failure could spell your doom adds a harsh pressure that makes these characters and what they’re fighting for so much more compelling despite only having just met them. It’s a statement of intent from Nier Automata that it carries across the entire experience. Then you’ve got Alien: Isolation, which turns the act of saving games into a nail-biting exercise in anxiety. It isn’t immediate, and the time it takes to achieve a brief moment of salvation is just long enough for a Xenomorph or rogue android to creep up from behind and murder you in seconds.

Save points in Isolation are phone-like devices where employees of the Sevastopol Station use cards to record their attendance or get in contact with fellow employees, with this being signified by a few faint noises and flickering lights across the machine. Once the process is complete, your game is saved. But the action never pauses no matter what, so saving now becomes a rare privilege, or something you must perform under the cover of stealth where you know enemies aren’t nearby, and reloading a checkpoint won’t suddenly have you now face to face with the ultimate killing machine.

Typewriters in Resident Evil, Bonfires in Dark Souls, restrooms in Dead Rising are all similar examples of fleeting safety, that you’ll be running to in desperation with few resources and dwindling health, only to breathe a sigh of relief the second you break the threshold. It is equal parts reward and respite, making you feel like, at least for the moment, you’ve reached a new echelon of progress beyond only providing a means to continue the next time you pick up the controller.

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