Intrusive save system

[doveman 7]

Does anyone else find the way that A3 saves, by pausing the game and locking out the controls, rather intrusive and immersion-breaking? It's probably most annoying when flying along at speed and then it freezes you to save and then unfreezes and you carry on but even on foot it's annoying.

I realise it's no different from A2 but I'd hoped they'd come up with a better system, like most other games that just save in the background, maybe with a small non-intrusive symbol in the bottom-right corner to indicate it's saving.

Or is it just an insurmountable engine limitation?

[dmarkwick 261]

Maybe it's a choice between that & really choppy & low fps for the duration.

[dale0404 5]

I don't think its intrusive, in fact when the save game kicks in I love the way the colours change!

[metalcraze 290]

It's an insurmountable hardware limitation.

One thing is saving several kilobytes of data in a corridor shooter or pseudo-open world that just saves your position, ammo and literally nothing else and another - every single active object on a really huge map with its exact values like even a destroyed tree or pushed box.

[doveman 7]

It's certainly not a hardware limitation, that's just silly!

You seem to think it has to save hundreds of MB or GB each time. In fact, looking at the savegames I have, they're only a few MB each.

I don't really see why it should be a choice between pausing the game and ruining the immersion or choppy & low fps either, surely it just has to copy the current data to a cache, so that the save is at that fixed time and it's not trying to save changing data as things move about and then save that whilst the player is able to carry on playing. Considering it can load/stream large amounts of data, I wouldn't think saving a few MB at the same time would be a major problem.

[Mansen 10]

Playing through the showcases I have made the following observations (or rather opinions)

1. The timing of most autosaves is horrible. It often saves far too early during a checkpoint (like when you are much farther away - enjoy backtracking a lot)

2. The one save per mission is really bad design - maybe for an Ironman mode (or Bronze/Iron - one save, no save), but not for a series of INTRODUCTION videos that have a liking for screwing the novice player up badly.

[Smurf 12]

Ah c'mon. Waitinf for 3 seconds once or twice per mission get you annoyed?

[doveman 7]

Ah c'mon. Waitinf for 3 seconds once or twice per mission get you annoyed?

Yes, it's very annoying and ruins the immersion by suddenly freezing you out of the game for a few seconds mid-mission. It would be better at least to just let me save manually whenever I want and have no auto-save (and as Mansen said, one save per mission is terrible).

[EDcase 87]

Yes, it's very annoying and ruins the immersion by suddenly freezing you out of the game for a few seconds mid-mission. It would be better at least to just let me save manually whenever I want and have no auto-save (and as Mansen said, one save per mission is terrible).

Sorry, doesn't bother me either. Its important to have the autosave to cut out the intros etc.

There is an option in difficulty settings to allow multiple saves or not

[doveman 7]

@EDcase, thanks for the tip about the multiple saves option, didn't know that :)

[nettrucker 142]

@EDcase, thanks for the tip about the multiple saves option, didn't know that :)

In ArmA 2 unlimited save games are available until Veteran difficulty. In Expert Mode it's disabled by default. Don't know how ArmA 3 handles the unlimited save game.