Games with one save slot

[L Thammy]

I'm pretty sure that Pokemon does this as an intentional strategy. If a family has two kids that want to play, they need to get two copies.

 

[Georome]

Dead Rising, I believe.

Yep. The original Dead Rising gave zero fucks about being user friendly.

 

[Noogy]

Alternatively, games with multiple save slots that "lock" you into a single slot for a playthrough.

What a frustrating design choice.

As a developer I can't believe how much internal debate I have about this. In my last game I allowed users to save and mange slots, but I often wondered if I should have dumbed it down and forced them to stick with a single slot.

I always hear both sides of this from users. Some get confused and don't understand when the game isn't automatically managing a single selected slot. Worst yet, I offered a single 'autosave' and it was possible to lose that if you started a new game.

Conversely, I think it's important, in a narrative based game, to let players manage multiple slots. I still don't know how I should approach future games, but I personally prefer full control.

 

[woopWOOP]

The Advance Wars series has one save file for campaign and a different one for multiplayer battles.
More than once did I find myself in a dilemma of wanting to start a new multiplayer game, but not wanting the old save file gone yet...

 

[Soodanim]

Doesn't Dragon's Dogma just have one?

Dark Souls' 10 annoys me no end, I'm constantly deleting saves. Souls games are the only games I've ever played where I want to make that many saves and I'm forced, arbitrarily, to be stuck with 10. I want at least 100 slots to feel safe, but it should be unlimited. Demon's had 4, which is just ridiculous.

 

[11redder]

One of the 3DS resident evil games have this, and what's worse is it's impossible to delete.

I think they did it to curb used sales.

Yup, Mercenaries. A supposed attempt to deter used game sales and it fucked the game up for everyone.

Ended up buying it when it was heavily discounted on the eshop rather than day one as a result.

 

[Fauve]

For the Souls games (and other games I guess), are you able to back up your files (to something like PSN online storage) and just switch them out so you can kinda have multiple saves?

Never tried this (and it may not work) but thought it might be a useful workaround.

 

[T.O.P]

Until Dawn... -_-

I was playing with a friend but he got to episode 6 and we had to stop. So he'll have to play all over again because I wanted to play the game with my sister and had no other choice but erase his progress and start a new game.

Ok this sucks

 

[malfcn]

Watch Dogs.

Another Ubi game. I think it's because it has SP and MP things tied together..so they made only one slot. Sadness.

 

[Giever]

Etrian Odyssey 1,2,3,4 and Untold did this, but 2 Untold finally dropped it and we have multiple save files now.

Shit enraged me since I couldn't share the game with my SO. So glad it's gone.

 

[khaaan]

One of my recent frustrations: Limbo

It's not that I want to have multiple playthrough's going, or that someone else in my household wants to play it too. My issue is that when you pause the game, right beneath the "Resume Game" is a "Start New Game" option. When you press "Start New Game" it doesn't ask you if you're sure, it dives right into it. Auto-check points rather than manual save meant that my game, the single save state in the game, was overwritten immediately.

Thankfully it's not a very long game so even though I was over halfway through I didn't have to sit through much to get back to it. Having already completed those sections also obviously helped speed up the process considerably.

Until Dawn... -_-

I was playing with a friend but he got to episode 6 and we had to stop. So he'll have to play all over again because I wanted to play the game with my sister and had no other choice but erase his progress and start a new game.

Couldn't you just make a second account?

 

[PreyingShark]

Smash Bros U.

What the fuck do you fucking mean I can't fucking unlock shit on my own because my bro fucking unlocked everything while I was busy with college stuff? What the fucking bullshit is this fucking nonsense? Unlocking shit is my favorite part of Smash Bros! Why the fuck is there only one save file per a console what the fuck?

"Only one save slot? But my younger sibling wants to play/I wanted to try out another starter without losing my current file. Well, I guess if I buy another copy, I can get the other version and be able to trade Pokemon."

Pretty much.

Meanwhile, Yo-kai Watch 2 sold millions in Japan and each cart has three save files...

 

[Etria]

The Etrian Odyssey series, 999, Pokemon, Ace Attorney Trilogy off the top of my head.

 

[Chalupa Batman]

Until Dawn... -_-

I was playing with a friend but he got to episode 6 and we had to stop. So he'll have to play all over again because I wanted to play the game with my sister and had no other choice but erase his progress and start a new game.

You can export the save to USB, which is what I did to ensure I could clean up the collectibles after I beat the game a 2nd time without worrying about them.

 

[Occam]

Terrible design choice. What's even worse is a game with 1 save slot and auto saving.

Example: Dead Island. If your save gets corrupted, you lose all progress and have to restart the game from the beginning.

 

[Lindsay]

Dragon Quest IX?

Buy a new copy or lose the characters, items, and post-game accomplishments you've spent hundreds of hours building up!

Same for the DQ Monsters games to apparently. And Okamiden, and sooo many others.

Don't ya miss the days of memory cards? Well at least you can backup your save files to a memory stick or something... provided the game doesn't have a copy block on it.

Sonic Lost World does, for no discernible reason other than "they forgot"

It's annoying, because on the off-chance you want to rewatch the cut-scenes (which are actually fairly well done), you have to replay the game from scratch.

What. SA2 let ya rewatch cutscenes after beating the game an that was way back in 2001. Even the Sonic Rush games did! Seeegggaaaccc!

 

[Tezzeractor]

Animal Crossing's is frustrating. You can make multiple characters, but you're all forced to live in the same town. This issue in the GameCube version was mitigated by using multiple memory cards, but that solution is not as viable in the latest releases.

 

[Princess Viola]

The 3DS version of Metal Gear Solid 3 has only one save slot.

My sister saved over my save file a few years ago. I was about to face The Boss.

 

[rhandino]

Etrian Odyssey had them, It was maddening in Untold because there are 2 modes (Story & Classic) and you had to commit to one of them to use it. Thank god they added more in Untold 2.

Dragon Quest IX was also like this and was maddening when my brother wanted to play it, had to erase my data for him (But it was worth it, he loves it)

And the one that agravated me the most was Dragon;s Dogma. Ugh. My save always ALWAYS corrupt when I try to do the mission to rescue

Spoiler

, I lost 100's of hours the first time and a little less then next time. Ugh

 

[Funyarinpa]

Virtues Last Reward on 3ds. The Vita version had two save slots lol.

Ding ding ding

 

[dab0ne]

The first gears of war. I'm pretty sure when that game came out You could only have one save and if You started a coop campaign it over wrote your single player progress and vice versa.

 

[Jacqli]

Dragon's Dogma. smh

Couldn't save before an encounter or switch characters. No second character without deleting your old one. Why?

God, this one hurt so much once I found it. I mean, the game has an awesome character editor and interesting combat classes and yet they decided that you must erase the character if you want to try any of that out. And, on top of that, this decision remained in the newer version.

You can always create new accounts or use USB stick to transfer your data, but agh it could have been much simpler.

 

[TheGamingBox]

The first gears of war. I'm pretty sure when that game came out You could only have one save and if You started a coop campaign it over wrote your single player progress and vice versa.

is there mission select like in the halo games?

 

[dab0ne]

is there mission select like in the halo games?

Oh I don't remember it's been so long but I want to say no just because of how much this pissed me off at the time lol.

 

[PreFire]

AFAIK TPP is like this too.

 

[Silent Chief]

In the Souls game having multiple saves would defeat everything.

It's bad enough that people use USB/Cloud saves to unlock the different endings without playing game++.

In Far Cry 4, you are missing nothing. There's no real differences between playing the moralist or the drug lord. You play whatever makes you feel good and the NPCs will patronize you accordingly.

Having multiple slots saves on gameboy game has always been worthless to me. My kids/grandkids always managed to override my save anyway. On PS1&2, I always used my own memory card.

Having multiple slots is required on games with major bugs like Elder's scrolls, Fallout, etc.

 

[Eblo]

Antichamber, I do believe. But it's worth it to erase that save and play the game in a totally new way.

 

[struggler_guts]

So pissed when I saw until dawn did this. I was going to have a save for group play, girlfriend, and then myself. Buuuut no.

 

[kamineko]

Until Dawn--the thread

OT: I don't like it either, TC

 

[Booshka]

Dead Rising was super stringent, one save locked to your xbox profile. So you couldn't reload, and couldn't start a new character unless you got on another profile. Game is meant to be played over and over, and you could restart story and keep your player progression, but still, pretty insane.

I think it makes the game better though, save scumming and save safety nets ruin a lot of games. So long as the game is designed well enough that you can recover from mistakes and still progress, then I don't see the need for satiating some players' perfectionist OCD.

More save slots for new playthroughs and characters is always welcome, but I don't have a problem with restricted save files.

 

[chrisPjelly]

Honestly, why isn't this something that's already dead? Strategic reasons (i.e. Pokemon trading) for doing so are justified, but is there some technical/hardware issue preventing SINGLE GODDAMN PLAYER experiences from having more then one save file!? It just comes across as arbitrary, and if Bethesda can get away of allowing multiple save files in the Gigabytes, then what's holding back developers from letting people experiment with their game saves?

 

[kiuo]

Im experiencing this with sword art: re hollow fragment. It also gets pretty annoying with how it auto saves every new zone i enter. Not to mention that's the only way to save.

Also the only way i found to get to the main title screen besides exiting the game is to go into your room to be able to log out which is super annoying.

 

[Mephala]

More games need a feature like the World Tarot from Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together.

It basically allows you to jump between anchor points at any moment once you beat the main game. Anchor points are those shields you see above the time line.

The game has 4 chapters not including the epilogue chapters. There are 3 "routes" that are Lawful/Chaotic/Neutral. Chapter 1 and 4 remains mostly the same while Chapter 2 and 3 are quite different depending on the route you take. Each route has their own scenes and characters to unlock/save. This system allows you to go back and fix mistakes or just mess around and see what different choices do.