Single Player Games and Their lack of Save Files

In recent years, I have seen something happening to a large amount of the single players games that have been released. They have a lack of multiple save files. 

For those that do not know what save files are for in games, I’ll explain. Save files are a function use in all games and they are much more important to single player games. Save files allow us to save our progress whenever we are in the game. This allows us to come back to a certain section of the game whenever we choose.

Something that I have noticed in a lot of games as of late is that let’s say you finish a great game and you want to play through that game again but you don’t want to lose all the cool stuff you did in the first run of the game. What games normally would have is more than one save file for a whole new run of the same game. This way you could keep the first run of the game that you beat but then start a whole new one on a second save file.

Games like Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Marvel’s Spider-Man are great examples of games having more than one save file. Now, a trend I have watch happen over the years is that a lot of single player games only have one save file to be able to enjoy their games. Ubisoft games in particular being the biggest offender of this.

Games like Watch Dogs 1 and 2, Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal, and Far Cry 5 all have only one save file. The list of games like this goes on and on. It amazes me that games with such awesome stories and large open worlds would only allow you to keep one save file at a time and lose all the work you put into the game.

A reason for this could be that gamers simply don’t stick around for the whole game anymore. It’s been stated that gamers only play a single player game through until about the half way mark and then get bored and move on.

So I have reason to believe that game devs simply started to not add these extra save files to their games which is understandable; However, I believe that there are a lot more of us that want to play through a great game more than once to see all that the story has to offer again.

What’s frustrating is that you don’t want to lose all your progress in your game just to play the story one more time. Could you imagine if you wanted play to through all of Skyrim again but lost all of your first save. That would be hundreds of hours lost in the blink of eye.

No one is really sure why we are losing the ability to have multiple save files and it probably is more technical in than I think. The addition of this feature to more games would allow us to enjoy the game again and again to really get our money’s worth.

We are starting to see that more games are bringing this feature back, Marvel’s Spider-Man being one of them and Just Cause 4. Whose prior game, Just Cause 3, did not have more than one save file.

Perhaps the lack of save files is something that will change with time and hopefully devs will see that we want to play through their awesome games more than once. Not by losing our progress in the process.

Currently playing: Celeste