Folks, we need to talk about the user experience (UX) of saving and quitting in videogames
The player can have had a wonderful time, but end up walking away frustrated and confused, despite the game itself being a brilliant piece of hard work by hundreds of developers.
Usually when a player tries to quit a game, they are warned they may lose unsaved progress. This is important, as you don't want someone to come back to a game and then have to redo all their previous gameplay. Games are fun, but losing progress is very frustrating!
However, it is good to question if that UI makes sense at face value. Why are the only options cancel and confirm? Why isn't there a 'Save and Quit' option? Many games solve the problem by doing that. Because then you always save when quitting. Never worry about losing progress!
However the worst offenders by far are the games that allow you to manually save, and then, while never even leaving the menu, you click on the quit button, and it warns you that you will lose unsaved progress.
What just happened? What progress am I losing? Did it not save?
The game prompting you that you will lose unsaved progress creates this whirlwind of questions. Is the game bugging out? Did I do something wrong? Did it not save all progress, and is there a different way to save? I didn't leave the menu, so what could have progressed?
So now the player leaves the game not thinking "Yeah, I did some great progress today!" but instead is leaving the game going "Oh no, I hope I didn't just lose hours of progress..." You had an amazing time, great characters, everything looks good, and it was ruined by a dialogue
You may even save over your already existing save, or create another save. Hundreds over time! If you're a game developer, it's like hitting Ctrl+S a whole bunch of times before you leave any DCC. Your faith is entirely shattered in the tool, and so you overcompensate to be sure
(Also, I really like Marvel's Midnight Suns. The gameplay is great, the free weekend is a good chance to try it, and the dialogue is fun for all the characters. There are many games that do the 'Unsaved progress' UI in a bad way, and I'm just using this game as a most recent example.)
So, 'Save and Quit' resolves that problem, but what if the player cannot save themselves and the game only has checkpoints? In that case all progress from that previous checkpoint onward will be lost, and they have to be warned.
That's a solved problem too! By showing the amount of time the player will lose. That gives the player enough of an idea of whether they can quit safely or not. "How much progress will I lose? Oh just 7 seconds, that's alright."
So even with something as seemingly simple as leaving a game, the user experience has to be taken into account. UX is holistic. The player could have had a fantastic experience, but then leave worrying about whether anything they did actually mattered. Which is such a shame!
Save systems are usually complicated, unruly, and sources of endless bugs when building them, but you also have to think about what the user will see in the end. Cause if you can pet the cat, that's great, but can the player also save the game without having to worry?
A guess: It's hard to catch this issue in playtesting because those playtest players know their progress will be reset. So their progress doesn't matter as much then, until the final game is in their hands at which point they suddenly really need their progress to be safe.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Got thoughts about this? Feel free to let me know, especially if you have seen any other great way of doing this.
Lastly, big thanks to the amazing Game UI Database for having all these screenshots easily accessible! https://www.gameuidatabase.com/
