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Folks, I would like to talk about the user experience (UX) of saving and quitting in videogames, because 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 game developers.

Usually when a player tries to quit a game, they are warned they may lose unsaved progress. This is important, as you do not want someone to come back to a game and have to redo all their previous gameplay. Games are fun, but losing progress is very frustrating!

From: Marvel’s Midnight Suns

However, it is good to question if that message makes sense at face value. Why are the only options cancel and confirm? Why is there not a ‘Save and Quit’ option? Many games solve the problem of saving and quitting by having that as one singular option. Because then you always save when quitting. Players then never worry about losing progress!

From: Celeste

From: Into the Breach

(You can still have a regular quit next to that, that then displays a warning. This is useful if you want players to be able to experiment, try weird things out, and then quit without saving.)

From: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Though this concept is not always applied. The strangest save & quit etiquette can be found in games that allow you to manually save, and then, while never leaving that same 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? Will I have to replay that whole boss fight? Will I have to redo hours of play?

The game prompting you that you will lose unsaved progress creates that 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 pause menu, so what could have progressed?

So now the player leaves the game not thinking "Yeah, I did some great progress today!" but instead leaves the game thinking "Oh no, I hope I didn’t just lose hours of progress..." The player had an amazing time, enjoyed great characters, everything looked awesome, and it was ruined by a single piece of text on a small bit of the UI, as it implies the game is lying to you. Entirely going against your own senses.

You may even save over your already existing save, or create another duplicate save. Just to be safe. You may make hundreds over time just to be sure! If you are a game developer yourself, it is like hitting Ctrl+S a whole bunch of times before you leave any DCC software, like Photoshop, Maya, Blender, as you are afraid you may lose your hard work. You only have to lose your hard work once, just once, and your faith is entirely shattered for years, and so you overcompensate with saving just to be sure. I think all of us have, at one time, been hit with losing a lot of work.

It is such a shame that a small Save & Quit dialog can create that feeling. Especially with such a fun game as Marvel’s Midnight Suns! The gameplay is great and the dialogue of the characters is so fun. It is great to play it for hours on end, but to then be afraid of losing all of that only because of some text. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is of course not the only game to do this: There are many games that display the ‘Unsaved progress’ UI in a way that is confusing, and I’m just using Marvel’s Midnight Suns because it is a recent game that I enjoyed a lot.

There are some guesses we can make as to why it is done in this way. Perhaps the game does not actually pause when the main menu is brought up, and so technically there may be progress happening that you may miss out on when quitting? Though in the case of a few milliseconds between saving and quitting, that does not seem necessary to warn about.

So, ‘Save and Quit’ as a single button resolves that problem, but what if the player cannot save by their own action, and the game only has automatic checkpoints? In that case all progress from that previous checkpoint onward will be lost, and they have to be warned, right?

From: Battletoads

But how much progress will I lose? How much gold, XP, or jiggies will I lose if I quit now? Do we have to account for all of those metrics when a player quits the game? Won’t that be a lot of work to keep track of, and to check on what the player will lose since that last checkpoint?

No. That’s a solved problem too! By showing the amount of time the player will lose, it’s clear. Showing the amount of time gives the player enough of an idea of whether they can quit safely or not.

They may think "How much progress will I lose? Oh just 7 seconds, that’s alright."

From: Lost in Play

From: Bugsnax

From: Pentiment

Though there are also some stranger versions of this that I have seen. For example in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) there are checkpoints, and in the bottom left of the pause menu there is a date and time of when it last automatically saved.

From: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

But if you were to then quit, it only says you will lose all progress since the last checkpoint. With no indication of time, and the time in the bottom left getting obscured in darkness.

From: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

So that implementation feels a bit strange. Though this does not mean you always have to have some kind of warning. It is possible to get away with not having a warning at all, especially if it is a game in which folks are used to saving all the time anyway. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 does not warn you about losing progress at all. It only asks you if you are sure about quitting. No mention of losing anything!

From: Baldur’s Gate 3

Conclusion

There are so many ways to do the same thing, and even with something as seemingly simple as quitting 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, and then you also have to think about what the user will see in the end. These things are a lot of effort. It is important to think about them though, as if you can pet the cat, that’s great, but can the player also save the game without having to worry they will lose out on their progress of petting cats?

Lastly, I have a guess as to why this is not always caught before ship: Maybe because it is hard to catch this issue in playtesting because those playtest players know their progress will be reset. If the playtest is held in a daily playtest lab, then players expect they will lose their progress. 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.

Thank you for reading! Got thoughts about this? Feel free to let me know, especially if you have seen any other great way of doing this. If you enjoyed this post, you can find my talks here, and my other posts here. You can also subscribe below to get updates when a new post is published.

Lastly, big thanks to the amazing Game UI Database for having so many great game UI screenshots easily accessible! You can find those at: https://www.gameuidatabase.com/