Alt-F4

The worst are the ones that even disable alt+f4.

I've saved. Or I don't care if I saved. Let me quit the damned game without opening task manager or navigating menus.

Game dev here. There are many reason why games don’t just shut down with a click of a button. The main thing preventing them from doing that is you the player. Games typically have either pre determined points at which they save, or a set of constraints that must be met to allow a save to happen. If game allows you to quit all at once you got two options.

1. Discard any progress made after the last save and quit. This will leave some players mad and may even prevent them from picking up the game again.

2. Save right then and there, then quit. Depending on the game, this might not even be possible. If it is, there exists situations in which the players save may have put them in a set of unwinable conditions, right before a loss. Also a big problem.

The solution is to warn the player. Because at the end of the day, it’s an extra 15 seconds to 1 minutes to avoid a lot of headaches.

There are also certification constraints set by the platforms. Some of these involve a mandatory warning to a player if an action could result in loss of progress.

So it’s not as simple as “dumb devs go make it better it’s easy”

Here's the game development side of it. Not every game handles memory the same. Closing a game while it's running, in theory, is supposed to free all of your memory back up. This is not always the case. By going through the menus, it's freeing up the memory by destructing (removing) the objects in the game. Some games handle them in certain menus. Meaning, if you quit, to the main menu first, the game will destruct all of the objects in the world. When you quit the main menu to the desktop, it will destruct all of the UI and any remaining used memory blocks. Now you have whatever RAM the game used, back. You usually notice this when you use alt+f4 causing system hangups for a second or two.

As for the saving part, again, this is a memory constraint. Most games use a checkpoint type system. In open world games, there is typically a draw distance around the player with chunk loading points scattered around the map. As you travel, every now and again it makes a quick save by distance or at a chunk point. On the flip side, manual saves stutter the game because it's stopping everything to save before continuing. The more RAM you have (and higher core count CPU), the less stutter you get. Older hardware is notorious for this. In mmos, it's a clock based sync with the server.

So, yes, you're right it's not hard. The hardware itself makes it that way.

Would be all fine and dandy until that one time you mess up big time and ragequit, only to find your progress has been saved

One of my biggest gripes with From Soft games haha

I do love that feature on Xbox. Save game, use the controller to shut down. Turn it on and the game state is ready to go where I left it. Hopefully as the architecture behind these things advances we can see that for PC games as well.

Ever wondered why games are (used to be) like that?

One thing consoles are good for... I just tap the main power button and go to bed and when I turn it on again it's right in the same state

Let me introduce you to the xbox and quick resume.

Talk about such a non-issue

You're assuming that you always want to save. It's possible that the reason someone is quitting is because there's been some type of issue and the player may not want to save the game as is. If you're going to automatically save, then you better save to another save file so that a previous save can always be loaded. You wouldn't want your only save to be of an unstable gamestate.

All the big games do now is make the cheapest games in history, botch the launch if they can and spend all the money on monetizing it.

There are too many games that won't let you quit even from the main menu. You have to use stronger measures, lol.

I'm just going to point out that there is no one size fits all approach to any facet of game dev. There are always outliers and individual use cases. What your arguing would not work with every project.

console ports....

This is why I liked cyberpunk and hate far cry 6s save system

Depends on the type of save this game implements: in some games, saves are only possible on checkpoints rather than anywhere in the game (and it is a conscious design decision), in such cases it is simply impossible to save if you're currently in the area where saving is disabled.

That said, the whole (quit to main menu - watch all the intros - quit to desktop) thing has to go, I'll give you that. I think it's mostly a console thing that slid into PC gaming via console ports, and they really should just get rid of it.

>Rant: All single player games should have an easy way to quit to desktop and save as-is. Too many games require exiting to main menu and then quitting from there..-- I've been saying this for years, modern games should come with a save anywhere feature, inside a dungeon, mid-mission, mid boss battle etc. With nowadays' processing power & graphical capabilities, it shouldn't be difficult.

F5 / Alt-F4

If you only have a set time you are allowed to play, determine the time left once you are able to save to decide whether you can keep playing or should stop since you most likely can't save in time.

That being said, pretty much every single player game for the last generation has either the ability to save whenever you want or automatically saves additionally to your manual saves. And no, just save because you quit to the Homescreen is not hard but also not desired since people don't want to save, if they wanted to, they would have but since some are forgetting stuff, the game gives a reminder.

So I seriously don't get what your problem is.