One of my biggest gripes with From Soft games haha

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.

Did you read the post? The problem at hand is not being prepared to turn off a gd game. It’s the fact that there are not one but multiple steps to take in order to fully back out of the game and it’s rather frustrating/annoying especially when you’re in a rush or caught in a bind. For example, Microsoft flight simulator the exception of Ctrl alt delete you cannot successfully exit the game until you back out of the session your in and exit to the main menu first, which then allows you to exit to the desktop. It shouldn’t require multiple steps, because believe it or not these games take time to load, said menus, and that’s the problem. If I could exit to the main menu in under five seconds, and then click a button and exit the game with another few seconds it wouldn’t matter, but these games requiring you to go to menu after menu after menu, which takes time is a little ridiculous.

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.

Yeah I read the posts that's why I ended my comment the way I did, since it didn't made much sense. And If you are that much in a hurry, Alt+f4 out.

Even your case is not the norm, most games let you either exit directly or right in the home menu, which doesn't take time to load in pretty much every game. If you take a specific game to validate your argument, that doesn't make your argument more valid but make you look nitpicky and manipulative.

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

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 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

It takes too much effort and time to quit.

This works? TIL

Let me introduce you to the xbox and quick resume.

Just save first lol

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.

Works on pc too, just pause, tab out and put it to sleep

While that sounds like a good description of what happens when you close a game, it doesn't account for why you can't have a single button from the pause menu which does all that for you in one fell swoop.

Strangely, some do not

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.

Talk about such a non-issue

Memory. How many objects do you think are rendered in every frame? Given most frames fill in under 20ms, yeah, that's a lot. Serializable data classes have to get moved to RAM before that occurs. Since most modern OS', outside of Linux, have no swap buffers, your memory is already clogged with the games data. Long save on quit, or go through the menus. Your call. We ditched long load screens in favor of efficiency.

its a windows shortcut so unless you disabled it, it works on all games

Looking at you, Rocket League 👀

console ports....

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”

And I'm saying fine take the 2 seconds to close properly, rather than make me manually wait through the studio logo and menu animations before I can hit exit for a third time

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

[removed]

It doesn’t

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.

Yeah, fuck Checkpoints. Those are usually a sign that the devs did not have the resources to implement a proper save system.

>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.

then you have it disabled either on your keyboard or windows itself

Then go to task manager (alt+ctrl+del) select the gane and press "end task". Note, the game won't save beforehand so you need to save beforehand.

I mean it would be black for the section of the logo and such. A few games do it that way actually but I always think they are busted when they hang on a black screen for over ten seconds when the rest of it doesn't have much to any loading.

No there are literally some games that won't let you get out with an ALT+F4, CS:GO does this to me for example.

then you can just alt+tab, ctrl+shift+esc or ctrl+alt+del

F5 / Alt-F4

I was thinking of Alien Isolation when I read the title. Some games have specific save places as a point of purpose and risk, which can also help in those games avoid a potential soft-lock by saving right next to the big bad that kills one instantly.

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.

Super Alt-F4 is your friend! Ctrl-Alt-F4 once you install it.

Ok, now I see what you're saying. You don't want to go through the title and splash screens again. Well, that is an engine thing. Think Unity splash screens. You don't have the option to avoid those because it's free. For some developers, it's a loading system. It's what loads all of the main menu UI. Again, you're missing the issue that I'm making you aware of. Memory makes that constraint. Currently. Unless we get a new OS or devs start switching to Linux, it's not going to happen.

If that seems like a problem, you could open an empty map and exit.

And on consoles, I don't understand what you're saying about TRCs. On consoles, the option to exit does not exist.

Lol no, there are some games where the developer coded it so that the alt f4 shortcut doesn’t close the game.

The way games work doesn't change. It's hardware. Like I've said over and over. Manufacturers set these limitations. Until you can produce a FOSS game system, you cannot realistically expect us to make this happen.

ctr + shift + esc opens task manager directly

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.

Some games yea

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.

In euro truck simulator2 you can alt f4 and it will save you location and cargo and everything..

That doesn’t explain why some games force you to quit out to the main menu first and then only from the main menu allows you to quit to desktop. This is what OP is mostly complaining about.

For example:

1. Pause game
2. From pause menu click “Quit”
3. Game does whatever it needs to do. Either saving or prompting the user about losing progress etc.
4. Game returns you to the main menu
5. Finally from here you can “Exit to desktop”

OP (rightly) has a problem with games that make you do steps 4 & 5 instead of just closing out after step 3.

It’s a design decision. The player has to have some way to get back to the main menu. I personally like when a game has the option to quit to main and quit to desktop. However that’s not always possible. Sometime you run into UI constraints and don’t have space for both options.

Honestly a big part of it is scope though. It’s such a small non impactful feature, that most games put it in their backlog and never get around to it because more important stuff usually takes priority.

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

The ones that make you restart the game before you can quit are infuriating.