On top of that, Braid is a puzzle game, which is far more resistant to the bad parts of save-anywhere compared to reflex-based or skill-based games are.

I suppose that's what I'd really get at, although I admit I didn't make it clear at all – take one of the genres that's really hurt by save-anywhere (a good FPS, for example) and then try to come up with something fun you can do with it. Puzzle games were never substantially hurt by it in the first place, so leaving it in wouldn't be much a problem.

I have a tendency to make generalizations that really only apply to one genre of game and I should seriously stop doing that ;)

In case you haven't played it, or in case you have but haven't made the connection between Braid and save-anywhere:

Braid is a game that *automatically* saves for you every single game second, so you don't worry about saving or loading. It takes save-loading to its logical extreme. What you really get when you do this is the ability to rewind time; Braid has a rewind-time button. In the later levels it goes on to layer even more bizarre time mechanics, but the basic idea is the perfect answer to "What game mechanic does save-anywhere actually allow?"

It's not the first such game either. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time also allows some rewinding, but it's not infinite or free like in Braid, so the infinite-auto-saving is a bit more obfuscated.

@Michael: You're actually describing Pokemon's save system. Of course, they punish you by having you lose money when you lose. But you retain everything else. This works excellently, IMO, for the type of game it is.

@Zorba: Also, regarding your last idea, it could work, but realize that sometimes people just don't have time to play something for an extended period of time. The "pause slot" could work here, perhaps.

I've had an idea for a while that I may never get to make, but the basic idea is that it's a semi-random mission-like first-person-shooter. You say "I want to play" and you're given a 30m-to-1h-long adventure, but without knowing the details. You can't plan for ambushes because you'll never know where the ambush is coming from, if there even is one. The goal is to beat the adventure, but even if you fail, you're given something you can use to get stronger for the next attempt. (And you have some control over difficulty.)

And, of course, there is absolutely no way to save in the middle of an adventure. You start, you're in it until the end.

I think it could be marvelously suspenseful.

While I agree that a save anywhere system has significant negative sides, I feel that poorly placed save points can be far more detrimental to gameplay than a simple save anywhere system. If a game developer is not willing to put in the effort of thoroughly testing and tweaking the save points, they simply shouldn't bother and go for a save anywhere system. At least that way it's up to the player how much gameplay is hurt.

I'd like to point out two games with their own approach:

Bioshock (and System Shock 1 & 2 before it) had a standard save anywhere system, but combined it with respawn points. The result was that although getting killed still sucked, it didn't result in a game over scenario. That took away the pressure and made people forget about saving (it also made the game too easy for those players which didn't need respawn points, but that's another discussion and can be handled through extra difficulty levels).

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time used an auto-save system, but combined it with a rewind system. Failing a jump merely meant you wound back time and tried again. No problems. It made sure you couldn't make stupid mistakes and focused the pressure on the actual difficult parts.

Nothing's more frustrating than having finally survived a large fight, only to misjudge a rediculously easy jump and plummet to your death right before you hit the save point.

The real issue is not how to let players save, but why they want to. I say it's about pressure: if you're low on health and only have three bullets left and think: "Hmm… door. Most likely there's nothing but a big pile of ammo behind it, but there MIGHT also be an enemy", you WILL save.

Tricks like Bioshock and Prince of Persia used take away this pressure for the player. While they both have their downsides, they do provide a way out of difficult situations other than saving. They might make a game easier, but, especially in the case of Bioshock, they also make sure the player doesn't concern himself too much with save games.

Players worried about saves (whether its because they're constantly doing it or because they're hating the fact that they can't do it when they want to) signal a lack of suspension of disbelief. That's always bad.

One final comment: a game should be fun. Every single bit of it should be fun, no matter how often you repeat it. If a player's thinking: "I'd better save, I don't want to play that last bit again" it should be because they want to know where the story or gameplay will take them. Not because they found it frustratingly difficult and genuinely don't want to repeat that experience.

To summarize: the best way of handling saves is by making players forget to do it.

I definitely agree that making the game harder after a loss is a terrible idea. That just makes the player lose again. That does not achieve anything. Ratchet and Clank rigged things so that you kept all the experience and money you'd gathered, thus letting you slowly level up and get more powerful despite failure. Brutal Legend just let you go somewhere else and do something else. But Halo just tossed you back into the fray, and your personal skills improving was the only thing that made it easier.

'Course, now I'm also playing Borderlands, which deducts some money from you but leaves all your experience alone and even lets you run back and continue the fight from whatever amount of HP the monster had when he killed you.

Single players, incidentally, aren't predictable, but large groups of players are reasonably predictable in this sense, and this is just what players do. Enough of them, at least, to severely cut into your userbase.

Regarding RPGs, typically, death means loading a previous save.. thereby losing all progress made since then. Perhaps a good compromise would be a system wherein you're sent back to the last save point (whether you had used it or not) and retain items, experience, gold, whatever that had been gained. In this way, you lose progress in the game but retain the progress of your characters, and a system would develop where it would get easier each time — not just because you're more familiar with it but also because your characters are slowly getting stronger.

Come to think of it, your earlier "rts" was much like this (I really enjoyed messing with that game's mechanics).

Many games do work this way, or close to it. MMOs particularly. Perhaps more should. Resets are never fun.