To bad oldbroad,but once they put more auto saves in the game. You can wonder around for a hour or two and get nothing done and when you quit the game and start up again you will start at the beginning with nothing accomplished. That's what happened to me. It's got beautiful graphics. The game plays real smooth.
I wish you could save anytime but you can't.
Richard

Oh, no. I absolutely HATE auto saving without the option to save when you want to. When will these game developers LEARN! Oh, well. I am still looking forward to the game. It's an overnight download for me, so hopefully I'll have it some time tomorrow.

This is my OPINION only Draclvr. I think Amazon does not want to be stuck with discs they cannot sell and only place their orders based on how many pre-orders they get. The reason I say this is because the last several times I pre-ordered discs, I received them but they were immediately "out of stock" and unavailable on the same day they were coming out/supposed to be ready to ship. This is a little different, but maybe they didn't get enough pre-orders or maybe it is because of the bugs (that would be a good thing - to not send discs that you know are buggy).

kjos - I also do not like not being able to save when I want to. I would not be starting over too many times if that happened to me. I hope you can figure out what you need to do to get the gave to save!

I just downloaded my copy from GOG and burned it to disk - but I'm rather disappointed to hear it's an "auto save only" game !!

[I'm another who really dislikes that format.]

So it doesn't auto save when you "quit" ???? Aggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Better be a good game in every other respect then !!

It's a good game but for the auto saves.Auto save works after you have completed something like solved a murder .I played for about 2 hrs and thought I had solved the murder. When the save comes on white dots flash in the bottom right hand corner. I didn't see any for me but I thought I would give it a shot. Quit the game started it again back to the beginning lost everything I had done. The graphics are wonderful You can go almost anywhere. Mad let me know what you think of the game.This is what I read on Steam
From a developer post on steam:
How do I save the game?
The auto-save happens after you complete a bigger event like solve a murder scene or experience ...[...]. When the auto-save happens, three animated dots appear in the lower right corner. With the first update, we will be changing this to something maybe a bit less immersive, but much clearer (like "Saving...").
and
Please bear in mind we are a fairly small (eight people) team with literally one programmer. Of course we will try to fix every single bug possible, and as soon as humanly possible, but feature requests like an option for manual save might be outside of our reach.

Richard

Thanks very much for that, kjos

[I wonder if just an "extra" auto save on quitting might be a possible "upgrade" we could hope for ??]

I won't be playing the game for a while yet, I have too many games on the go already !! But I'll be checking back here regularly to read player opinions

The game is extremely beautiful, just stunning - tho just a little bit choppy - micro lag on movement on my computer. The auto save is extremely irritating. I wandered around for a couple of hours before leaving the game. The next time I played past the area of the 'first case' and wandered through the village for a while. Again, life away from the pc interrupted me, and I had to start over from the beginning, as I hadn't solved the first case. After a few hours, the forward movement became extremely slow, as my laptop was getting quite 'warm'. I finally solved the first case after watching a you tube video and finally understood about the "click and hold" to see visions to progress further. Without any helpful explanations, there's quite a bit of trial and error. But I'm still enjoying this immensely when I get past the irritation of not being able to save when leaving the game. I'm looking forward to playing more when time allows a full exploration of each case.

Timo, I moved you to glitches where they can answer you.

Ana

I love "almost" everything about this game. Obviously the graphics - I haven't seen anything this beautiful since The Witcher. I like that you can go anywhere and the navigation is completely intuitive. No getting stuck or lost because of the limitations of point and click. I like the minimal interruption of your gameplay with mountains of dialogue and getting stuck in the game because you happened to click on the wrong dialogue choice. The sound track is perfect for the rather lonely and disturbing atmosphere. It's not hard, but it's far from easy either - at least for me who is NOT a very good puzzler. (I am a closet fan of sliders, however!). They say it's a short game, but it probably won't be for me because I have so little time to play for very long at one time - tomatoes are winding down, but now I'm buried under buckets and buckets of chilies and peppers.

WHICH brings me to this utterly dreadful decision to use infrequent auto-saves. I'm having to play parts of it over and over because I have to quit before I reach an auto-save after solving a murder or a puzzle. Last night after I got back from the Ranch at 11:00, I wanted to play until I got sleepy. Well, when I did, I still hadn't gotten to an auto-save and although I hated to, I used a walkthrough and rushed through the next part so I could get to the auto-save. It totally ruined the efforts of the developers to make the game completely immersive. What a dreadful decision on their part to not take the time to program manual saves or at least like Mad says an auto-save upon exiting the game.

Your point Drac is exactly why I haven't started yet. I don't have the luxury of long game playing times and I don't think they were thinking when they designed it that way. I'll get to it but I wish they would patch it.

I haven't started it yet either for the same reason .... Not being able to play as when and when I prefer.

I asked on the Glitches Board about the possibility of a patch, even just to provide an auto save on quitting play, but from what Jenny100 replied it doesn't look as though one is likely to be provided

GOG had a large update for this game, over 200MB. I couldn't find any release notes so I loaded my saved game. Walked around a bit, didn't really notice anything different. When I went to quit the game autosaved. I haven't been able to try it again, I'm at work, but they may have added a save on exit.

I was ready to shelve this game because of the save situation, but if they rectified the saving I'm going to have to start exploring the country side again.

Thanks for that info, unowen. That would be a big help with the save problem. Here's hoping.

There is a very long list on steam for the patch but this is what it says about saves:

Added the option to choose the way the save notification is displayed.
steam cloud saves officially launched

I tried the game today and played about two hrs. and quit and restarted it and came back to the same place I had started two hrs ago. I added the update a while ago. I don't think I will be playing it for a while but If I have all day with nothing else to do. I bought it from GOG.
Richard

I've had more time to play, home from work now, and unfortunately it seems the game does not same on exit. Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up.

Shelving the game (virtually) until another patch is released. Hope springs eternal....

That's too bad. I was hoping.

Ana

I posted Stiler's tip for how and where to save ***over in Glitches***.
It's more like a checkpoint system than a real save system, but knowing what the checkpoints are might help.

Thanks Jenny!

That's great, Jenny!

Thank you, Jenny100 !! Any bit of help is appreciated

I see GOG has a new update 3. I was just in there site and saw it. 372.3 MB
Richard

Thank you, Richard. I will go check it out right now...

Downloading the newest update from GOG now. Hope it makes a difference in the saving. I'm also playing and loving Ether One....but I can't get past a certain point in the game because of inventory disappearing. So I can't really play either one right now until there is some solution. I sent an email with my saved game to Whitepaper Games,(who made Ether One) about my problem and they said they will get back to me about it. Meanwhile, I have 2 great games that I can't continue to play.....sigh.

The update 3 is the one I did yesterday from Steam. It has the save descriptions from my earlier post.