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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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Skyrim has a feature known as "autosave". It means the app saves your game automatically when certain conditions are met. It's generally pointless and time-consuming which is why I have it turned off except in one situation – "Save on Character Menu". Since character creation can be very tedious work, I'm letting the app save my game every 10 minutes, just so I won't lose an awful lot of work should something happen.
For some reason, that setting also causes my game being saved when idle. That is, I want to take a break without exiting the app, so I open the console to pause the game events and time, and use Alt+Tab to leave the game window, letting the app sit. When I feel like continuing the game, I just click on the game tab in my taskbar and continue. The thing is, when I do, I notice with some annoyance that the game freezes. I wonder what the hell happened, and then I notice the text "Autosaving" in the upper left corner. After a few seconds, the game continues to work as normal. Meaning, the game was autosaved just after I returned to continue playing.
Of course I know I could just turn autosaving off. The sole purpose of this article is to draw your attention to the bafflingly, bewilderingly stupid way Bethesda programmers have designed the Autosave feature.
What is the purpose of Autosave in the first place? To protect the player from losing a lot of game progress should something extraordinary (such as a powercut) happen.
That's why it's a good idea to have the game autosaved while idle, because while the app is idle, saving causes no inconvenience to the user. What is grotesquely irrational, to not say sheer madness, is that the Skyrim Autosave is triggered shortly after the app ceases to be idle.
Suppose you leave the game for an hour. If a powercut would happen during that hour, you would lose your progress after the last save, as there is no autosave being made. Only when you return to continue playing, you see your game frozen for 5 or 10 seconds, because now, all of a sudden, the app feels it has to save your game.
During the hour you were away, the app would have had plenty of time to make a hundred autosaves. But it wouldn't make even one. It waited idly until you returned and needed the processor at full power for the game to react promptly to your actions – and then the app briefly prevents you from enjoying your game by making an autosave which is obviously unnecessary because you are back at the computer and can save the game yourself if necessary. Bethesda makes Skyrim behave like a child who demands to use the toilet shortly after you have lied down in the bathtub and closed your eyes to enjoy your nice warm bath.
The Autosave menu lets you choose to have your game saved after 10 minutes. Why then isn't it saved even once when you leave the game for hours, and is saved as if to deliberately irritate you a few moments after you want to continue to play?
I mean, how difficult can it be to program the app to make an autosave after having been idle for 5 or 10 minutes? What kind of an idiot can come to the idea of letting the app sit idly and then make an autosave at the precise moment when it's no longer needed? Who would program such manifest nonsense? I just can't imagine how anybody in the world can be so stupid.
Neither can I understand how it's possible that such a crackbrain gets hired to create commercial software.
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