Quicksaving

: "Quicksave" redirects here. For the defunct UK-based chain of food stores, see Kwik Save."Quicksaving is the term used for saving the player's progress in a computer game by pressing a single key on the keyboard. Normally, to save progress the player must reach a designated point in a level (checkpoint), or if saving is permitted elsewhere it is usually achieved through the use of a menu. In games that allow quicksaving, one can save progress with a simple keystroke, bypassing the menus or checkpoints.

Some people consider the use of quicksave in a game to be a form of cheating since it allows the player to incrementally "inch" through a difficult level regardless of skill. Others see the omission of quicksave as a fatal flaw in a game, believing that the player should have control as to when the game is saved. A good balance can be achieved if a game's difficulty level is set so that quicksave is not required but to still provide the facility for those players that wish to make use of it. Some games (e.g. Painkiller) exclude quicksave capability from the highest difficulty-level(s).

Quicksaving is usually a feature found in PC games and is often not present in console games. One reason for this is hardware limitation: because a quicksave must contain information about the entire level state, rather than minor statistics such as player health and inventory, it can require significantly more memory to store the information (a quicksave for "Doom 3" is approximately 10 megabytes in size, while a corresponding save game for any PlayStation game only occupies a few kilobytes). Half-Life for the PS2 gets around this by saving the quicksaves directly to the console's memory; if the game is left for any reason without going into a menu and saving properly, the quicksave is lost. In The Orange Box, which when for the PlayStation 3 contains no autosave function, the player is merely reminded to quicksave at important checkpoints.

An alternative meaning of "quicksave" is a specific limited method of saving a game. When the game is saved, it terminates thereafter and when restored, the save file is deleted so that it cannot be used to cheat by doing-over parts of the game.