Gaming is dead/Long live gaming.

[Pete for President]

I don't agree that auto saving has to make games 'easier'. In fact, it allows the developer to create a much more difficult encounter.

Lets say you want it to take 1 hour to get past a certain part of your game. The old way would make you do 10 minutes per try because you have to re-do everything to get to that point. If you auto-save right before you can do one attempt every minute, allowing you to tune it difficult enough to require 60 attempts to complete instead of 6. In theory it allows you to make it 10x more difficult.

Unfortunately whenever a game developer wishes to capitalize on the 'hard game' market niche they do so by making the game moderately more difficult and adding a lot of repetition to pad every attempt.

I guess a good example of what I am talking about would be 'Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?' You start the game with 1000 lives and there is a checkpoint like every 30 seconds. It is also exceedingly difficult.

I think he means easier in the sense that you can go haphazardly through the game, knowing you are only losing a few seconds or minutes at most of your time if you make a wrong move. You have to think less about every move you make, and that makes it easier.

Both are valid points, and both would suit different types of games I think.

I remember a few moments in Vagrant Story where I was on the edge of my seat nearly begging for a save point in the next room. Thrilling indeed.