For ppl who don't know what quick saves are. Quick saves are saves that you can do fast usually for the purpose of quick re-loading to redo things such as lock picking or re-trying a fight. For most game implementations they are stored to file and act like a normal saved game but in some implementations they are stored to memory and erased once the game is exited.

In the situation of Fallout New Vegas quick saves can't be relied on as the normal game saves. If you want to save your progress so you can continue a game later, use normal saves. That's what they're there for.

Auto-saves are the equivalent of normal saves except they're automatically saved and are over-written by subsequent auto-saves. Some games auto-saved every X of minutes, some auto-save at load points and others auto-save before specific events. If you did something wrong in the game or you didn't save for a while and your power went out then the auto-saves can give you a chance to get back your most recent progress, *can* being the key word as you don't rely on them as your main saves.

For everyone who is losing their progress because they're relying on quick saves and auto saves: stop doing it. Use normal saves. That's what they're there for.

[edit]I got beat up bad when I wrote this so I'm correcting it.

Actually, to me...

The only difference between a QUICK, AUTO and HARD save are:

AUTO - Computer saves, no user action needed. Often done at game-based "checkpoints"
QUICK - User initiated. Used as a single "latest state" from which the game "continues". After multiple Quick saves you still only have 1 latest quicksave (not individual saves)
HARD - User initiated. Used as a hard loading point. Must be manually selected when loaded to continue game from that point, rather than latest chronological save (quicksave/autosave)

Im prone to agree with Aegis here

This is what we call wrong. Have you ever played a game before with quicksaves before today?

Cancausecancer is clearly wrong. Even if the quick and autosave features of ANY game worked like that, they'd still be broken in New Vegas.

Of course, no game works that way (for at least 10-15 years now), certainly no Bethesda game. Certainly not FO3, which presumably shares the code with NV.

Well, the Quicksave is not a full save of the game data. While you can continue with a Quicksave after exiting the game, some issues can occur with some mods when using QS. Vanilla Game play is fine.
Autosaves have an issue because they get written over so many times, and can grow, just like all saves do, to 5MB or more in size. After time, the chances for these files to get corruped increases. Not everyone will have a problem, but enough do that it is not worth it in my mind to rely on these.

Even before the Saves issue with the Steam Cloud, I never relied on Quicksaves, and I have always turned off the Autosave features. Problem with using Quicksaves is you Quicksave and then you realize that you made a mistake or you want to go back. Well, with only Quick or Autosaves just how far can you go back if you messed up? Usually not far enough.

The only safe way to save in this game is to use Manual Saves, and rotate through several slots so you are not overwriting them constantly. The reason you have multiple slots is so you can go back an hour or two hours or whatever you need to if you want or need to redo a quest.

They way you have it written sounds like the right way, I'd like it that way too or even to have multiple quick save slots but there isn't a standard among developers for this so they implemented their own way.They could have avoided our forum problems if they thought like you do.

I agree that maintaining multiple saves is prudent in any game.

However, it should not be a defense against what seems to be sloppy, broken design.

The way he has it written is the way it works. Or, it's supposed to work, at least.

You don't know what you're talking about and no game works that way for 10-15 years, that really shows you don't know what you're talking about.

i dont care what excuses people dream up to justify the lack of quicksave and autosave and how to, what they deem, properly save in a rpg . this is a disgusting bug.

First is that THERE IS a bug with quick saves and auto saves not being overwritten, I've restarted the story to see if the save issue would resolve, but it was still there after 12 minutes of gameplay. Not hours but twelve minutes. This is a game stopping bug and needs to be fixed fast.

Second, I've played about 86 hours of Fallout 3 just using quicksaves and autosaves with ZERO problems so I don't need to read all these people preach about hardsaves. All the other games I've played I never had problem with quicksaves, games that had them that is.

And again this is a serious bug. Yes hardsaves work, but what will happen is that 8 out 10 people will forget to hard save for lets say and hour of gameplay and their game will crash, so now since the autosaves don't work they have to repeat that hour of gameplay. We shouldn't put up with these compromises, its a feature in the game that should work properly. Plus who really wants to repeat X minutes of gameplay throughout the game on consistent basis, you never know when you system will crash from something like a power outage. This game uses the same engine, its not build from scratch, hell this is just Fallout 3 version 2: It looks a little more shiny edition. Its the same game people.

If you people want to turn off your autosaves in games then thats your business. Don't try to cover up a major bug with excuses, I like the convenience of autosaves. If you like the 5 seconds it takes you to pause the game and hardsave then go ahead and do it. Its juts if you hard save often throughout the hours of gameplay those 5 sec build up probably to an hour of paused game. I'd rather play that hour. Yes i think that hardsaves should stay an option in games (like they are), I think its a waste of time to tinker with them every ten minutes.

No, I'm fairly sure that a quicksave is a full save. They are the same size as normal saves at equivalent times, they have functional backups that are also of equivalent size, and they have the same file extensions as normal saves. If quick saves were delta snapshots or something equivalent, they would not be anywhere close to the size of a full save.

I've fallen victim to this bug aswell. my game has crashed twice so far, I lost several hours of gameplay and the only autosave on the savegames list is when i was level 3 at primm. so I've taken to manually saving the game whenever I enter a new area

It is not how big the save is, but what is saved. As I said before you can use Quicksaves like a normal save, just that with some mods, there are issues.

My issue with Quicksaves are not what they save, but what are you going to do if you get a Glitch or a quest does not work out the way you want and you need to go back an hour. With only Quick and Auto, you can't do that.

Manual Saves have nothing to do with issues that may or may not be there with Quick and Auto, it has to do with being able to go back and do something over again so it comes out the way you want it to.

While the OP is obviously wrong (I can't actually remember a game that I could not rely on auto and quick saves for), it's a moot point for me because even my hard saves are disappearing. Any save I make past #2 is gone on the next reboot. I've cleaned out the .ini files, I've re-installed, everything I can think of or that was suggested in the forums.

I'm a forgiving player, I get it, all games have bugs upon release. But this doesn't seem like an obscure bug or something to do with my video card drivers. Not losing save games seems like one of those very basic functions that should be working before release. I've never been angry enough at a game to [censored] on forums until right now. Congrats Bethesda.