I’ve noticed that many games today only have a single save “slot”, unlike older games that used to routinely allow quite a number of saved games. Is it now considered the norm to just have a single saved game?
Still plenty of games which let you have many, and a blend of methods.
Games generally have one profile because everything is multiuser now. You should have multiple accounts on any gaming device with multiple users. At least the consoles and desktops do.
Choosing save from the menu often let you save a new game, and the most recently saved game is what the continue option in the menu loads. Quicksave should just use the most recent name, but some games even have them separated from named saves and autosaves.
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No, I wouldn’t say so.
“Single save slots” is mainly used in console ports and games that upload their save state to some sort of online server or sync with it (Dark Souls, Dragon’s Dogma).
It is not a de-facto standard.
It can also be used to artificially increase duration of gameplay, by introducing branching choices into the game. In this case, choices will have “finality” to them.
It is also used with “permadeath” games for the same purpose - increasing gameplay duration. (Because when your character dies, the game saves).
From recently released games, for example, Dishonored 2 has multiple “campaign slots” BUT within the slots you can have a lot of game saves. The game saves automatically, but can be saved manually at any point. Since the game encourages save-scumming, having a lot of slots isn’t that surprising…
–edit–
And, yeah, as @orb said, it is a good idea to allow multiple profiles for your users even if you go for a signel slot thing.
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Do you mean letting users create different accounts from the main menu?
I mean that a user should be allowed to have several different “characters” at the same time at different points in the story.
It doesn’t really matter how it is handled. Profiles imply different players playing the same game. This kind of thing can be handled by OS, although having user profiles wouldn’t hurt.
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A lot of games have three save slots. I don’t think there is a normal or standard number of save slots, though.
Single save slots per character is fine. It can even enhance some RPG games, by taking away the players ability to second guess themselves. Works well in an auto save setup. It also works well in linear FPS games, if you give players the ability to start a new game from the start of any unlocked level.
In some games in console, one save per profile is fine, although I would normally avoid this approach and run with a character approach. On PC there isn’t always such a thing as a profile, so avoid this approach.
Three slots is standard for throw away web games. But I wouldn’t use it for a PC game. My household has four players. Which means we can’t play something with three slots without messing with the file system. And forget showing it off to a friend, I’m not going to do that if it overrides my own save.
On a PC there is no reason to artificially limit a game player to three slots. I have terabytes of storage, I should be able to save as many playthroughs of a game as I want.
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The three save slots thing is more about reducing cluster in the UI menus than anything regarding disk space limits. It is an ease of use vs flexibility decision.
It depends on the game. The worst kind is quicksave spamming to cheese an area. I would just go with what your game needs. All games are different, roguelikes for example.
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I’m just saying that as a customer, I need more then three concurrent playthroughs. Reducing UI clutter is great. But UI clutter is a lower priority then core functionality.
A list of file names isn’t technically difficult to implement, and it’s not objectively worse in terms of clutter then a slot system.
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Then you have the games where you quicksave spam because they love to crash at the most inopportune times.
yeah try getting through stalker SoC with no quick save
(Most of know this)…In the old days, console savegames were stored on the carts themselves(SNES, etc…). There was of course a limited amount of said space, so having only a few save slots made sense.
Nowadays, we know if there are limited save slots, it is an artificial limit, as games themselves are taking up GBs of space as it is. I can understand there being only one quicksave slot running at any given time, but for the “primary” saving, it should really be unlimited, or at least a big number, like 20. It is easy enough to program scrolling bars of sorts, and lists of files, so I just can’t see limiting games in this manner anymore.
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Some who realise this go entirely in the wrong direction after hitting upon that thought though! I’ve seen games which basically save the game world. There was one Unity-based platformer where the saves were larger than the installed game size. Don’t be lazy - try to optimise, and in the name of good coding practices: Use compression where you can definitely save 75%+ space 
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I agree with this of course…I don’t see a need to save the whole world…just the basics, where you are, how strong you are(whatever all that includes of course), and maybe some important pieces, like quest status and similar.
that’s just not being lazy, but also is heavily dependent on your games features, some games only need to save some simple ints and bools and maybe the players state, while other games might have a large amount of persistent objects in the environment and may need to save the state of enemies and npc’s
Saving 500MB of state for a 300MB platformer game is a bit odd though.
that was my point, but yeah no clue how they got it up so high, even saves for a game like witcher 3 oare only like 30mb or so
It’s late, and my reading comprehension is right at scripting forum level 
Save game reduction is a little art, a little science. The artful part is figuring out what isn’t needed.
Don’t forget about the code entry for saved games!
Long live Castlevania! heart, battle axe, boomerang, holy water!
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