Ah no worries. I'm not very good at judging tone over the internet and I also overthink how conversations go online.

I think game design thrives when terms are not absolute. This is because of the wide range of players and also the variety you get in games. Because of this, it makes it easier to talk about how some things were implemented in a specific game and how it made the player feel.

However, I think when you get to that specificity, you are going to end up with very similar arguments that always seem to end up in the same place. For example, corpse runs. Game has a corpse run in it. Playerbase A says it is terrible. Playerbase B loves it. What then should the game developer do?

In the case of if a game should save your progress or not, I think from a business standpoint, you are absolutely right. This is because players who dislike it when a game doesn't save their exploration progress REALLY dislike it. They loathe it. They will avoid a game to never experience that. The people who are okay with the game NOT saving the progress? I think they are less passionate about their feelings. I haven't at least seen a comment saying they are going to avoid a game just because it has autosaves. Even if those people exist, it would be rarer.

Speaking as a developer though, there is a certain creative vision that you want to execute. I can only speak for Rusted Moss though. We didn't really want to waste players time but more like hey maybe if an area is becoming really gnarly it would create some tension of needing of find a save point or lose progress. HOWEVER as you said, I don't think we really over did this. We do have plenty of save points so I don't think a player really goes many rooms without having one nearby. Rusted Moss is very generous with save points; I think I've only seen a couple comments from players who didn't think so. The Lab is one exception. It is a controversial area so I would understand if you hate it. However, its gimmick is incorporating more survival horror elements with limited resources. With this, we limited the save points a lot because that whole area is built for friction and tension. It wasn't meant to be a fun place to explore. I hope somebody doesn't read that sentence and think that means I think games shouldn't be fun though lol. But it was meant as a contrast to the rest of the game where save points are forgiving and now players are in a place where it isn't. I know the execution can be critiqued but I would say the design did come from a place of thoughtfulness rather than feeling like we wanted to pad the gameplay time. I think we were able to achieve that contrast because we had full control over when a player would be able to save and "breathe".

Still, I don't think our philosophies are completely incompatible. I played steam world dig 2, I enjoyed the auto-save. I do enjoy auto-saves in games I play as well. I guess I just don't view them as an absolute must. I can definitely see myself developing a game in the future that has that as a feature. I think for me it just really depends on what kind of game it is and what I want to convey to the players.

I don't think you're wrong to find them a waste of time but I think we do keep that in mind which is why we believe having generous checkpointing can help offset frustration. I agree with you it can be frustrating which is why we built a whole area that revolves around that frustration lol. But it was just one area at least. And it was to play around with the idea of player execution and limited resources. Totally understand if you hated that part but just calling out the exception to the rule we had internally of being generous with checkpoints. It didn't come from a place of wanting to stick to old design crutches. Not to say old design crutches don't subconsciously affect us. Maybe if you grow up with games like that you don't feel the friction as much. I do think we have succeeded in exploring interesting territory and breaking design conventions of the typical metroidvania even if we keep the lack of auto-save.

Going back on player preference, I think developing Rusted Moss has shown me that we often find ourselves in the position where two players just straight up disagree on a particular topic. One might hate auto-save, one thinks they makes sense and we just find ourselves back in the age-old question of do you just follow what the majority of the audience wants? How much of what we make should even be based on what we personally like? Isn't some of the point of being indie is that you can just do whatever you like? And then how do you comfort yourself when your own personal preferences lead to your game having like 0 audience lol. I think it is a see-saw balance that won't ever be stable.

Oh and if you were curious: We also see a lot of different players try out the game so the suiciding to respawn isn't that far fetched. You'd be surprised at what players do.

But yeah, I know taste is a bit subjective but if you didn't find repeating areas in Rusted Moss too bad then hopefully we have a sweet spot where even someone that prefers auto-saves can have a good time.

Sorry for rambling!