Auto save is a wonderful invention that has saved players countless hours of time. Gone are the days of forgetting to save for an extended period of time and losing a ton of progress, but it comes with a few downsides as well. For starters, games that completely forgo manual saves make it impossible (or very difficult) to manipulate save files, and even games with both manual and auto saves sometimes encourage players to rely too heavily on the auto save. While it's certainly a helpful feature, it is far from perfect, and Redditor -Buck65 found this out the hard way in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
-Buck65 was playing Skyrim as normal when they found themselves in a bad spot. The game decided to auto save right before they were killed by a group of enemies, causing them to get stuck in an endless loop of death and rebirth. The video is absolutely hilarious to watch, but one can't help but feel a tinge of pain wondering how much progress -Buck65 might have lost.
The video starts with -Buck65 falling in combat to a stream of lightning magic before the loading screen takes over. After the auto save is loaded, the game picks up just moments before the player's death, but there isn't time to make any changes. Whenever Skyrim loads a save game, players can't move for about two seconds while the screen fades in from black. Unfortunately, enemies can still fry the player with lightning magic just as effectively during this time.
The same thing then loops a few times. The player dies, the game loads the auto save, and then they die again while the black loading screen is fading out. There isn't any time to even pause the game and load a different save, much less get away with a well timed dragon shout or other maneuver. Although the original poster doesn't share how they got out of this situation, it likely involved force quitting the game and the reloading a previous save. There's no telling how long ago this previous save was, however, so fans can only hope it wasn't that far back. In response to one comment, -Buck65 does say that they "Lost quite a bit of time also because of this auto save."
This auto save trope has been referenced by other media before, but this is one rare instance of auto save fail actually happening in game. At any rate, this serves as a good reminder that players should always save frequently, even if the game makes promises that the auto save feature has it covered.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.