Multiplayer
Save systems get a little trickier in cooperative multiplayer games. Players expect to be able to join a friend's game and leave at any time, and to save and continue their progress later without the game's save system getting in the way. Gears of War does a great job here too, allowing a friend to join an in-progress game at any time (taking over the AI for the character named Dom).
The player can get through a couple of chapters alone, then have a friend join who can leave at any time and pick it up again later. Even if the friend is new to the game, they're still allowed to join someone who's playing the last level, because Gears of War is trying to be as convenient to the player as possible.
One hitch is that when the friend leaves, the player must briefly quit the game then restart it from the same checkpoint. On this matter, Lego Star Wars has Gears of War beat because it allows a friend to seamlessly join or leave a game without ever quitting out to a menu screen.
Playing Gears of War with a friend is easier than playing alone (there are no AI adjustments between coop and single player), but it could have been incredibly difficult had the designers wanted it to be. The save system's flexibility doesn't prohibit difficulty.
That said, if you were really serious as a designer about creating a meaningful leaderboard for single player and co-op play (Gears of War doesn't do this), then you'd need a single player mode where no one can ever join in, and a co-op mode where the two players are set from the start and can never switch out.
This would be highly annoying, so it should only be used as a hardcore leaderboard mode inside a game that also offers a more forgiving system.
Massive Saves
In massively multiplayer online games things get even trickier still. On the plus side, players can log out at almost any moment they want in these games, and their character's progress (such as items or experience points) will be saved.
In World of Warcraft, players can't log out while "in combat," and must wait 20 seconds when they do want to log out, but it's pretty player-friendly overall. There's even a hearthstone that lets players teleport back a city (once per hour) so they can end their play session at almost any time with character progress saved.
What's much harder to save is progress on a quest or in a dungeon. If a group of four friends is halfway through a three-hour dungeon, one could log out, but it's socially unacceptable, and that player won't be able to continue their progress in that dungeon later.
This is a worse problem during raids, where 25 people must coordinate their real-life schedules, and the ability to log off at any time is basically gone.
Blizzard has taken some steps to simulate the kind of save points seen in offline games, though. The Scarlet Monastery dungeon starts in an ante-room with four separate portals leading to four different wings. This allows players to play just one fourth of the total experience, stop, and come back later.
Also, the Mauradon dungeon gives players an item half way through that allows them to teleport back to the half way point, so they can continue their journey later. Blizzard added even more winged dungeons and pseudo-save points half way through dungeons in the recent Burning Crusade expansion.
Players welcomed these changes as they make the game much more convenient, though they still fall somewhat short. A single player game with save points more than an hour apart would be considered lacking, but at least Blizzard is moving in the right direction here. There is opportunity in the MMO genre to be even more friendly to players' real life schedules.
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"Braid" has a great saving system ... infact it is not a saving system .. it is "Time " controling system ... you should see it ... so funny
There were, as I recall, something like 12 different endings. And an entire playthrough took a max of 6 hours, realtime. So the punishment was minimal. And without forcing you to restart like that, most players wouldn't have discovered that the game plays very, very differently depending on what choices you make.
Altough I like the idea (as a designer of course, I never played the game, so I do not know how annoying it is to start over), but that gives me new ideas (ie: you do not return to the START since that is much probably annoying, but you could have some penalty, like return in place and lost stats, or return strong but everyone respawns \o/, a intelligent person could even use that to level up, kill everyone, kill himself, kill eveyrone, kill himself... lots of killing here Oo)
Another game that could have been mentioned here was Zelda: Majora's Mask. While the game was quite unique and interesting from various perspectives, its save system fell into this same trap of being for the game designer rather than the player. You could only do a full save by turning back time all the way to the first day. They did mitigate this somewhat by providing a "one-time save" feature, where you would strike certain statues with your sword to save, but when you loaded the save, that save would be deleted unless you saved again. It mitigated the problem somewhat, but still forced the player to spend fairly large blocks of time on the game without saving.
Hilarious, although I'd love to know whether this is just a joke to lighten the tone (presumably NSMB would have sold 10 million even if the saving had been more pleasant), or a last-second contradiction of the rest of the article ;-)
So, saving a few times leads to a lack of ammo and health - but your enemy towers in front of you with a fully replenished healthbar. Sad, if you have been using that save-slot for the last few game-hours.
Quicksaving is also often badly implemented, the quick save feature should use at least 2 slots and cycle them.
Cheating by saving shouldn't be a concern, people are only cheating themselves. And if people resort to save cheating there might be something wrong with the game in the first place.
I'm huge fan of the hardware supported sleep that all DS games are required to implement. It makes sense for the DS because it's a handheld and you may need to put it down at any moment.
But now that I think about it, why can't the living room consoles implement a sleep too? Or better yet, since they're living room consoles, how about a hibernate? Obviously you drop your Internet connection the same as if you had unplugged your modem. And driving games and rhythm games aren't very well suited to hibernate. But a quicksave at home would be very welcome.
Although it seems obvious, it's important to remember we're designing for the fun of players, not for the fun of the game designer (or the computer, for that matter).
I wish some casual games too would allow me to keep my progress and not make me start the level over.
Another note: There was that experiment (at MIT, I believe) where they had girls and boys designing games. Girls designed games that were much more forgiving of failure whereas boys designed games where the player would have to start over or would have to lose a lot of points or progress.
I was really thinking about saving systems just a few hours ago...
The quick-save feature is really a bad thing that just makes the most hardwork player to cheatsave the game before every challenge [I`ve done quick saves before hacking in Bioshock! even with the vita-chambers there], and that`s an anti-immersive feature...
I think the best thing to do is about trying to mix the things, for exemple, using saves and checkpoints together, like in Resident Evil 4 or Symphony of the Night, where you get back in the current map even the game having a moderated saving system...
Another thing, depends on the game style, is to make the saving feature inside an in-game menu, "in-game" as "no-pause", like in MMORPG menus... some turn-based RPGs uses this: the player only can save the game when he`s out of a battle... well, open an in-game real-time menu may be something to do out of a battle...
And then when it came time to save, it was simple as opening the menu and saving; you could do it at any time.
Overall, though, good article. This is another something you'd think would be obvious, from a player perspective, but that designers generally implement poorly.
Don't limit the player
Agreed. I don't enjoy a "we know what's best for you" attitude from game designers any more than I like it from other kinds of social engineers.
As a diehard save-gamer, I was extremely unhappy when I discovered in playing the original Far Cry (for PC) that there was no quicksave/quickload feature. Save and load were implemented; they just weren't made available to the player because the developer had the "we know better than you how you're supposed to play this game" attitude. Fortunately there was a console hack that allowed a quicksave/quickload key-bind or that game would have been dumpstered on the spot... but why should such a gross hack have been necessary in the first place?
Furthermore, as a dedicated PC gamer, the (from my perspective) misbegotten choice being made more often these days to design first for consoles and only later -- if ever -- for the PC means that more games are following the Far Cry no-save-option model. As a result, my gaming experiences are becoming worse, not better. I'm buying fewer games. Isn't that the opposite of what game publishers should be wanting?
Having said this, however, I have to acknowledge I'm not closed to all no-save-option designs. I recently decided to give Call of Duty 4 a try. (Again, this is the PC version.) When I realized that there was no way to save when I wanted to save, I growled something about "Far Cry all over again!" and nearly quit. But out of curiosity I kept playing a little longer... and discovered that the checkpoint system in CoD4 actually worked pretty well. The number and location of the checkpoints was usually close enough to where I would have saved so that I was willing to accept the game's handling of that for me. I still didn't like it, but I could live with it.
So this approach can work, even for someone like me who absolutely hates having a developer's theory about when I "should" be able to save my gameplay experience imposed on me.
It's worth noting, however, that this will not work for all kinds of games. CoD4 and BioShock, for example, are very different kinds of games. A linear shooter intended to be a high-adrenaline experience might be able to justify a checkpoint system rather than a save/load option that could supposedly "interrupt" the visceral experience more than dying and magically restarting at a checkpoint. I could accept not being able to save in CoD4 because the pace of gameplay in that particular game made a checkpoint system feel reasonably natural.
But in a slower-paced, more thoughtful and more exploratory game like BioShock, I and, I suspect, most other players want to be able to do what Doug Hofstadter once called "subjunctive replays" -- we want to be able to explore one path, then reload and see what would have happened had we taken a different path. RPGs with branching dialog trees generate a similar desire in players to try all the options to see all of the possible content. Games like these need to reward players who try to explore that content, not punish them for their curiosity.
One approach for accomplishing this would be to provide the traditional save/load feature so that players can -- without having to replay the entire game or level -- see everything the designers spent time making (and for which publishers want $60). Alternately, designers could design games with some kind of explicit subjunctive replay feature that allows the player to scratch that "what would happen if I...?" itch. Why not design exploratory games so that the act of saving and reloading (which a game can easily be programmed to detect) is an active and perhaps even necessary feature of the gameplay? What if reloading wasn't thought of as a punitive "ha! got you!" but as a "hey, if you think that was cool, go back and try it again!"
It might be OK to treat saving as a game mechanic around which to make tactical decisions... if game designers can break out of thinking of saving only as an enemy to be destroyed and start thinking of it as a feature that, for the right kind of game, could be fun to explore and play with.
Right. You can have a suspend/resume feature which enables players to effectively pause the game without leaving it running, but at the same time not have your game respond to player failure by automatically reloading the latest arbitrary "save game".
Missions were available in "Free mission mode" outside of the campaign, but only once they were completed in the campaign, so there was no way to practice a difficult mission without risking the loss of another VT.
It was a punishing system by design, though by my reckoning most players who were die-hard enough to purchase what was originally a $250 game with an enormous custom controller appreciated the extra emotional investment in their pilot's well being. From a theoretical standpoint, it added a sense of continuity to the game world, where there was a very real incentive to make every attempt count. (This was not a game for "Little Jimmy". Another testament to this fact was the lack of a tutorial level for such a complicated title - the first mission began with a hangar door collapsing and an enemy VT opening fire on you.)
Dragon Quarter mixes save spots and "save anywhere". Permanent saves can only be made at specific locations, and furthermore require expending a save token, which can themselves be found only at specific spots. But temporary saves, deleted upon loading, can be made anywhere outside of a battle or cutscene. This eliminates almost all of the negatives found with limited save systems, and particularly those found in games that allow only a limited number of saves in a single game.
The only issue is that such a system is easily hacked for PC games, and probably as easily for modern consoles. But again, if the player chooses to do that, they're just degrading the experience for themselves.
Another note-worthy scheme is from Outcast: If you wanted to save, you had to "meditate" for 5 seconds in game-time. If you got shot or something, your meditation would be broken, so it wasn't really possible to save in the middle of a fire-fight. This isn't interruptable, so I don't really like it, but I thought it was clever.
I really want to play and get into the game, but the saving system is so punishing that it turns me off. However, I can easily see the intention to use the saving system as a tool of game design, and for the people with the patience/gameplay habits to deal with it, it can be a rewarding feature and succeed in its intended purpose of heightening the survival horror experience. My girlfriend loves the game to death, has about 900+ gamerscore points on it, and she's quick to tell me how much I suck for not getting into it. This is the same girl that wants me to play Viva Piñata and Animal Crossing.
My point is, some people will naturally be turned off by it, while others will see it as an interesting challenge that adds a lot to an already unique game. Plus, unless the purpose of Dead Rising is to, "Make every game approachable enough so ANYONE, from grandma to teenage hardcore gamer, can FINISH the game," then I don't see the system as a bad decision. The game was both a commercial and critical success, and thankfully, it proves that not every successful game needs to follow the typical path of predictable design choices.
When he player starts a new game, he/she gets to choose what kind of save system they want. These could be named something like 'Casual' and 'Hardcore' and the player chooses according to how they like to play.
This way, the game designer doesn't have to choose whether the game is casual or hardcore and manages to include both groups into their demographic.
Diablo! (1, 2 or both? don't remember)
When starting the game you can:
*Start new game
*Load old game
When playing you can only
*Save and Exit
The game has total control over respawning. No quick save after every enemy, load after every death. Respawning always happens in the town. (Or at checkpoints or whatever the gamedesigner find apropriate.)
And the player has total control over when to play or not.
Long story short: quiting the game is totaly equal to pausing the game.
Some design should go into this. Like: you can't quit while in a fight, because it is no fun to start the game in one.