Outliers
Let's return to single player games and look at two unusual examples: Dead Rising (Xbox 360) and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS). Dead Rising has save points, but no check points.
The open-ended nature of the game makes it very easy to forget to save at all, especially considering that the save points are off the beaten path inside the various bathrooms of the shopping mall where the game takes place.
When players die in Dead Rising, they are given a confusing choice: they can restart from their last save point, losing all character progress since they last saved, or keep their character's progress, but lose all save points.
Yes, you read that right. If a player wants to keep their character's progress since the last save (such as experience points gained and moves learned) then they must restart the entire game from the opening cut-scene.
Even stranger, Dead Rising only allows a single save slot per Xbox 360 profile, per storage device. That means the game is trying its hardest to restrict people into playing the game only the way the designer wants, while still remaining easily defeatable if one makes a new profile or uses another memory card. By "defeatable," I mean this grants users the ability to create two save files, a feature common to almost all games.
The reasoning behind these decisions in Dead Rising was probably to create a very specific experience for the player. They are supposed to care about finding those save points, and care that they are in constant danger from zombies and that if they die, the last save point was a really long time ago so it's going to be a big deal. The world is against the player-as it almost always is in the horror genre-and so the game's difficulty is intentionally very hard.
If the player keeps playing through the game and dying and starting over, they'll start each time with a stronger character and with more knowledge of how to navigate the game correctly and save the various victims from the zombies.
Incidentally, this same save system was used in the game Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which was also by Capcom and is rumored to share some team members with Dead Rising.
I understand why a designer might create a save system like this that reinforces the concepts of the horror genre, but games are not meant to satisfy game designer ideals, they are for players. I was personally annoyed by this system to the point of quitting, because I could not play it the way I wanted.
Dead Rising is an amazing technological showcase and combines the design concepts of a sandbox game (go wherever you want, do whatever you want) with the horror theme of a mall overrun by zombies.
And yet, I'm not allowed even two save slots, I'm bullied into playing the same parts over and over because I feel obligated to restart all the time, and the save points require me to actively seek them out, which means it's very easy to play for an hour or so and forget to save, then die.
That type of save system may work for hardcore players (who border on sadomasochism anyway), but the fictional Little Jimmy from Idaho (the person I often design for) is just going to quit playing out of frustration. I know I did.
On the other hand, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has an unusual save feature that is intended specifically for the player's convenience, rather than for the designer's vision. This game has standard fixed-location save points (with no check points) and it also has a second method of saving called a save marker.
Players can pause the game at any time and create a save marker, and then the game quits to the title screen. When they want to play again, they can either load a game that was saved at a save point or they can resume from their last save marker.
The tricky part is that if they resume play through either method, then the save marker is destroyed. That means if the player is in the middle of a boss fight, they can save, stop playing, play something else, then later resume from the exact moment they saved.
But players cannot reduce the game's difficulty with this feature because it does not give them a second chance of any kind. This is another example where the game can remain very challenging, and yet still allow the player to save and quit at any time.
This same save system was also used by Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance) except you didn't even need to pause and create a save marker. It was automatically created for you any time you turned the Game Boy off during gameplay.
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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.