New Mario, Old Trick
One of the most surprisingly bad save systems of recent times comes from an otherwise wonderful game: New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo DS). It would have been very natural in this game to allow the player to save at any time on the map screen between levels.
Instead, the player must beat either the castle at the end of a world or the tower halfway through the world in order to save. For example, in World 2 this means beating a minimum of five levels before reaching a save point.
Players can also spend their hard-earned star coins to buy a powerup from various mushroom houses which also lets them save, but they very well might not want to spend their coins.
The need to keep the player at arm's length from the ability to save is conspicuous here given the traditions of the genre (Mario 64 did much better) and doubly-so considering this is a handheld game.
Surely the concern wasn't about keeping the game challenging, because NSMB lavishes the player with extra lives the whole way through.
My girlfriend once asked if she could play Nintendogs on our DS, and I had to explain to her that no, she couldn't, because I just spent almost an hour collecting nine star coins and didn't reach a save point yet so I had to leave the DS in sleep mode until I could save.
I'm not sure which game designer sensibility this restriction on saving serves, or why it would ever be more important than allowing my girlfriend to play with her virtual dog.
NSMB really stands alone here. The most incredible part is that when you beat the game, you unlock the ability to save anytime you want on the map screen!
This proves that no technical limitation made the save system the way it was.
The convenience of saving anytime was deliberately withheld from the player, and given as a reward at the end.
As designers, we can't do this, and must instead put the real lives of our players ahead of our game designery ideals.
Saving for the Player
A save system should allow the player to stop playing at any time, allow the player to pick up where he or she left off with as close to zero replaying as possible, and save as automatically and seamlessly as possible, so the player will not forget to do it.
Saving should be treated as one of the player's natural rights, not an earned privilege or a game mechanic around which to make strategic decisions.
The design space we have to create new games is so unthinkably large that we lose virtually nothing by restricting ourselves to designs with friendly save game systems that don't presume to override the real-life needs of players.
As I have shown, this does not even require a tradeoff with game difficulty; even difficult games can have convenient save systems.
We should always try to design a save system that simply serves its purpose and fades into the background, otherwise we might end up like New Super Mario Bros.-a game with sales of over 10 million units worldwide, and with ten million girlfriends unable to play Nintendogs.
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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.