I'd like to see a lot more autosaving, and to facilitate that I'd like to see developers paying more attention to efficient data storage mechanisms. Loading screens are often a sign of laziness.

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Original post by Kylotan I'd like to see a lot more autosaving, and to facilitate that I'd like to see developers paying more attention to efficient data storage mechanisms. Loading screens are often a sign of laziness.

YES!

Did I mention that RalliSport Challenge 2 caches its data reads? It even appears to read ahead and perform asynchronous loads, ensuring that you get to the game faster. For instance, when you select a race you see a screen that describes the race's mechanics; the game is already loading during that screen. On the next screen you have the opportunity to tune your car characteristics rather extensively. The game continues loading through all of that.

The game simply rocks, both from a creative/aesthetic perspective and from a mechanical one.

I was just playing Neverwinter Nights, and thinking about the same thing. I've only ever played it once before, so this time I sat down for about two-three hours straight and had fun walking around killing some bandits, and stuff... Until they killed me. Then I remembered I hadn't saved since I started, so I was quite relieved to find out about the autosave-system.

But, they also have something of a compromise as well. Basically, when you die, you get three options. The first is to load a game, the second is to quit the game. The third is interesting: It allows you to continue the game, with the world just the same as you left it, except your character suffers certain penalties...

Also, seamless loading is important. I find myself getting pretty irritated every time I need to go back into a house because I forgot something, and everytime I do it, the game loads for a long time.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before (I'm sure it has), but my ideal save system would be a bit like:

A.) Level-by-level saving. This would allow the player to go back and replay individual levels.

B.) Checkpoint resumes. Only the last checkpoint can be reloaded -- Chronicles of Riddick's method, which allowed you to reload at any checkpoint in the game, actually took away from this short game's replayability.

C.) Temporary save-anywhere. This way, you can save (say, after the room you're in has been cleared or something) when you "really gotta go". This save file would be erased upon being reloaded.

Not all games could adopt these methods, but a lot could. It would make games more difficult, interesting, and, if there are branching story paths, endlessly replayable.

Again, sorry if this has been said before.


...Hey, my rating went down by...a lot. I feel sadness.

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Original post by Ajare A dictionary couldn't help me with 'diegetic', so I'm not sure what you meant exactly, though.

Sorry about that. [smile]

"Diegesis" is the entire world of the story. If you hear music in a film that does not originate within the scene - it's not coming from a radio or an orchestra - then it is extra-diegetic.

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Not necessarily. It may be better to use an unapologetically obvious savegame system, than it is to use an strongly-contrived gameplay device to integrate it 'seamlessly'.

Perhaps. Personally, I consider explicit saves to be a relic of antiquity, an anachronistic technique based on the approaches of yesteryear - just like explicit saving in any other application. The difference between autosave in games and general desktop autosave is the fact that game autosaves are unambiguous - there's no question of being able to reference the correct save, particularly if all possible paths for a given profile are serialized.

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Original post by Superpig Incentive and disincentive are basically the only tools we have to propel a player through the game; without them, the player has no reason to move through the game. (I'm not just talking about progression - GTA has incentive/disincentive without necessarily making you get 'further' in the game). You can take one of those two tools away over my dead body.

I fail to see how the inclusion of autosave erodes your ability to use incentive and disincentive, including in-game death. For instance, Splinter Cell presents a checkpoints at regular enough intervals (none of which a user would choose to skip saving, so they might as well be automatic), yet it still uses the full range of design tools available.

I think those issues are, in fact, orthogonal to each other. Oh, and I think your TV analogy sucked :-P

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The result? The player can't 'room reload' because the autosave won't stay obediently outside the doorway. They have to take the hit, die, and return to the spawn point. However, if they have a system crash at any time, they can load up the game and continue playing from the most recent autosave (maybe one or two minutes behind where they were at the crash).

This is an acceptable compromise. Autosaved progress with implict checkpoints for reload.

My black and white, all or nothing thoughts...

Why shouldn't we be ABLE to save any time, any where? It's our game, damnit, and we should be able to play it however we want. Heh. If we don't want to be cheezy and save every 5 seconds in a FPS, then we'll just choose not to save. But it should always be our choice. Maximize our options, increase our gameplay. Why do designers assume that if there is an anytime/anywhere save option, then all players will save everywhere/all-the-time?

On the other hand, don't allow any saves at all. This will force the designers to STOP MAKING LINEAR GAMES. Make it so if you have to start over, you can actually do something different. Make it so if you lose your army, you can keep playing and find a different way to accomplish your goal. Options, options, gameplay, gameplay. The linear RTS is really starting to get old, and I guess that's true of just about all the genres. It's like they think, yeah, a non-linear storyline would be cool, with branching missions/plot lines. But wait, let's upgrade to 3D first then we'll come back in version 2 and add branching missions. Version 2 comes along and they just add more eye candy, postponing dynamic plot lines till version 3. Etc., etc. Meanwhile where is our branching missions?!?!?

A little tongue in cheek on the above, people. Just some thoughts.

Take care.

Perhaps it should be noted that Bad Level Design is the culprit in the requiring of any form of quick-save or auto-save system. If a good designer were there to piece together an appropriate level, then you wouldn't face the distinct possibility of death looming over your head every 5 seconds. Also, if it is the focus of the game to just really get people nervous and jittery, then Quick-Saving removes that sense, because they can also undo death, thus its a triviality that just blocks the players way between to points.

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Original post by Oluseyi I fail to see how the inclusion of autosave erodes your ability to use incentive and disincentive, including in-game death. For instance, Splinter Cell presents a checkpoints at regular enough intervals (none of which a user would choose to skip saving, so they might as well be automatic), yet it still uses the full range of design tools available.

My argument wasn't so much levelled at autosaves, more at your comment that I shouldn't be allowed to punish you for sucking at the game just because you bought it. If you play it badly, you should not win the same way ^_^ It covers all forms of saved game, not just autosaves. Considering Splinter Cell, that choice - save or not save - is a non-choice, so I agree, it might just as well be an autosave.

If we're looking at whether autosaves are better than regular saves, then yeah, no-brainer. If we're looking at whether any saves are better than no saves... more complicated issue. [smile]

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Oh, and I think your TV analogy sucked :-P

I was hoping you would be drawn in by the genious of the underlying idea and overlook that detail :-P

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Original post by Inmate2993 Perhaps it should be noted that Bad Level Design is the culprit in the requiring of any form of quick-save or auto-save system.

I call bullshit. Saves and loads should always be fast; 'quick-saving' should be the norm, and we should be asking ourselves why we still have 'slow-saves.' Crap load/save times are the culprit in the requiring of a quick-save system - otherwise, the only difference between a quick-save and a slow-save is that one usually requires you to pull out of the game world briefly. Why would we ever want to require our players to do that, to break immersion, if the two are equivalent?

The 'undo death' thing applies just as much for regular saves.

I wonder about the motivation of players in the whole 'save every 30 seconds' thing though. You cite death as "a triviality that just blocks the player's way between two points." Without saves, isn't death still that same thing, except that you have to repeat more of the game to get back up to the same point and continue progressing?

This is where I think Heaven's hit on something. If the player has to go back and replay the game since the last save point over and over again because they keep getting killed just before the next one, then sure, they're going to want to avoid that - it gets boring and wastes time that they could be spending getting closer to their objective. If, however, they're not playing the same bit of the game over and over between the two save points, will they still want to save so frequently?

GTA as an example, again ([wink]). I have never, ever seen a person pause a game of GTA to save their progress - it's possible that the game doesn't support saves, I don't know, I don't own it... but what I think is more likely is that players don't feel they need to.

When you die in GTA, you lose the weapons you're carrying, as well as any pending bonuses/points multipliers/powerups. So, you do backtrack a little way - to reach the same point you'd have to reacquire the same weapons and powerups. But the ways in which you can do this are so varied that while you may be playing to the same objective (acquire your stuff), you don't find yourself repeating the solution very often. This time you get the pistol from region A of the map; next time you get it from region B, etc. They're pretty much equally easy to get to (though, of course, some may be closer to you than others). So the player's not walking the same goddamn streets, jumping over the same crashed car...

Eh, I dunno. I guess it's possible that some people would go around and get every weapon in the game and then save so that they could start wreaking havoc from there, but it certainly seems like less of an issue if the player's not retreading their steps twenty times before continuing.

GTA's save system (at least 3 and Vice City) requires you to physically *travel* somewhere to save. There's a specific building with a save icon.

I'd say more, but I need to play Vice City. Now.

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Original post by superpig I call bullshit. Saves and loads should always be fast; 'quick-saving' should be the norm, and we should be asking ourselves why we still have 'slow-saves.' Crap load/save times are the culprit in the requiring of a quick-save system - otherwise, the only difference between a quick-save and a slow-save is that one usually requires you to pull out of the game world briefly. Why would we ever want to require our players to do that, to break immersion, if the two are equivalent?

I think we're working on different definitions of "quicksave". I'm not refering to the time element involved in the physical encoding of bits onto a magnetic or electronically erasable memory device, I mean the pressing of some key like F5 before entering a room, entering, dieing, and then pressing F7 to try it again. The Quicksave function just acts as a means of say "Oh, I was just kidding when I walked under that falling steel box."

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The 'undo death' thing applies just as much for regular saves. I wonder about the motivation of players in the whole 'save every 30 seconds' thing though. You cite death as "a triviality that just blocks the player's way between two points." Without saves, isn't death still that same thing, except that you have to repeat more of the game to get back up to the same point and continue progressing?

Right, but I'm of the philosophy that a player should be able to play a game through and never be forced into a death, it should only happen as a function of their own stupidity.

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This is where I think Heaven's hit on something. If the player has to go back and replay the game since the last save point over and over again because they keep getting killed just before the next one, then sure, they're going to want to avoid that - it gets boring and wastes time that they could be spending getting closer to their objective. If, however, they're not playing the same bit of the game over and over between the two save points, will they still want to save so frequently?

This is where I accuse Bad Level Design as the reason we need to press F5 every 30 seconds. For example, the puzzle where theres two buttons and one of those buttons drops a ton of bricks on you, thats a bad puzzle. And even so, if the game wants to kill you over and over, there should be some rhyme of reason behind it. At least be like Space Quest and accuse me of stupidity rather then just turning red and upside-down.

Anyways, think for a second what value Gameplay has if its a requisit that the player remember to press F5 fairly often. In such a game, this is where the Auto-Quick-Save topic comes up, which is what I assume is the point behind these discussions.