Being a rabid defender of "save anywhere" I can't believe I'm actually writing this. And for a PC RPG, no less... Consider a single-player / co-op RPG where: 1) You can't die 2) The story keeps going even if you screw it up 3) Major mistakes really only cost you time / money 4) Some critical plot events can only happen when you suffer loses 5) Your status in the world and story are always recoverable Baring bugs and crashes, is there really any need for a save in such a game?

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This deserves a bit more explanation: I'm not exactly thinking about ripping saves out entirely. Autosaving would still happen periodicially to sidestep issues of game corruption and crashes. Basically, there would be 4 things you'd care about in this game: 1) The state of the world (your rep, faction territory gains/losses, etc.) 2) Your own personal leveling, which in this case is 1 part your "soul" and one part your body 3) Your property (be it a ship or base or house) 4) Your allies, who you might have invested time and money in I don't mind you saving your own state, but I don't want the world state to be savable (and thus reversable) except through in-game means. This helps heighten drama and meaningful choices, especially in cases of loss and tragedy. A simple scheme would be a save that just saves you, but not the world. But for immersion and the sake of giving you risks to weigh, I'm thinking about using something a bit more elaborate: Death of Self You resurrect in a friendly location. (See this thread for details) You may be able to recover implants and items off your old body, provided they weren't destroyed or stolen. (Assume a heavy dose of item creation, btw). Resurrecting is free at public locations, but carries a cost. A less risky alternative is to join a faction and resurrect at their (relatively safer) locations. Destruction of Property You pay for a "matter print" snapshot commensurate with the quality / size of property. If it gets wiped out, for any reason, the last print can be restored at the nearest friendly nano-factory. (Either printing is cheap and restoration is expensive, or printing is expensive and restoration is cheap.) Death of Allies Low-level hirelings die like redshirts. They don't come back, and it may affect the morale of other allies. This you have to fix in game. People you value you give an implant like the one you have which allows resurrection. Such implants scale in cost with the level of the NPC, so you have to make a strategic decision about who you can stand to lose permanently or how much of an NPC's leveled up soul you can stand to lose. Annoying "Retravel" This is a space game, meaning you can die off in some distant location. Teleporting and time-skipping are meant to help handle returning fast. In cities, you can return via a portal network pretty quickly to where you last where. In space or across the surface of a planet, you skip time. No "Unique Item" Barrier Puzzles Every barrier that requires items can alternately be overpowered given enough resources and time. This means you can go away and do something else, then come back with a big enough gun to blast a lock, for instance. Thoughts? Anything I'm not considering?

Your no-save policy reminds me of Rougelikes. It might be fun, but for a game on the scale you are talking, I wouldn't want to take the chance of ruining it with something like that. I mean, all you are doing is taking the Save ability away from the user, and removign the ability to die. It would be a game where you could just power through, I think.

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Original post by Meagermanx mean, all you are doing is taking the Save ability away from the user, and removign the ability to die. It would be a game where you could just power through, I think.

Not sure what you mean.

I should have asked, "What would you need for this gameplay to be comfortable?"

(It's becoming increasingly important that the world state not be recoverable, btw, so that's where most of this is coming from)

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Original post by Meagermanx It would be a game where you could just power through, I think.

No, it would be a game where you are forced to live with your mistakes, if I read Wavinator's post correctly. If you do something wrong, you can't reload to before your mistake, you have to play on to recover (and it's always possible to recover).
Theoretically, that could make for pretty infinite gameplay ("stay king of the hill") if the likelihood of making a mistake is quite high at advanced levels. I.e. the chance of making one more mistake in the time to recover from the previous mistake is nearly one. That way, at the top end of the scale you'd always be fighting to be the top dog.

It has some of the benefits of the permadeath lobby, without losing too many of the benefits of the save anywhere lobby. I like it.

There are a couple of problems related with saving.

First of all, usually you can use the ordinary save system in order to prepare for future situations — which is in my point of view wrong, since saving is a player action and preparing for future situation is basically a player character action: saving the game doesn't even happen in the same world the character resides, but in the world in which the player does. Now, what you are proposing is basically a way for the character to prepare for the future, which not only solves this "abuse" of the save system, but also adds interesting gameplay elements. As for preparing for the future goes, this is certainly nicer than having the possibility to save arbitrarily.

Then again, sometimes you save so that you can do something else for a while and then continue from that save and never load that save again. Much like pausing; it has nothing to do with the prepare-for-the-future type saving — you don't save for reasons in the game world, but rather for reasons in the so-called real world. The player would probably want to save for this purpose. Autosaving would be similar to this in the sense that we save in order to be able to continue the game, but not play the same situation a second time; you could use the same save slot for all saving relating to these aspects, as you have no further need for the older saves.

I'm not sure if you meant that the autosaves were to save only the player character state, but considering that this saving is only for the sake of being able to continue where you stopped (or the game crashed), wouldn't you want to retain the world state as well? After all, if you press the pause button you probably won't want to regenerate the world arbitrarily as well, right? And since pausing and pause/auto-saving does not happen in the game world, the game world just changes form without any in-game reason, and thus such arbitrary randomization could happen any time regardless of saving and pausing, right?

Well, despite the potential problems with pause-saving and autosaving, what you described sounds much more interesting than the usual overly-abusable save system. It actually forces the player to think.

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Original post by MadKeithV No, it would be a game where you are forced to live with your mistakes, if I read Wavinator's post correctly.

Wait a darn minute that's not right!! IT would make the game where you are NOT forced to live with your mistakes because you can always pay a price and redo since the game goal is still obtainable. Wavinator said this is a single-player /co-op RPG so the player isn't competing with anything; while MadKeithV is making us confused pfffth :p

This is all debatable really, can the game still provide a clear penalty to the player by with time and money? Damn balance question... the penalty needs to be less than the reward for resurrect ally/rebuild building while enough to make an impact on the player.

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Original post by firewindshadow Wait a darn minute that's not right!! IT would make the game where you are NOT forced to live with your mistakes because you can always pay a price and redo since the game goal is still obtainable. Wavinator said this is a single-player /co-op RPG so the player isn't competing with anything; while MadKeithV is making us confused pfffth :p

No, you're forced to live with your mistakes precisely because you pay a price and carry on.

Character death in rpgs is more of a nuisance than a punishment. If my character dies, I just reload my last save. Where's the punishment there? Furthermore, if I screw something up and lose my best weapon or my super cool armour gets trashed, I can just reload an older save and try and avoid whatever it was that trashed it.

Wav's approach would make this impossible. Sure you wouldn't 'die', but permadeath that forces you to replay the whole game from the beginning is rather too harsh for most people anyway, and deaths which you can save and reload from are pointless.

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Original post by firewindshadow This is all debatable really, can the game still provide a clear penalty to the player by with time and money?

Depends on how valuable time is to the player. Really, nearly any RPG is worthlessly easy because you can technically get to level 99 fighting rats in the first area.

But, really what I came to say was, I think it's great. It's no panacea for the save problem, but sounds like a good solution for this game. Nothing new, just giving my vote [grin]

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Original post by Wavinator Being a rabid defender of "save anywhere" I can't believe I'm actually writing this. And for a PC RPG, no less... Consider a single-player / co-op RPG where: 1) You can't die 2) The story keeps going even if you screw it up 3) Major mistakes really only cost you time / money 4) Some critical plot events can only happen when you suffer loses 5) Your status in the world and story are always recoverable

I could live with it, except for one point. What if I have to quit the game suddenly?

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Original post by Sandman Character death in rpgs is more of a nuisance than a punishment.

No way! If the character stood still in a combat doing nothing and he gets kill, the death is a punishment to warning him he should start fighting. Not because the game is designed to be a nuisance to the player.

Why do I have a funny feeling that the same people who constant save/load game when they screw up are just going to make backup copies of the game's world state file. Or even more crazy, write a shell program that can save an instance of the game like most game emulator.