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Original post by Anonymous Poster This is how it'd have to work. You'd have to save every change in the game to disk as you go. Depending on how your game works this could hit speed, but if things change relatively slowly it probably would be workable. It would be like your own privant persistant world.

Yes, one where you could invite a few friends to adventure with you in, without the annoying spammers, whiners, cheat-PKers and gimmies.

The world state should be savable in the form of from random generator seeds and progress values, but I admit at this stage I have no idea how big that will be.

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Original post by ahw So no, there is no need for save games IMO. And it has been done in more harsh environments (ie. roguelike games) and nobody ever complains, cos that's just the nature of the game. Hope this helps?

Yes, alot actually. Now I can start looking at another example for clues on how to do it right. (Any opinions, btw? Why don't Rogue players get really upset with this?)

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Original post by Wavinator Why don't Rogue players get really upset with this?

I used to play roguelikes a lot, and the lack of saves only bothered me once or twice.

I think that an extended low-level story is what carries roguelikes. The variety kept things interesting, the odd things that occasionally happened gave the story twists, and having pets and friendly/neutral monsters added texture and showed that you weren't alone in the dungeon. Having a few special/theme levels also added texture to the dungeon.

Mostly because roguelike are neither adventure games nor cRPGs (hence why I get so upset when I hear people call Diablo a "roleplaying game"... please! [flaming])

I think mostly this derives from the fact that roguelikes are a niche game that never really tried to evolve.
If you remember, there used to be a time when PC games were just as hard and unforgiving as aracade games. One pixel to the right and you were dead, and that meant restarting the game, not the level (you played Prince of Persia I, didn't you?). Roguelikes were there even _before_ that time.
And the rest of computer games evolved, tried to please the player, gave in to the eye candy, all this little things that make a player go "Wow!" so often that they forgive all those little things that went missing (you know, the harsh learning curve, the skillz required, the eidetic memory needed for navigating level, god, the Zen, quasi mystical attitude that real masters of a game would acquire over time)
Well, roguelikes never changed.
Nowadays, they are a bit like Guinness: an acquired taste. Either you started playing them eons ago and you're used to how difficult they might be, and you _relish_ the challenge. Or you are new and sheer peer pressure will tell you to just accept the way the game is and _become a better player_ rather than make the game lower its level to yours. If you do, you will become part of the community, a proud roguelike addict, that wouldn't exchange his barrel of ASCII graphics for two barrels of normal mapped, vertex shaded, millions polycounts 3d graphics... [grin]
A bit like an Assembly programmer, sniggering at how simple and forgiving all those programming languages have become, and how any moron can learn to code, and how we didnt need any graphical interfaces in my days, let me tell you...
(oh yes, I am amongst them [rolleyes])

So anyway, I just meant that yes it can be done, it has been done, and the players love it. Because you _teach_ the players to like it.
Build it, and they will come.
Or something like that ;)