With wavinators topic on no saving and no death, its got me thinking about my own project which also has no saving so I've come to ask the community thier thoughts. How do people feel about the notion that you can't save but instead there is a single save game file for each instance of the game you play, and all the saving is done automatically in the background. Here is the catch if you die thats it end of game. You see a list of your feats and achomplishment and you can never contiune that game again. Its a strategy game so it designed for multiple replays but how do people feel about the lack of mutliple save slots? Would it lessen your enjoyment considirable to know you can't save multiple times and go back to an early time if your made a series of serious mistakes?

I'm personally not opposed to it in general, but it depends on the context of the game. How difficult is it to die? How much time is invested in a typical, individual game?

Your goal is to maximize the player's pleasure with your system. This goes through reducing the negative impact of having lost everything one has once had, and increasing the interest of starting a new game.

1 - Reducing the feeling of loss

First, looking into how we manage death in real life is a good start. Make sure to list all the details you could ever be thinking of about what happened to the player. Answering the player's questions is the best thing you can do! Also, the player will need a way to remember everything that happened during his game. Keeping a "morgue" for dead characters is a good idea, with stats such as number of kills, inventory, score, important events, maybe a small journal. Some roguelikes have even implemented comebacks by inserting the ghost of a dead player into the level where he died: "ToohrVyk has been killed by ToohrVyk's ghost from afar with a puff of flame (26 damage)" is an interesting way to die (happened to me a lot in Dungeon Crawl), and it can be interesting in a game that has some way to share data with other players to actualy leave a very powerful ghost behind you to harass other players, and even be able to keep track of that ghost.

2 - Introducing replayability

A noble goal indeed, this can be done by several means. For instance, ensuring that no two games are the same is good. Having a huge game with an important number of enemies, spells, items, player races, classes and many different quests is a sure way to keep the player playing. Auto-saving at important steps during a character's life and, once the character is dead, allow the player to play that character again, from the auto-save point, but for a maximum of 10 minutes (and with no saving) is a good way to encourage replayability by suggesting what-if situations (what if I had decided to wear that object instead of burning it? Would I have survived if I had charged the dragon?). Generating games randomly can also introduce the "I'll have better luck next time", hence the YAPC acronym from Dungeon Crawl : every character is Yet Another Promising Character (until of course he dies).

I think most people would bork at this initially but its not a bad idea inherantly - games such as civilisation were 1 try only games (although they did have saves, but if you lost a game of civ usually it was bad descisions from last week that killed you so unless you have a heap of saves it didn't really help). If dieing is easy then its definatly NOT a good idea. If dieing is very hard then it could definatly work, you just have to be carefully not to frustrate the player. Having them spend 9 hours playing your game then kill them 5 mins befor the final boss will make them hate you [grin]

It should be made abundantly clear to the player which actions result in death. The King's Quest adventure games often had story branches that were almost arbitrary ("do you jump down the well? y/n"). If you can introduce consequences for wrong action and still allow the player to recover (if he's skilled), then the idea will work very well.

Another thing to think about is, after the player dies, is he going to WANT to play again? How much of the story will be repeated? How many minutes of the game become stale when they were new and exciting the first time around? Not such a big problem for strategy games, but still.

Some games only require a skeletal pretense to be enjoyable, depending on how deep you want to go. The idea sounds fun, but i don't see a deep and involving story fitting to well into it, since its static nature would limit the potential replay of random/persistant gameplay. Either that or result in a scripting nightmare. Then again, being able to advance a plot through noble sacrifices, knowing your character will come back to see the results of his death would be pretty cool. Have the player respawn X days/years after his death and show what things have changed and impact he's had. Or any decendants he may have lying around, which could all fit into the whole Bloodline thing thats been bounced around this forum.

I think Fisheye raised some valid points there. Most notably the concept of ensuring the player wants to play on. You might want to look at some reviews/opinions on Steel Battallion for the XBox. It was a mechwarrior game that came with a huuuge joystcik/cockpit. One interesting component was that failing to press the 'eject' button before your mech explodes would result in your game save being deleted, thus simulating your players death.

A simple glance at the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike will give you an idea of how increasing the penalty for dying (sitting around waiting for the round to end) can increase the tension immeasurably. However, a terminal end to progress could leave most people cold.

As I run the idea around in my head I can't help thinking back to the times I'd died in a platform game and turned the thing off because I can't be bothered to battle through that level again. I doubt I'd be any more willing to battle through everything I'd already done.

Perhaps you'd be best off offering this sort of consequence as a huge gamble that is purely optional. So the player can enter into a battle knowing full well that defeat would result in complete death but it would at least be their own choice and the rewards for success could be suitably tantalising.

I like more the idea of their being an afterlife in the game. After dieing, you have to earn the chance to be reborn. This has probably been done already though and I'm just not remembering it...

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Original post by kaysik I think most people would bork at this initially but its not a bad idea inherantly - games such as civilisation were 1 try only games (although they did have saves, but if you lost a game of civ usually it was bad descisions from last week that killed you so unless you have a heap of saves it didn't really help). If dieing is easy then its definatly NOT a good idea. If dieing is very hard then it could definatly work, you just have to be carefully not to frustrate the player. Having them spend 9 hours playing your game then kill them 5 mins befor the final boss will make them hate you [grin]

Civ is a good example because its a strategy game and loss is always progressive and not because of a couple of poor choices. Would it have hurt Civ appeal if you only had one save slot per game? Probably not, since death/loss isn't sudden its generally pretty obvious that your going to loose it generally a question of how long can I hang on, and maybe I can still turn things around.

Am I wrong? Are there any civ fans out there that feel they could not enjoy it without 10+ save slotds?

I think Civ is definitely the sort of game where losses are both gradual (meaning you always have a chance to recover) and predictable (in terms of them resulting in something that was done a long time ago in game terms). However I think the developers noticed that while the game in general follows these rules, occasionally they are broken (such as when your attacking battleship is sunk by a defending phalanx) and sometimes the game can turn very quickly based on one poor random effect. I think this is why they introduced the whole health/damage aspect in Civ 2, to reduce the unpredictability of individual combats, and therefore reinforcing the gradual and predictable aspects of the game.