On the "limited saves" angle, allowing people to save at any point in time is a two-edged sword. Sure, it means that players don't have to commit to spending X number of minutes/hours playing, because if any emergency comes up, they can quicksave and go deal with real life. However, it also tends to promote a rather different style of play, where people quicksave after every minor accomplishment, and reload if the slightest thing goes wrong.

I keep thinking of Metroid Prime while writing this. There's a section (the Phazon Mines) which is a long, grueling dive into enemy territory with difficult enemies that are encountered for the first time in that area. The player gets healed at every save station they encounter, and normally up to that point they've probably relied on being able to run and save whenever things go wrong. But the Mines are too long to feasibly retreat out of, and there's only one savepoint, at the end, after several boss fights. The area is hard, yes - I still usually die at least once trying to tackle it (where in contrast I hardly ever die anywhere else in the game), but the feeling of accomplishment and relief the player gets upon finally reaching that savepoint and recovering their health is also unparalleled in the rest of the game.

You'd lose all of that if you allowed quicksaves. The player would merely quicksave before each room, and reload if they didn't like the outcome of the fight contained therein. A long, difficult gauntlet is transformed into mere tedium.

imo, dead ends are the worst shit ever. they take all of the fun out of a game. if you really want to challenge the player, give him a harder time getting past a level if he messed up something but don't kill him.

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Original post by Derakon I keep thinking of Metroid Prime while writing this. There's a section (the Phazon Mines) which is a long, grueling dive into enemy territory with difficult enemies that are encountered for the first time in that area. The player gets healed at every save station they encounter, and normally up to that point they've probably relied on being able to run and save whenever things go wrong. But the Mines are too long to feasibly retreat out of, and there's only one savepoint, at the end, after several boss fights. The area is hard, yes - I still usually die at least once trying to tackle it (where in contrast I hardly ever die anywhere else in the game), but the feeling of accomplishment and relief the player gets upon finally reaching that savepoint and recovering their health is also unparalleled in the rest of the game.

Everything s/he^ said. For one thing the Mines were scary (or at least I thought they were). As I pushed further in I got more and more paranoid - 3 energy tanks left, 2, 1, how much further would I have to go? Even after I cleared a room with a boss in it I was still sweeping the room for baddies just in case one should snipe me in the back of the head as I made my way to the save room door and make everything for naught. Excellent game.

I don't think the answer is "very very long gap between save points" or "save whatever you want", I think it's spacing them out WELL, perhaps taking some cues from who your audience is and what sort of difficulties will be faced between two points. If saves are very infrequent you risk frustrating more casual gamers or making it not worth the effort of playing if the player doesn't have much time. However: Part of what made the Phazon Mines run interesting was that if you made a mistake, there was no easy way back or very recent stopping point; it made me verrry wary of what was going on and if you screw up, the rest of your way through has to be even more on edge because you're weakened. Having infinite quick-saves ruins that because you never have to react to the consequences of a mess-up; just reload and try again with full health.

Go back to your Atari 2600. Nowadays games are longer, people get interupted by stuff, or angry parents make them do stuff. I remember when I didn't have a memory card because my brother broke it and I played 10 hours into Chrono Cross just to have my sister turn off my PSX. Damn that pissed me off.

Derakon & Frequency, you hit on exactly the sensation I want to recreate. I never played metroid prime but I have experienced similar in other games and I notice it missing today.

I don't care that people are busy and things come up, etc etc. Exactly as was pointed out (and I know because I do the same thing) quicksaves steal away the involvement and the resulting satisfaction when you succeed because there is never any actual peril.

An immersive game has to demand that you offer it your time because if you don't then you are only playing for a moment of amusement instead of engaged involvement.

I recognise that this divides the market into those who would play a game like this and those who wont. Balance of implementation would be tricky but tricky can pay off.

You could still have a "save anywhere, load once"-saveslot in addition to your normal limited save system (for an example, GBA Castlevania:Aria of Sorrow has this) for unpredictable interruptions.

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Original post by Oluseyi Quote: Original post by TemporalFlux Quote: Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel. hehe...I had the same thought. I'm guessing there was some mario brother trauma somewhere in that childhood...or maybe rayman :P That was supposed to be the reaction of the hypothetical frustrated gamer. That was not an insult to the OP or a rant of any kind.

Oh, I see. My bad. [smile]

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Original post by LittleFreak I wouldnt make it a dead end but more as mutliple endings maybe one ending happens after 20 mins and maybe one happens after 24 hours of game play... That might would but Dead end is dumb way to put it.

I like that but perhaps just make all the paths lead to the same place, but some drasticly harder than others. And use checkpoints two or three(depending how long and hard that path is) times in the level but save the game at the completion of a level.

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Hehe, my theory is that kids (and adults) had longer attention spans back in the old days.

That would explain the average movie lenth going from 2 1/2 hours to 2 hours to nowadays 1 1/2 hours.

I think the root of the problem isn't just that games let you save anywhere; it's that they let you reload anywhere, and then base their entire design around that principle. Before Quicksave/Quickload became standard issue, games all had their own unique ways of dealing with player failure. Take Super Mario Bros.; if you die, you restart at the beginning of the current level. That was a pretty good method for several reasons:

A) They never set you back too far, because they knew it would get frustrating to replay the entire game each time you died.
B) Yet they realized you WOULD be replaying large chunks of the game many times, and thus replayability was an inherent part of their design; they made it so that different approaches could be tried, and scattered secrets around that you might not find your first time through.

With the quicksave/quickload mentality of today's games, that entire line of thought is scrapped. Instead, developers seem to think "Hey, we can make this part as boring as we want; if anyone has to replay it it's because they were too dumb to quicksave." "We can make this part as hard as we want; the player will just have to figure out that he should quicksave." "We don't need any kind of death or respawn system, let's just force the player to reload."

This becomes an inherent part of the design, which leads to today's game flow, which is often "Let's but a big iron door with a skull on it here, so that the player knows he's supposed to quicksave. Then, let's put something totally unexpected behind it that will kill the player after he goes in. Then he'll have to reload, and this time since he knows what's behind the door, he will beat it." That's not really challenge; that's a vain attempt to instill challenge in a system that is inherently unchallenging; there are no sports that let you take back every move you do wrong, no board games that let you constantly back up and keep picking moves until you win. Quicksave/Quickload is no longer about "being able to save your game if someone calls on the phone". It's a huge design decision that affects the entire gameplay of your game. And in my opinion (and obviously many others), it's one of the worst trends ever to hit the gaming world.

So... what are solutions to this? Well, first, I will say what the solution is NOT. The solution is not to take your typical quicksave/quickload-based game, and just remove the ability to save. Nor is offering a "hardcore" option in such a game really going to satisfy most people; because it will be obvious to them that the game was designed entirely around the idea that the player would be saving every 5 seconds, and that they are merely subjecting themselves to painful repetition because you as a developer couldn't come up with any decent ideas for implementing actual challenge. Save Spots are a little better, because they do force the developer to focus on the save/reload issue as one of inherent primary gameplay and strategy, and not brush it off as "just something they do in case they need to answer the phone". Save spots can be annoying if there are too few and your gameplay is too linear, and they can be pointless if they are too many, at which point you might as well have implemented Quicksave.

I think some better options are these:

-Of primary importance, DON'T DESIGN AROUND "RELOAD ON DEATH". Have a different death mechanic in your game. Once you decide that the only option at death is to reload, you have irreversably tied all of the challenge of your game to the quicksaving habits of the player. The challenge moves entirely away from anything you thought had anything to do with your game mechanics, and the game instead becomes "How often will you remember to quicksave?" Instead, take a page from earlier video games, or from online FPS/MMORPGs where they were forced to not use Reload On Death. Respawning at a spawn point, respawning with "ressurrection sickness", being penalized but able to continue, etc. And you may notice something about these games that have been forced to not use Reload On Death: they have, in turn, been forced to not make their gameplay so linear and predictable after dying. They couldn't rely on forcing the player back through the same exact steps as "punishment" and instead had to rely on something more interesting. This is a Good Thing. In a more adventure based game, you could come up with interesting plot devices that might happen on death. Maybe if you die in the Evil Bandit Caves, you wake up tied to a post being held captive. Or if you die out in the Swamps of Bad Things, you wake up in a mysterious old woman's hut, unsure of how you got there, but suspecting that there might be more to your strange luck than you originally thought. You could even go the route of Planescape: Torment, and play off of the quicksave-video-game "main character can never die" thing by taking it to its logical conclusion and just making your main character actually immortal. I think this was a great thing for PS:T to do: if you honestly don't care much about combat challenge or punishing the player for failure, then why even bother with Reload on Death; you might as well just make the fact that you can't die an interesting part of the story.

-Secondly, avoid "repetition as punishment". The de facto standard of almost all games is "If you screw up, you need to do the same part over and over until you get it right." I think this works in certain cases, but not all. It works great in a fighting game like Tekken; the entire point is to keep getting your reflexes sharper and your mastery of the moves better. It doesn't work well at all in your standard RPG, where dying when you've forgotten to quicksave means trudging back through 40 minutes of the same exact dialogue, cutscenes, and pithy monster battles that obviously don't offer any actual danger, just so you can, this time, remember to quicksave before you open the big iron door with the skull on it to fight the boss.

-Thirdly, avoid "this will kill you the first time it happens" situations. This is a direct result of quicksave-based game flow, where the only way to "challenge" the player is to put something totally unexpected that will almost definitely kill them because they haven't encountered it before, but once they've figured out "the trick" (by dying and reloading), then getting past it is no problem. Worst Examples: a treasure chest in a room, that when you go open it, it explodes and you die. Then you reload and don't open that chest. Or, a nonobvious option in a dialogue tree that if you say it, causes the person you're talking to to smash the Goblet of Important Things and bring up the Game Over screen / permanently screw up the game somehow. You reload and pick the other dialogue option instead. A row of three levers with no hints, pulling the first lever kills you, reload, the second kills you, reload, the third opens the door. Not As Bad Examples, But Still Pretty Bad: A boss that relies entirely around some "trick", who will kill your the first ten times straight out, but once you figure out that you need to use the Magic Mirror or hit him with the Silver Bullet or pull the Third Lever or whatever, he is easy as pie. It would be better to allow the player ample time to figure out the Trick during his first encounter with the boss; make the boss do less damage or be easier to dodge. Furthermore, once he gets the "Trick", make the boss still be somewhat difficult to fight, so that the game actually offers a little replayability at this point. Another Sort of Bad example: a corridor of spikey-smashy traps, that you need to time and jump through correctly, otherwise you instantly die and need to reload. Instead, make the traps do damage, or turn them into pit traps or teleportation traps that will drop you into some interesting gameplay.

Nice post makeshiftwings.

The idea I am working on is basically far more organic in nature compared to the vast majority of current games and posts such as yours are a help in narrowing exactly how to implement certain aspects. Appreciate it. Of course, programming what I have in mind might be a bit of a task but hey...I shoot for the stars :)