Don't forget another reason for saving: protection against loss of progress from crashes and other failures. Nothing is more annoying than losing hours of progress through no fault of your own, because the game crashed unexpectedly.


Anyway: another approach might be to make the Save feature a consumable, just like health potions and other buffs.

Availability of this 'Save Potion' could be dependent on difficulty level easily enough, although I suspect that most player's inherent hoarding instincts will take over and they will naturally conserve them even if there's three of them in every other drop. There could be other incentives to preserve them: perhaps an NPC who will trade certain items that cannot be obtained anywhere else, in return for a number of these save potions.

This also brings the concept of saving progress into the game world. With a little bit of effort, the mechanism can be explained within the game universe, and may help the game feel more immersive.

That's certainly not a bad idea. I liked the Resident Evil savegame approach. You was free to save whenever you want, but only a very limited amount of times. So I was constantly affraid of using my savegames too quickly. When playing the game for the first time you don't know what will come of course. Maybe there is a boss behind that door so I should save... or maybe not.

One of the ideas I had for my game is to use sleep. You have 7 (long) days to accomplish the game. Sleeping will save your progress, but it also takes your precious time of course, so don't be too lazy!

I agree there shouldn't be too much time between 2 savepoints, if a PC crashes and you loose hours, it could be a reason to discontinue the game.

Thanks for the input!

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as you can always pass any obstacle after X times trying

Nope. The quicksaving itself might be a hard challenge if the main objectives of the mission need to be done quickly, one after another. Use your imagination. ;)

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nd may help the game feel more immersive

Saving potion won't help there. I get enough immersion in any of the Splinter Cell games when I use manual saving too... (here I don't use quicksaves because it is easy to ruin the whole mission progress with one single quicksave, but I want to complete the mission perfectly ^_^).

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And worse, the challenge is taken away.

Sorry, but it looks like you don't understand the concept of quicksave - it is used to save the game faster (that means no button clicking and name writing). A game that has good challenges and immersion will make the player forget about the quicksave option when he is in a fight. When the game just gets annoying, the player will remember that he can do quicksaves and use them together with his tactics.

Checkpoints and Save systems are great and should be utilized often in every game unless you have a specific reason not to. There is a difficult balance between too many saves, and too little, as each person has a different opinion on what feels right.

Your example of a player losing the thrill of the game if they don't have to worry about getting killed is a good one. However, if you are trying to create a horror game that appeals to younger or more casual gamers then you must make death more forgiving.

There are other consequences you could give if the player fails a certain scenario other then death as well. An effective horror game to me doesn't get me scared to die, it gets me scared to see what is going to happen next.

Regardless of game, I want a suspend feature so the game can be dropped any time and continued at will a la Nethack. (Obviously, a save anywhere feature is a superset of that.)

But I generally don't want a save anywhere feature. With no save anywhere, and proper playtesting, design failures (and bad designers!) will be weeded out; with save anywhere, you end up with players save creeping through stuff that should have never been there in the first place. And like the OP says, a lot of the excitement just disappears.

One of my all-time favorite games remains Aliens vs Predator for the PC. It didn't have a save feature at ship time, and IMO, was all the better for it. No other FPS has made me that afraid, and a lot of it has to do with how I stood to lose the last five minutes' hard-won progress if I died before reaching the end of the level.

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with save anywhere, you end up with players save creeping through stuff that should have never been there in the first place.

That is not true when quicksave/save-anwhere option is part of the gameplay. And it is actually much harder to implement so don't think that save-anywhere is a cheap hack. ;)

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Original post by snake5 Quote: with save anywhere, you end up with players save creeping through stuff that should have never been there in the first place. That is not true when quicksave/save-anwhere option is part of the gameplay. And it is actually much harder to implement so don't think that save-anywhere is a cheap hack. ;)

I don't personally know even a single game which has refined save-anywhere functionality by somehow tying it into the play. If some exist, well, my comment was not about them but the other 99%.