That's a bit like Fallout, Red Dead, or Final Fantasy. That system tends to work pretty well since the saving system is hooked directly into the game itself, not a specific menu. Even helps by healing the player sometimes! Extra bonus.

As a player, I'd prefer to know where there is a story branch and what causes it, and be able to restore to before the story branch if I accidentally went the wrong way.

This sort of play-style could possibly be well served by having a series of save/safe points that are unlocked as they are reached and which can then be used to replay the game from any point along the way that you've already reached -- you could even display them as a tree so that the branching of different possibilities is visible in the loading screen.

Thanks for your answers.

I think incorporating failure into the story can work okay. As long as complete failure is still an option. [/quote]
Well...what if its not ? That is, player may be worse off on the resources and so on after losing, but what if you want players to adapt to their situation, instead of just keep on winning and steamrolling the opposition until the endgame credits ? Also, in many games after player performs poorly he is sometimes given a punishment game. Like, if you die you have to collect souls, or defeat some spawned enemies. Would you say its better if a punishment game is easy or if its hard, relative to the regular gameplay ? Because if its too easy it becomes a chore you soon cant wait to get past, but if its too hard it becomes basically a double punishment and leads to frustration.

Take a look at multiplayer games like your standard MMORPG or even FPS like MW3/BF3. The game progression is saved automatically[/quote]
Yes, but its not really an intended game design, is it ? Its the nature of multiplayer, you cant really make it in any other way, thats why nobody questions it and demands a save functionality.

If there isn't really an optimal result and the player knows it then the he probably won't be focusing on looking for a specific end but rather on exploring what possibilities are available. [/quote]
Ok, thats good reasoning.

Farcry had limited saves[/quote]
It didnt, but devs were pressured to release the patch that added the functionality. Rather quickly, i might add. This had been the case for most of the games without saving feature for the last decade.

As a player, I'd prefer to know where there is a story branch and what causes it, and be able to restore to before the story branch [/quote]
I was thinking of something more amorphous, like...you are hired by one faction to fight the other, but if you fail then they wont hire you anymore, or maybe you lost your weapons/equipment and cant pay to replace it, so your options for employment are immediately shifted to lower tiers. Naturally, i cant really put a narration on something like that, not everytime at least.

hmm what about some good checkpoints as portal2? its the best option imo

I'm a big fan of no save/load, and having actions have irreversible consequences. Especially story-driven games / RPGs have lots to gain from that.

I dunno if this helps the discussion, but as a player, I really can't stand games that don't let me save anywhere--to the point where if I know a game doesn't, there's a good chance I won't buy it unless I'm really interested in it otherwise.

I don't usually have a ton of free time for playing videogames; I tend to squeeze my gaming sessions into 30- to 60-minute chunks. Given that, I try to avoid any game that's going to waste my time by making me re-do things, because I died and the last save point was a long time ago, or because I had to turn the game off before saving because there wasn't enough time to keep playing. Moreover, in games that don't have save-anywhere, I tend to spend the whole time fretting over where my next save point is going to be (because I don't want to keep playing if the next save point is far away), to the point where it ruins the whole experience for me.

So! If you don't want players to take advantage of saving/loading to wipe away mistakes, I think it'd help if you could at least save and quit at any time, and then have that save file immediately deleted when you load it.

I don't usually have a ton of free time for playing videogames; I tend to squeeze my gaming sessions into 30- to 60-minute chunks. Given that, I try to avoid any game that's going to waste my time by making me re-do things, because I died and the last save point was a long time ago,

It's only a waste of your time if the section you have to re-do is too easy or the game is boring in the first place. Arcade games are all about re-do, playing the entire game from start to victory or failure, but very rarely waste the player's time. With rich mechanics and tight difficulty balancing the play stays meaningful.

or because I had to turn the game off before saving because there wasn't enough time to keep playing. Moreover, in games that don't have save-anywhere, I tend to spend the whole time fretting over where my next save point is going to be (because I don't want to keep playing if the next save point is far away), to the point where it ruins the whole experience for me.

So! If you don't want players to take advantage of saving/loading to wipe away mistakes, I think it'd help if you could at least save and quit at any time, and then have that save file immediately deleted when you load it.
[/quote]Yep, every last game should have save and quit. I have no idea why more designers have not realized that.

It's only a waste of your time if the section you have to re-do is too easy or the game is boring in the first place. Arcade games are all about re-do, playing the entire game from start to victory or failure, but very rarely waste the player's time. With rich mechanics and tight difficulty balancing the play stays meaningful.

Maybe it's just me! It's only in specific genres that I enjoy repetition--racing games, sports games, things like that. If I'm playing a brawler, and I get most of the way through and die, it's probably going to be a loooong time before I pick it up from the beginning again.

I already believed that manual save/load is a bad feature in games before reading this thread.
There's many other ways to implement saving like having to return to your home or an inn to save if you want to logout.

What got me to think about stopping manual save/load is that I ALWAYS abuse it in all games where you can pickpocket npc's.
I hate doing it because I know it's cheating.. But all games have really bad game design when it comes to the penalty of getting caught pick pocketing.. so I don't have any choice but to cheat.

This brings up what Ashaman said below...

To be honest, saving/loading is a cheat for the game designer too. Did you design some bad balancing or an overpowered boss ? No problem, just let the player use your build-in cheat to overcome the design flaw. So, when you want to get rid of loading/saving you need an almost flawless design or optionally some other feature to weaken the impact of failure.

This is also something I've meditated on for months and I still believe in this motto:

"Someone convinced against his opinion is of his own opinion still."

People including game designers always believe themselves to be right even if they are proven wrong they somehow think they are right.
Why I don't know but it's always like that.

I made a post in perma-death thread where I said that if you're going to have perma-death you better make sure the combat system and mechanics of the game make sure there won't be any unfair or lame deaths. Class based games, RNG based combat goes out the window if you want to have perma-death.
I think this goes for singleplayer games too that have no save/load.. You have to make sure that the player won't die of bullshit reasons.

I don't feel like going indepth on how I've come up with everything I said about combat systems in the other thread because I don't think anyone would agree with me anyway because of my motto which I will QFT again: "Someone convinced against his opinion is of his own opinion still.". But I think that anyone who could understand me should be able to fill in the blanks on their own such as why class based games aren't fair 1v1.


So, There's really no way to know if your game is "flawless". There will always be bad players even after they've played for hundreds of hours that will complain about certain features without knowing what they are really capable of. So you can't really listen to the players because you really don't know which one of them knows what they're talking about. And you can't listen to yourself either because like I said previously, Everyone thinks they have created a flawless system and they can't be convinced otherwise no matter the proof infront of them.

I think my theories are flawless too because they are.. no one has yet to prove me wrong.
I know it's funny hearing me say that after everything I just told but it proves my point I guess.

Class based games, RNG based combat goes out the window if you want to have perma-death.

Wrong. The presence of "classes" does not imply unfairness. Some amount of randomness is tolerable as well as long as it averages out sufficiently and the player has enough tools to cope with it.