Hamdoon is onto a good point though...although we may all sit up in our ivory towers and look down upon the idea of quicksave/save anywhere you want, when you get right down to it, the average gamer wants it. I have read numerous game reviews, as well as just hearing general conversations, where the players were highly dissatisfied by not being able to save at any time. It may be just that those games handled the issue poorly, but it seems fairly common that in an action game where the liklihood of death is high, players really get upset about it and are thus less likely to buy or recommend your game.

Anthracks

Sounds and good NPC AI seem like such an obvious answer to this problem. Just as in real life the Player shouldn''t have any more info than what he can hear and see. You shouldn''t always visually tip people off because that get''s too predictable.

i think for a large part Return to Castle Wolfenstein played this quite well. A lot of times sneaking around you''d hear conversations in the next room between the two guards standing duty. you could hear the footsteps of people tracing their steps. when guards were on alert, you''d hear them loading fresh clips into their guns. If you play with a sneak around style you''re rarely surprised by the human guards. if you''re in doubt you can shoot a single shot from your gun and you''ll hear the guards say "hey" or "is someone there". You can still be surprised by how many guards there are or monsters breaking through walls suddenly.

You could always allow sneaking around type real world info gathering options:
peek through door cracks.
crouch to look under doors for feet or shadows
hide in shadows to see if someone is on a patrol in the area

but definitely sound, sound, sound. especially if the enemies aren''t on alert they should be talkative, singing to themselves, whistling, shuffling around, watching tv / listening to the radio. all the normal things that people do when they are working watch duty.

with more and more CPU time free to deal with AI people should make use of it.

-me

Why not have a hardcore mode where you can''t save ?

or allow saving whenever but just force the user to quit the game immediatly after saving

people would hate you for that....

-me

The player wants an advantage, so the idea should be to provide ways in which the player can get an advantage that are more effective and/or fun than the save/reload trial and error cycle. As already mentioned, Thief did this perfectly - you could plan ahead by studying patrols and listening, so there was hardly any need for saving and reloading if you played the game using the tools provided to you.

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Heres an idea:
The game could keep track of visited areas, keeping this information in memory even when the player reloads a section. When the player saves, this hidden metadata will be saved along with the regular savefile. When a player enters an area, the game will check to see whether it has been previously encountered. If it hasn''t, the rewards in the area can be increased, or conversely the rewards can be decreased for an area that has been investigated already.

This idea can be applied to the current example of JKII. Lets say a player enters a room, gets killed, and consequently reloads. Presumably, because the player has reloaded, he has formulated a plan based on previous knowledge and can maximize his resources. Therefore, the game can remove imperial supply keys from the officers and drain ammo from the guns left behind by stormtroopers.

However, If the player manages to clear the room on his first try, then he is suitably rewarded with bonus items, compensating for the increased resources (ammo, health) used by not having an exact plan or knowledge of what and where everything is.

This system would make it more rewarding to get your feet wet and push on through the game, rather than constantly quickloading to perfect your room-clearing.

No one will save/reload until they get an empty room. Saving and loading is annoying and they didn''t buy the game to not kill anyone. If they just want to get through a certain area, they''d use cheat codes.

I do like the random placement of enemies idea, though it should only be slightly random. For example, you might always have the same enemies in a room, but at different positions, orientations, and "states" (alert, conversing with fellow guard, etc.). And you can explain this by having the guards not stick to the same place. JK2 did this nicely; nearly all the guards were on patrol, walking around. They didn''t all stand in one spot.

~CGameProgrammer( );

Just to clarify : I choose JK2 as an example because it is the game I''m playing at the moment. Some levels are highly predictable (but still tremenduous fun) due to the patroling and talkative NPCs and cleverly placed hints (like cameras). Also, once you get the second level of Force Speed, using it before entering new rooms drasticaly increases your chances of survival. That''s probably also why the parts where the player''s death seems unavoidable without previous knowledge of the level annoys me as much as they do (last example I had was the mined walkway on bespin. There is no way to know that there are tripmines hidden until they get activated (And the blue lightbeams at least appears), by which time you''re already dead.)
But it is still a great game (or I wouldn''t have played till 5AM yesterday. (Oh .. and Im playing on the normal level btw.)

The problem with not having the possibility to save anytime is the fact that players sometimes just need to save because something comes up and they can''t keep on playing until the next checkpoint. As someone pointed out earlier, Halo''s savepoint system worked quite fine, but there were still times when I had to stop playing and was longing for the possibility to save.

Well I think the computer AI is what is needed to be improved if you can save/load all the time and the enemies is on the same place all the time.

sHaKaZeD

The ambushes in JK2 didn''t bother me very much. I just learned to keep my lightsaber out when entering new areas, since even in the early stages, you can deflect most shots with it. I haven''t died much from ambushes, and I''m not a particularly adepth FPS player.

What *did* annoy me was the numerous jumping puzzles where a slight miscalculation could lead to death. The communications matrix is a good example of this. Many of the jumps require perfect timing, and it''s almost impossible to get it right on the first time. Jumping puzzles are bad enough, can we please not make them lethal too?

Speaking of problems with quicksave, I recently picked up Drakan: OotF, and I ran into another very frustrating situation. At the end of one level, you have to destroy a generator by jumping to four different platforms to make them drop. The problem is, if you do them in the wrong order, it''s impossible to reach some of the higher platforms. This wasn''t immediately obvious to me, and since this was another lethal jumping puzzle, I had been quicksaving after every platform dropped. When I realized that I had screwed up, I had no choice but to restart the (fairly long) level.

Since a lot of players use quicksave almost exclusively, designers need to account for that, and provide a backup plan for cases when the player quicksaves at a point that puts them in an unwinnable situation. JK2 does this to some extent with checkpoints, and other games do it by having a rolling queue of quicksave slots.