MadKeithV wrote:

quote: I thought the whole point was that it is annoying to the player to die and have to replay sections of the game.

Ketzer wrote:

quote: Therefor i recommend a save anywhere with as few restrictions as possible.

I recommend an automatic save anywhere, without the need to ever load.

I think MadKeithV's statement pretty much sums up my own feelings about 'save/load'. What's the best way to deal with it? Well, just remove the need for it entirely.

Taking CRPGs as our example again, if our character just never dies, but only gets hurt a little, do we still feel the need to load a previous game state?

And if we do... is that wrong?
If I know that I don't have to load, but still choose to do so, should I somehow be prevented from doing that?

If the engine can handle it, I'd prefer to play a game where

a) there is never a need to save/load
b) the game automatically saves every X seconds

The auto saves could be kept in a timeline, possibly displayed somewhere on the screen (for example on the bottom, much like the Windows bottom toolbar). When a player feels the need to load for any reason ("Hey, I want to see what would happen if I do X instead of Y"), all he has to do is scroll over the timeline (which could for example list specific events, such as 'I crossed the bridge over the river' or the cheesy 'I killed boss monster'), click on the moment he wants to go back to, and voila...

Of course, if I find that doing X instead of Y turns out bad, I'll want to be able to go back to the point I was at when I decided to load.

If the savegame filesize can be kept really small, you might be able to keep several timelines going all at once, giving the player the ability to freely go to where and when he or she desires.

But, in all this, make sure the player does NOT at any point HAVE to load. It's all optional. Loading a game does not take you back to do the same thing again, but instead gives you the freedom to try something entirely different. Not to overcome an obstacle, but to explore more of the game.

[edited by - Silvermyst on May 22, 2002 11:09:32 AM]

The auto-save (and auto-load) feature is pretty powerful. I''ve thought of it also.

Think of a game that begins as usual by you creating your character. Then the next part is selecting your save/load difficulty level. Here would be the features with each mode:

Easy: Self-save and self-load any time.
Medium: Computer auto-saves at check points and every minute. No self-save. Self-load any time.
Hard: Computer auto-saves at check points and every 5 minutes. Self-load to any point once every minute.
Insane: Computer auto-saves at check points only. Auto-load at death to last save. (No "time back-tracking.")

You could alter any of the factors (times between saves, self-loading versus computer controlled loading, more difficulty levels, loading delays, etc.) as you would like. And, if the player beats the game he can be rewarded based on which difficulty mode he beat the game with.

quote: Original post by MadKeithV
The thread, in it''s entirity, is about how we can challenge whatever is "traditional" about games, so coming back at me saying that lethal combat is "traditional" in CRPGs to me is a non-issue.

I thought the thread was about save games, failure, and the way these relate to players'' experiences. In your post you argued against fatal failure in CRPGs on the grounds that replaying certain parts was undesirable. I countered that by saying that by removing fatal failure altogether you''d no longer have a CRPG. The way I classify things, a story-driven game with no fatal consequences is more like an adventure game than a CRPG. In any case, the point is that fatal failure is a valid and common element in CRPGs. To me that''s a very relevant issue.

quote: I thought the whole point was that it is annoying to the player to die and have to replay sections of the game. I also made the observation that MANY players of the genre abhor the way you just tend to die uselessly in many of these games, fast and often. Just read through the thread again picking up the many gripes about Baldur''s Gate.

At some point you argued that replaying conversations, specifically, was annoying to the player. Replaying certain sections can be annoying, but this does not automatically extend to all possible sections. As for dying too often, this is not an argument against fatal failure in general, but against dying too often.

quote: why on earth does the consequence of losing have to be lethal? I''m not even saying all of the time, why does it need to be lethal ANY of the time? ... Does dying add to the fun? No, you just reload and try again.

I do think it adds to the fun. Dying itself isn''t very fun, but the fact that you can die alters the nature of the game in a way that often makes the game more exciting.

quote: Original post by chronos

I thought the thread was about save games, failure, and the way these relate to players'' experiences. In your post you argued against fatal failure in CRPGs on the grounds that replaying certain parts was undesirable. I countered that by saying that by removing fatal failure altogether you''d no longer have a CRPG.

I also made this point that you may have a CRPG but it would be different enough so that plenty of people would still prefer the "old" kind.

I would also point out that failure may cause people to reload, whether it is fatal or not. There are plenty of people who want to finish a game with every character alive, or find all the hidden items or spells or whatever. As long as failure implies failure in the long term (as in you finish the game with less stuff or different events happen, not just you lose some energy you can easily regain later) people will have ample reason to save and reload.

quote:

I thought the whole point was that it is annoying to the player to die and have to replay sections of the game. I also made the observation that MANY players of the genre abhor the way you just tend to die uselessly in many of these games, fast and often. Just read through the thread again picking up the many gripes about Baldur''s Gate.

Yet plenty of PC games that allow save anywhere are still annoying in this fashion. (Including BG itself I think) So the proposed remedy doesn''t fix the problem.

Frustration and difficulty can exist even with save/reload. Save/reload may lessen the time it takes to wrok your way up but it will still be there. And I would bet anything that in save/reload games you end up dying more often than other games. As I mentioned, save/reload can be a crutch that allows you to not properly balance the difficulty. Even though a section may be obnoxious, unintuitive, full of cheap deaths and the like you can bank on the player saving. (Even if that ruins the pace and annoys them)

I would also point out that without save/reload you are forced to build up skill rather than count on luck. A good example is Final Fantasy bosses, they sometimes kill you the first time but you can usually beat them the second time, not because you get lucky or gain levels but because you learn how to fight them. That is much more rewarding than "I just went through a round of combat without taking major damage, better save!"

quote:
I do think it adds to the fun. Dying itself isn''t very fun, but the fact that you can die alters the nature of the game in a way that often makes the game more exciting.

I agree with this 100%. Why do people like things like cliff diving, bungee jumping, etc? When you complete a high risk activity there is a high reward. I can think of numerous times in games where I have been low on health and just barely managed to scrape my way out of the situation, and other times of severe dissapointment when I didn''t quite make it. Drama! If failure was just a slap on the rest it wouldn''t really be very exciting.

Also I would point out that, for all practical purposes, there are only two types of failure:

a: You must repeat the part you failed.
b: You get to keep going anyway.

b makes the game trivially easy. You can call ''a'' dying or running out of lives or getting zapped back to town or whatever, the effect is still the same.

quote: Original post by AnonPoster
Although the tone is rather jokey, save/reload does make sense for practicing

Glad to hear. And yes, I was pretty well just trying to be contrary there, it made me think of something. All the examples I gave are of games that I feel I need/want to get better at. And I think that if the challenge of the game was at the correct level, then I would have no want of a save feature.

Which brings up an interesting thought. If the challenge is at an appropriate level, will the player have any need of saves (excluding for continuation)?

MadKeithV''s mention of the different saving conditions seems to be fairly accurate.

And again, a lot of the comments in this thread seem to be along the lines of "if I have to go through somethning really tough, then die, and can''t make it back, I''m going to be angry." But, I mean, truely, isn''t that what this whole postulate was about? In the perfect game, that wouldn''t matter, because the challenge would always be at an acceptable level. I guess, just as important would be that the player would trust the design and flow of the game enough so that when the perception of the difficulty became higher (either in actuality, for story, or for tension) they''d feel confident enough in the design of the game to continue on.

This goes along with my thoughts in the "Jedi II and the Art of Quick Save" thread. Simply, if a game is frusterating because of the fact that the challenge takes multiple plays through, perhaps it''s too hard. Thus if there''s multiple difficulties, play on an easier one. Maybe an automated selection of difficulties? Or something like the remake of Resident Evil''s style where they don''t say "This is wussy level, this is panzy level, this is normal, this is hard, and this is where a real man plays!"

Also, Silvermyst, I love both the time machine save, and the automatic save ideas. I think they''re both good solutions to have in a toolbox to apply to different game concepts.

Finally, I have two suggestions on making games ''Save resistant''. Both are only appropriate in games with definate decisions (ie: dialog choices in an RPG). The first suggestion is to avoid arbitrary choices. "A or B" if there''s no way to gague what''s going to happen as a result of a choice, it''s cruel to force a player to make it. The second suggestion is to make things more subtle. Not everything has to show the effect it has right away. Additionally, not everything has to be decided by one decision. It''s possible to have a chain of choices reflect something.

quote: Original post by chronos
I thought the thread was about save games, failure, and the way these relate to players' experiences.

Yes, and therefore how the removal of save games as an "accepted" form of difficulty/progress management can be buffered by modifying gameplay. I stand by my original statement - save games are ALSO a necessity for "common" CRPGs, they branch plotlines occasionally, have points of no return, and discourage replay to an extent. Hence, the removal of the save game alone is going to pretty much "fatally wound" the idea of the "common" RPG anyway.

quote: Original post by chronos
In your post you argued against fatal failure in CRPGs on the grounds that replaying certain parts was undesirable. I countered that by saying that by removing fatal failure altogether you'd no longer have a CRPG.

I can argue that you no longer have a CRPG if you remove save games, and it would nullify every post in this thread, and that would be terribly boring.

quote: Original post by chronos
The way I classify things, a story-driven game with no fatal consequences is more like an adventure game than a CRPG. In any case, the point is that fatal failure is a valid and common element in CRPGs. To me that's a very relevant issue.

To you, it may be a relevant issue, that's a difference of opinion. I think a very large part of the game-playing population would not cease calling it a CRPG just because the common penalty for failure isn't dying and having to backtrack gameplay using a seemingly out-of-gameplay mechanism, but another more immersive way of telling the player he's doing a lousy job.

quote: Original post by chronos
At some point you argued that replaying conversations, specifically, was annoying to the player. Replaying certain sections can be annoying, but this does not automatically extend to all possible sections. As for dying too often, this is not an argument against fatal failure in general, but against dying too often.

It does indeed not automatically extend to all possible sections. I think that therein lies the point I was trying (and failing ) to make, there are two possible avenues of good design:
either you allow failure and backtracking, but you make damn certain that it's not going to be annoying to do so. If conversation is really interesting time after time, it's no problem having to backtrack (though I really don't see how you can do that). If combat is fast, furious and entertaining, so what if you have to give it 24 tries before you get it right. All FPS games are based around that fact alone!
Or, the other option is if you have a game that is very involved, lengthy, yet very linear, you make sure that the player doesn't need to backtrack. If combat is long ( and possibly tedious), don't make the player fight it 10 times in a row. I point the finger to paper-and-pencil role playing games, where a few rounds of combat can easily take up a few hours of gaming time. If you die after that, and have to do it all again, your GM is going to be dodging popcorn and pretzels. It is the same with the game designer, though he's usually at a safer distance from his players.
I haven't played many recent CRPGs, and I know their trend is towards real-time combat that usually doesn't take so long, but the old TSR "gold-box" games were terrible offenders of this.

quote: Original post by chronos
I do think (dying, ed. )it adds to the fun. Dying itself isn't very fun, but the fact that you can die alters the nature of the game in a way that often makes the game more exciting.

If, and ONLY if, the consequence of dying isn't having to tediously repeat oodles of inconsequential gameplay.

Again, going back to paper-and-pencil role-playing games - what usually happens when you die? Do you backtrack? No, you don't. Your group goes on and you create a new character that is machined back into the game. This new character might suffer some penalties, most notably having missed the character-and-stat-growth of the part of the game you had already played, but in some cases simply the loss of a character you were attached to can be penalty enough to try to stay alive. Granted, that is a multiplayer game, and we had already asserted that they are different to single-player games.
I think that in a mostly-deterministic-linear game such as a roleplaying game (computer or not), the only way to backtrack is to go back only to the end of the last part of deterministic gameplay, i.e. usually past the end of the last conversation you had. Which means replaying battles if you die, until you beat the battle. This is fine for some players, who enjoy doing the battle scenes more than they enjoy the steady progress through the game by meeting challenges quickly or slowly.
Yet there are many (including me, Wavinator, and Kylotan, I think) that find little value in having to replay the battles over and over until victory, especially if this happens because of artificially-inflated battle difficulty because the designer wanted to challenge the save/reloaders. People like us will be saying "but, I did not buy this game because I wanted to play a beat-em-up/strategy game".

You can come back and say "that is one of the basic features of the CRPG", and you'd be partially correct. It's one of the possible views of the genre (combat interspersed with a bit of story), which can be reversed (story interspersed with a bit of combat).

Oh well, I think I'm far enough off-topic now eh eh eh. I guess my point is that I believe combat difficulty to be artificially inflated in many CRPG game designs because of the save/reload facility, whereas I believe that the game should be designed so that the careful, conscientious and attentive player would not be expected to ever get killed (or put into any kind of fatal failure) unless the story dictated it. To put it another way, a careful player would never need to reload. What ThoughtBubble said above
That is not to say that the difficulty should be trivial, but rather instead of save/reload to recover, there could be other, more immersive mechanisms to lengthen the time required to finish the game if you fail to meet the intended skill level of the game.

And again, this only applies to those games where backtracking is not desirable because it would most likely only lead to a very limited change in circumstance. This is not the case with any action games, where the point IS the action, and getting a bit more of it is not supposed to be a bad thing (eh, Daikatana).

[edited by - MadKeithV on May 23, 2002 4:01:16 AM]

Death: The *possibilty* of death is a challenge ... if the game tries to keep you alive or you cant die at all, its just a click-trough which gets boring very fast imo. No, you shouldnt die often, not even once .. unless you mess up.

quote: Original post by Ketzer
Death: The *possibilty* of death is a challenge ... if the game tries to keep you alive or you cant die at all, its just a click-trough which gets boring very fast imo. No, you shouldnt die often, not even once .. unless you mess up.

Again, why would death be the only penalty on the player available to the game designer? Why would not having death make it a click-through? Death is not the only thing that can influence the rest of the gameplay, and in fact it is the most destructive of all.

Just a quick point on something that was said earlier on in this thread, as I really do have other things that are more important to be doing.

quote:
Original post by AnonPoster
I would also point out that challenge IS the point of many, if not most, games. Any sports game, any board game, any multi-player competitive game. There is
no "adventure" or narrative. What's the narrative in Super Mario? What's the narrative in SF2? What's the adventure in NASCAR Racing? In the end most
games are about mastering play mechanics to meet a challenge. Last time I checked CounterStrike wasn't a compelling story.

Ah, don't confuse a predetermined 'narrative' with providing the experience of an adventure. Narrative in the form of lots of plot, ISN'T necessary to provide the feeling of partaking in an adventure. When you ask where is the narrative in Super Mario, consider (the later games in the series ie. Super Mario World, and Mario 64). There may not be a major narrative element to them, but the player gets a feeling of partaking in an adventure, as they explore strange worlds (icy levels, chocolate levels etc), and overcoming the bizarre enemies.


Does this have much to do with save games?


[edited by - Ketchaval on May 24, 2002 8:42:09 AM]

quote: Original post by ThoughtBubble
And yes, I was pretty well just trying to be contrary there, it made me think of something. All the examples I gave are of games that I feel I need/want to get better at. And I think that if the challenge of the game was at the correct level, then I would have no want of a save feature.

Oop well now I totally disagree. I don''t think the "correct" challenge level for a game like Tekken is that you can pick it up and immediately be good at it.

I would point out that in a mutliplayer competitive game that''s really impossible. Skill is relative. As long as the game takes any amount of skill at all a beginner will be worse than an expert.

But even in single player, a game you can pick up and instantly be good at sounds lame. It is nice to pick it up and understand how to play, to recognize *why* you died and what you need to improve, but being good from the start seems to imply the game is brain-dead easy. Any new activity takes ramp-up time.

quote:
Which brings up an interesting thought. If the challenge is at an appropriate level, will the player have any need of saves (excluding for continuation)?

IMO the appropriate challenge level is that it is quite possible to lose, but quite possible to win as well. The real threat of loss should be there but no overwhelming. That is why playing fighting games is always the most fun when your opponent is about the same level as you. You could win or lose so you better try your best.

When you first start learning to play tennis you don''t expect to win every game, or ANY game. For games based around challenge I think this same logic applies. Tennis isn''t too hard - it just takes skill that you have to develop.

quote:
The first suggestion is to avoid arbitrary choices. "A or B" if there''s no way to gague what''s going to happen as a result of a choice, it''s cruel to force a player to make it.

This is like those choose-your-own-adventure books where you end up randomly dying for no apparent reason. You''ll get to a part like:

You encounter a big dragon. Do you want to:
a: Run, turn to page 212
b: Fight, turn to page 45

Page 212: You turn to run, but trip and fall. It eats you try again.

Basically you choose the very immediate action but have no control of what happens after that. The most frustrating is when it tells you that your character decided on something fatal, even though YOU are the character.