@Sporky: Your analogies aren't very convincing. DMC3 had an easy mode you had to unlock after dying. It was pretty damn easy too, you could mash your way through the mode. None of the enemies even have enough life to combo worth a damn. Nobody marked it down for having it. Now lets compare this real example where a game with an easy mode was not marked down to your examples, where you exaggerated and carefully constructed fake examples in an attempt to falsely strengthen your point.
Perhaps you should look at real games that exist that have easy modes and are marked down on difficulty despite the normal and higher being very difficult. This way you might have some evidence behind the broad claims you are making about human nature.
There's no excuse, at all, for not having at the very least a quick save and exit game function.
Come on, games are marked up or down all the time based on their difficulty level. Apparently it would magically solve all difficulty problems if you could save state anywhere.
But my main point wasn't even regarding that, which I notice you carefully avoided. Sense of accomplishment from being forced into a difficult situation? Normal, intelligent people abusing systems where abuse is possible? Choosing to play a different game where the save system suits you? What about those games where death deletes your save?
No comment.
I have no problem whatsoever with quick save and exit that's deleted upon return. You can't save scum that, and you can quit at anytime. I just don't think saving anywhere should be allowed, in the interests of letting people pick their difficulty, because it simply does not work. It's like expecting someone not to mod a moddable game because they might want the "true experience." Everybody mods it, in practice.
You could always make quicksaving a luxury that has disadvantages.
For example, have quicksaving make a mild but cumulative penalty on some function of the game. Like finding ammo in boxes, you get a bit less if you quicksave just before you get to the box. Something like that.
This way people who are suffering through a really horribly difficult section can quicksave through it to get through it right then and there, but are still having the survival resource mentality because now they know that "damn now i'm not going to have as much ammo for the next bit" or something like that.
Integrate saving more tightly into the resources mentality.
People who quicksave a lot would end up with a game that is a lot more difficult to get through as the cumulative penalties would make the game a lot tougher.
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First of all, I think implementing specific save points is the opposite of lazy. Save anywhere is "add a save menu," boom done. Save at specific points requires level planning, good or bad. But it's there. So on that.
I disagree. Save points mean "just record the inventory and a few state flags". Usually loading a save point save resets a shitload of stuff.
Save anywhere means "record a fuckton more things", including where the player is, what he's holding, what crap he has on the ground, so on, so forth.
Save anywhere RPG saves tend to get pretty huge, while save point RPG saves are tiny.
Come on, games are marked up or down all the time based on their difficulty level. Apparently it would magically solve all difficulty problems if you could save state anywhere.
But my main point wasn't even regarding that, which I notice you carefully avoided. Sense of accomplishment from being forced into a difficult situation? Normal, intelligent people abusing systems where abuse is possible? Choosing to play a different game where the save system suits you? What about those games where death deletes your save?
No comment.
I have no problem whatsoever with quick save and exit that's deleted upon return. You can't save scum that, and you can quit at anytime. I just don't think saving anywhere should be allowed, in the interests of letting people pick their difficulty, because it simply does not work. It's like expecting someone not to mod a moddable game because they might want the "true experience." Everybody mods it, in practice.
I didn't avoid it. I just found your invented analogies pretty bad and wanted to criticise them in particular.
I agree with games which delete your save, that's a pretty obvious game design choice. Most of those games let you save to exit at any time though.
Accomplishment is not based entirely around quicksaving or not. You can up the difficulty of sections if you allow quicksaving. You can increase the complexity of the situations you have to encounter, etc. You gotta remember people need to react after loading, so they can't just quicksave in the middle of a fire fight while shooting at someone. They're going to load in and die because they're not going to be thinking the same way they were when they got to that point the first time. Anticipation is a large part of reacting, and coming in fresh from a load is like being dropped straight into a combat zone. It's not as helpful as you'd think.
But ultimately I do see the gist of the point of removing difficulty via free quicksaving, I just don't think it's a big enough argument to turn around and avoid quicksaving all together. I don't think it's black and white, obvious and unassailable.
In particular, quicksaving is most detrimental to games where strategising before you encounter each situation is more important than reaction speed and combat reflexes in each combat.
That's why most fps include quicksaves and it doesn't matter much. If you can't shoot straight, quicksaving isn't going to help you at all. These games tend to be so combat intensive, which each combat having so many possible choices and things to react to, that having long checkpoints in between combats can easily result in insurmountable difficulty.
But this can be solved by making quicksaves affect the strategic choices you make in quasi rpg style games, which is what survival horror tends to be (for example, deadspaces upgrading weapons and gear). As opposed to having them be a free resource.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I disagree. Save points mean "just record the inventory and a few state flags". Usually loading a save point save resets a shitload of stuff.
Save anywhere means "record a fuckton more things", including where the player is, what he's holding, what crap he has on the ground, so on, so forth.
Save anywhere RPG saves tend to get pretty huge, while save point RPG saves are tiny.
I didn't think of it like that. Does the establishment of what to record take more work than establishing where you can record, though? Recording more data may not necessarily mean more work going into it.
This is leaning into the topic than I really expected to so I'll just take your word on it; again, didn't think of it that way.
I disagree. Save points mean "just record the inventory and a few state flags". Usually loading a save point save resets a shitload of stuff.
Save anywhere means "record a fuckton more things", including where the player is, what he's holding, what crap he has on the ground, so on, so forth.
Save anywhere RPG saves tend to get pretty huge, while save point RPG saves are tiny.
This is not true for RPGs. FF1 on the NES allowed you to save anywhere on the world map, it didn't warp you back to a town or anything. Current HP, MP, items, everything was saved, and this was back in the 8-bit era. This stuff is not difficult.
If I save at a save point I also expect it to save what I'm holding and what's on the ground. Saving at any location in an RPG just means that instead of saving one piece of data (the ID of the save point you're at), it has to save the map you're on and your x/y/z position/rotation on that map. If it's a more complex game like an FPS it's as simple as saving all the variables currently in RAM, as if the game were paused and needed to be unpaused. This may be even easier than trying to save stuff like x/y/z position, since you can just say "do a complete RAM save" and be done with it. It might be a larger save file but nobody cares about data size anymore.
I didn't think of it like that. Does the establishment of what to record take more work than establishing where you can record, though? Recording more data may not necessarily mean more work going into it.
This is leaning into the topic than I really expected to so I'll just take your word on it; again, didn't think of it that way.
Well, the file size thing is for sure, take Deus Ex, for instance, it records the positions of a ludicrous amount of shit you can drop, and there are a fuckton of npc states and conversation options and things like that.
I'm pretty sure that it takes one of the coders more time to make a system that tracks all that then a system that just saves your static inventory, like in FF7, for instance, and a few flags. Also, consider GTAIII. The save file has your cash, weapons, ammo, unlocks, basic stats (number of kills, deaths, etc) and missions. the state of the world is reset, it doesn't register your wanted level, the positions of any NPCs and peds and cars, etc.
And regarding the whole "should games have save anywhere" issue: I have a wife and a dog. FUCK YEAH I WANNA SAVE ANYWHERE.
It gets ridiculous quick. I have to go back and delete very old saves from time to time because the folder is taking up multiple gigabytes.
I haven't played the Witcher, but to be honest I think this is just lazy coding. There is no good reason for a single save to be that large. I mean, consider the sort of data you'd have to save for one really dynamic object:
X/Y/Z position, and roll/pitch/yaw - 12 bytes
X/Y/Z acceleration and velocity - 12 bytes
X/Y/Z rotational acceleration and velocity - 12 bytes
Other positional data such as current map or screen - 6 bytes
Level and six stat points that can be up to 65535 each - 14 bytes
Inventory of up to 255 items, each one with up to 20 bytes of data - 5100 bytes
Other character data such as ID number in the game world and flags - 20 bytes
AI, current thoughts, current actions and behavior - let's say 2048 bytes
A lot of miscellaneous other items, such as skills or combos or score, to be generous - 512 bytes
That's 7736 bytes, or 7.5 kb. If you want it to be really really dynamic you can throw in complete mesh and texturing data and up it to an even 20 kb. Even with all that, it's enough for 51 objects/characters in a single megabyte.
And indeed, Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex games of all time, saves anywhere with complete positioning, inventory and AI, and I've got a save file right here that's less than 5 meg.
I'm pretty sure that it takes one of the coders more time to make a system that tracks all that then a system that just saves your static inventory, like in FF7, for instance, and a few flags. Also, consider GTAIII. The save file has your cash, weapons, ammo, unlocks, basic stats (number of kills, deaths, etc) and missions. the state of the world is reset, it doesn't register your wanted level, the positions of any NPCs and peds and cars, etc.
Is that supposed to mean it's too difficult, or perhaps that an 8 meg memory card is just a bit too small? It would be trivial for them to save your current surroundings in GTA3. The PS2 only had 32 meg of RAM, and you don't have to save things like building models and textures, just positions and AI of everything.
I think it's more that they want people to be sure they can load up a save from a year ago and not be surrounded by cops and about to die.
Especially your earlier line about "frowning on that sort of person" who thinks people should play games as they see fit. You take games so seriously, they're just entertainments.
I seriously dislike this kind of attitude. It's very elitist and unnecessarily drawing a line in the sand between people for no good reason.
So true.
I end up having to keep games on pause for inordinate amounts of time and, while I am out running errands or doing whatever, have an irrational fear of my game console catching fire and burning down the house or overheating.
I end up having to keep games on pause for inordinate amounts of time and, while I am out running errands or doing whatever, have an irrational fear of my game console catching fire and burning down the house or overheating.
Honestly 'save anywhere' should be an element of the difficulty setting for any game. So, if you were a good gamer, who expected a lot of interuptions you could pick 'Hard/Save Anywhere' for the difficulty, whereas if you didn't expect them you could pick 'Hard/Checkpoints only'
Let people do something more easily, and they will, espescially if they can do it at any point. Let the player decide as part of the difficulty setting and go from there, then everyone is happy.
I disagree. Save points mean "just record the inventory and a few state flags". Usually loading a save point save resets a shitload of stuff.
Save anywhere means "record a fuckton more things", including where the player is, what he's holding, what crap he has on the ground, so on, so forth.
Save anywhere RPG saves tend to get pretty huge, while save point RPG saves are tiny.
I think Borderlands struck a decent balance here. It saves every time I pass a lamppost thing, and if I exit the game it does a full save. Then when I restart it puts me at the last New-U I passed. And it works since areas always respawn anyhow.
I haven't played the Witcher, but to be honest I think this is just lazy coding. There is no good reason for a single save to be that large.
Honestly, this just sounds like a lack of imagination on your part. I haven't played Witcher, and 150 megs sounds pretty monstrous, but 7-20kb is pretty tiny. That's like the size of an empty word doc. Having played Elder Scrolls games, where you can set a random item down just about anywhere in the world, run around, and come back and find it still there, I can see how there's a ton of things to keep track of.
Dwarf fortress may be a monstrously complicated game, but very little of that comes into play in a save file.
Honestly, this just sounds like a lack of imagination on your part. I haven't played Witcher, and 150 megs sounds pretty monstrous, but 7-20kb is pretty tiny. That's like the size of an empty word doc. Having played Elder Scrolls games, where you can set a random item down just about anywhere in the world, run around, and come back and find it still there, I can see how there's a ton of things to keep track of.
Dwarf fortress may be a monstrously complicated game, but very little of that comes into play in a save file.
I know it's the size of an empty Word doc, that's the whole point! That's literally all it takes to save a standard object in a video game. Most games wouldn't even need that much space, the rotation and acceleration and all that is just for something that has physics like a Valve game.
Just to make sure, you realize I'm saying it's 20k for one object, and not the whole save, right? An entire save for a decent game really should not exceed something like 5 megs. I wasn't specific on that in my earlier post.
I'm not a pro, but I do know what I'm talking about here. Tell me, what other data would need to be saved that would take up so much space? If you can take screenshots in-game, that could be a big deal, but you'd only need a meg or two at most per shot, and you certainly don't have to do it inside the main save file. You could let the player type out their own notes in a journal, but that only needs to be as big as a Word document too.
Think about what actually has to be saved about an item. The game already knows that "bronze dagger" is the text for object #11034, it sells for 100 gold and has two augmentation slots, and has a maximum durability of 150. You don't have to save that stuff. You save the fact that there is an instance of object #11034 at 3540x/2541y/130z, rotated 45/0/180 degrees, it has the essence of fire slotted into it and 113 durability left. That's up to 20 bytes. 52,428 objects of this type can be saved in 1 meg.
What do you mean, that Dwarf Fortress's complexity doesn't come into play? It has to save every dwarf's likes/dislikes hierarchy, their thoughts and how long they've been thinking about them, their plans for the future (move this stone to this spot) and the path they will take as they perform that action. I took that into account.
Ahh ok, that makes more sense, sporky, I did indeed think you were talking about a whole save.
And what I meant about dwarf fortress was that you kept saying ai, but the actual ai has very little to do with saves, what's more relevant is the complexity of the model (this is me being overly semantic probably, but it's what I meant at the time). It's probably about as complicated in terms of the model with most simulation games (well, maybe not most), it just doesn't hide any of it from the player like most do. That's also why I think comparisons to it don't really work, more than any other game it shows you just about every single stat and number in the game, because you need to work with them yourself.
At any rate, my point is that it's hard to know, because for most games, it's doing a lot that the player might not be privy to. Like, EV's with pokemon. I would never have guessed the game was tracking the types of pokemon you fight to know what stats should go up when leveling (or whatever it does, I don't even really know), so I wouldn't have thought it would need that space. It just depends on how the engine of the game is structured.
For the record, any time I've mentioned quicksaves, I don't explicitly mean them. A regular manual save would be even more appreciated, because it would be less likely to be limited. You usually get a single quicksave file that overrides each save. For me, saving is also about replayability as much as anything else. I can save as I want, where I want, and do the same badass thing over and over, instead of playing through the entire game 5 times. Which is why that "wipes save on load" thing is an awful idea. Hitman: Blood Money does this and it is horrible. Absolutely horrible. Honestly, the game is so easy on most settings you don't even need to save. On the occasions you do save, its so you can experiment and dick around, but it means you're in it for the long haul. You can't close down and grab a bite, you gotta love the bastard running. Worst idea, much worse than checkpoints that actually save.
I still haven't seen any argument that has convinced me that "don't save, then" isn't a valid option. Trying to trump up the difficulty issue is silly. Game mechanics vs. convenience. Having less health makes it harder, being unable save means I'm just repeating things over and over. Thats really all that means. Yes, you could say it changes the way you interact with the game, but you are still totally welcome to play it with as few saves as you want.
The best system is that Quake 4 system. If for no other reason, it has checkpoints, too. Want to play it that way? Then do it. Play by checkpoints and never save with your own fingers.
I haven't played Borderlands, but it sounds like the Diablo system. Which I've always hated. If I make a mistake, I'm completely boned. Accidentally sell that super armour of yours? Hah! NEH-NEH!
I hate quick saves. Even when I was basically PC exclusive gamer for years I avoided them like the plague. Autosaves for turn based games? Fine. Or saves at checkpoints? Or autosaves for action games every 5-10-20 minutes? Also fine. But Quicksaves themselves, user controlled? Cheating. They also promote the laziest type of game design; shit you can't succeed at without prior knowledge of the game or incredible luck/foresight.
I think portable games of all things have the right idea with suspend saves. Save at anytime, reload it up, but if you fuck up, back to the last real savepoint.
I think there would be a lot of good reasons to implement a "limited number of saves that is replenished during downtime" for a T or less rated game
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Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 2010
Like I said before, I think the vast majority of games would benefit from a quicksave function but that doesn't mean it should be something universal. Some games are constructed with a limited save system in mind and are superior products for it. To me, the problem is never the limited saves but whether or not you get hit with stupidly difficult situations or parts where you aren't warned to be adequately ready.
As far as just having people save as often as they want for any game ever, I maintain that for particular games this definitely cheapens the experience. As already mentioned, random events just become something you reload for. And with something like Dwarf Fortress, quicksaves would suck all the random disaster fun out of the game; dig out the wrong wall and flood ten floors with magma, tough shit. Figure out a way to fix it and deal with the consequences. Considering that most modern games won't even let you lose more than 5-10 minutes of progress, I'm not seeing how quicksaves are some vital thing. I play all sorts of games and I can't even think one in recent memory which didn't have multiple checkpoints and autosaves and so on for every level.
Why should developers have to drop down the difficulty of every game they make just because some people feel the need to hoard things? The save system of Dead Space did nothing to discourage me from exploring every nook and cranny. To me, the limited saves plus the checkpoint system were a far better choice than letting a player save every five steps. Dying could actually mean something besides a 5-second time penalty as I loaded up my last save.
I've got a job and family to work around too, but is pausing the game long enough to deal with something really that heinous? If there's a real emergency, the last thing you'll be worried about is losing ten minutes of a game. If it isn't, throw it on pause or take a couple minutes to hit a save point. People went nuts about the save system in Dead Rising; I played it last week and had zero problem with the save system considering any place to save was no more than a minute or two away.
I definitely see where some people are coming from on this, but I also think that doing away with limited saves entirely would make certain games far less entertaining for lots of people. No risk, no reward, which is how I view being able to save anywhere in anything. But an easy solution would just be the one from Blood Money: each difficulty level means fewer saves with the top having no saves. If people want unlimited saves, they pick the appropriate difficulty level; people who don't can pick a higher difficulty level.
The Blood Money system was awful. It deleted your saves if you closed the game.
The already existing Hitman system was much better, if not feeling arbitrary (don't wanna save? Don't save! repeat ad nasuem). It had the scaling limit, but you could, ya know, get bored after an hour and leave the game. I always felt that was a handy feature, because things like experimenting were plausible. In both SA and Contracts, I have countless "moments" saved, when I've set-up everything just right for some dramatic purposes. I love going back and playing those moments again, delete-on-exit is silly. Sometimes you just want to chase down a naked guard through a British mansion, with all his buddies lying on the floor.
Nobody should ever advocate such a system unless they have a grudge against time and effort.
Going back to the suspend mode conversation - Is there any reason my consoles can't do it? I'm just as likely to receive a phone call / call of nature / emergency / spur of the moment reason to stop gaming as I am to reach a destination while using a portable. Why isn't there at the very least a low-power state / "sleep mode" option built into the OS of any of the systems on the market? Sure, I couldn't use the device for anything else while I were using the feature, but it's better than nothing and has been already done with handhelds. I'd prefer a true suspend save feature, but a "sleep mode" could very easily be built into the machine itself and not need to be thrown in by each and every developer.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The Blood Money system was awful. It deleted your saves if you closed the game.
The already existing Hitman system was much better, if not feeling arbitrary (don't wanna save? Don't save! repeat ad nasuem). It had the scaling limit, but you could, ya know, get bored after an hour and leave the game. I always felt that was a handy feature, because things like experimenting were plausible. In both SA and Contracts, I have countless "moments" saved, when I've set-up everything just right for some dramatic purposes. I love going back and playing those moments again, delete-on-exit is silly. Sometimes you just want to chase down a naked guard through a British mansion, with all his buddies lying on the floor.
Nobody should ever advocate such a system unless they have a grudge against time and effort.
No, the ONE PART of the Blood Money system was bad; the gradation of saves vs difficulty was a great idea. And even then, I actually did not know that since the levels are all short enough to complete in 20-30 minutes. Considering the quality of the rest of the game, the save system is definitely not what I remember most about Blood Money.
As for the idea of being able to "suspend" console games (and some PC games as well), yeah, that would be a pretty great idea. People who want to save and quit wherever they are can do so and the game doesn't have to suffer for it.
No, the ONE PART of the Blood Money system was bad; the gradation of saves vs difficulty was a great idea. And even then, I actually did not know that since the levels are all short enough to complete in 20-30 minutes. Considering the quality of the rest of the game, the save system is definitely not what I remember most about Blood Money.
I don't know if BM was really easy, or if it was my having played all previous installments, but I went through each level with Silent Assassin rating in what felt like minutes. Possibly because all I ever had to do was find the target, push him down stairs, run away. Exploring the more entertaining manners of execution would require time, time I won't be allotting if I can't disperse it.
That aside, the BM save system was the same thing as previous games (I think, wasn't it?), with that horrible attachment to it. Delete-on-quit is just silly. I don't know how else to put it, its silly. I can see what they were trying to do, because in previous installments you could get around the 7/5/3/X saves by loading up an earlier save and not using as many saves moving forward. It still doesn't excuse how they just tossed out replayability to a make the game "hard"... even though it isn't on any setting. Its a fallacy, that save systems make a game hard, they don't, game mechanics do, and I don't count saves as part of that mechanic.
I point you to Velvet Assassin for the ultimate failure of checkpoint saves. That game was... I got it free, and I'd like to pretend it simply never happened.
For the life of me, I cannot think of a game that benefited so greatly from checkpoints/autosave/whatever, that it makes sense to actually nix proper save systems. Granted, I never spent time in the town of Silent Hill or Raccoon City and I don't own any consoles, so I'll never really get checkpoint/auto/whatever-only save systems.
I'm also curious as to what people mean by suggesting people will abuse a proper save system. Is the suggestion that it, in anyway, matters how I or others get their enjoyment from the product? Because thats silly. If the argument is that you will not be able to resist and save everywhere, then that is your problem, one that should not hamper my own enjoyment because devs got this zany idea that less is more. Again, the perfect system will incorporate just about every type of save system, allowing the player the responsibility of that "difficulty". I keep getting the feeling that its the latter option, and I can't help but think of that as odd.
I'm also curious as to what people mean by suggesting people will abuse a proper save system. Is the suggestion that it, in anyway, matters how I or others get their enjoyment from the product? Because that's silly. If the argument is that you will not be able to resist and save everywhere, then that is your problem, one that should not hamper my own enjoyment because devs got this zany idea that less is more. Again, the perfect system will incorporate just about every type of save system, allowing the player the responsibility of that "difficulty". I keep getting the feeling that its the latter option, and I can't help but think of that as odd.
Conversely, if you can't handle the idea of actually having risk in a game because you can't save every minute or two, that's your problem and I don't think all of my games should have to get crutches for that. Blood Money was focused on a being a tense, story-driven game of assassination, not a sandbox game about funny ways to kill people. For this intent the given save system, aside from the clear-on-quit nonsense, was perfectly acceptable. Yeah, it could've been better, but while killing people in a clown suit is all good fun, it isn't what brings me back to the game so I couldn't care less if I can't keep a perfect Killer Klown save hanging around. Blood Money could've done just fine with a mode which didn't "count" for anything (like advancing to the next level) but let you save wherever and whenever you want and keep a stack of saves, but of the two options I'm glad that it went with limited saves over unlimited ones forever.
Take an extreme example like I Wanna Be The Guy. If you could quicksave anywhere, beating the game would be meaningless. Places which should be nightmarish would be breeze. I argue that, like IWBTG, some games are objectively better if people can't effectively cheat their way through each and every difficult situation. I posit that Dead Space was one of these since the game relied hugely on atmosphere, particularly the atmosphere of imminent death. Given the option, a person is going to quicksave constantly simply out of human nature. Removing the option means they have to confront the tension rather than kill it by quicksaving every ten feet. It's perfectly understandable to not like it that way, but it's a superior way to present the game.
I just think it's not a great idea to assume that what would work well for many games would work well for all of them. I've played all sorts of games on all sorts of PC setups and consoles and think that there are certainly times when a limited save system is a much better choice for a given game. I certainly wish it was present in something like Just Cause 2 so I could more easily do crazy things, but that's only one variety of game.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Going back to the suspend mode conversation - Is there any reason my consoles can't do it? I'm just as likely to receive a phone call / call of nature / emergency / spur of the moment reason to stop gaming as I am to reach a destination while using a portable. Why isn't there at the very least a low-power state / "sleep mode" option built into the OS of any of the systems on the market? Sure, I couldn't use the device for anything else while I were using the feature, but it's better than nothing and has been already done with handhelds. I'd prefer a true suspend save feature, but a "sleep mode" could very easily be built into the machine itself and not need to be thrown in by each and every developer.
I was going to suggest the PS3 PS button, which drops you into the PS3 interface over the game you're playing. But that doesn't really do the whole low-power bit. They almost had it!
I just like games that have both checkpoints and quicksaves. Having just played through Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, it's astoundingly convenient to have the game pace itself through frequent checkpoints but also have the ability to save midway through a tricky section or just prior to quitting. This whole 'I can't resist the temptation to use something that I know will make the game less fun for me' attitude is baffling, personally.
I'll also add this - checkpoints are far more tolerable in genuinely good games. A situation where the core mechanics are just fun to play around with (such as Mario Galaxy) or where dying is frequently hilarious and encourages strategic thinking (such as Resident Evil 4) means that replaying small sections is no great chore - although much longer than this and even they risk becoming tiresome. Most games, however, just don't hold up well to this - much like the average book or film, seeing something for the third or fifteenth time is just immensely boring. I can't count the number of games where I've hit a difficulty roadblock of some kind, gotten bored and given up - a quicksave would frequently make these situations avoidable.
So are quicksaves just a crutch for lazy design? Often, yes. A perfectly structured and paced game would place checkpoints very frequently after each 'beat' in the game's flow, and you'd never feel the need to quicksave. But this assumes such games exist - I can't think of a single checkpoint-only game where at some point I haven't become immensely frustrated by a combination of bad game design and poorly-placed checkpoints. Remember the gulag shower sequence in Modern Warfare 2? Quick saves might be a crutch, but sometimes I need that crutch to actually enjoy something.
Of course, I approach games as 'interactive entertainment' - I gain no satisfaction from succeeding at some arbitrary challenge imposed by the developers - so this has doubtless coloured my views.
For the worst save solution ever, direct your eyes to Tomb Raider III
Is this like the first one, where there are giant blue glowy crystals that actually disappear once you use them, so in order to not waste them you have to ignore them and forge ahead and come back to use them later?
That was even worse than Resident Evil. Every typewriter breaks after one use!
Honestly 'save anywhere' should be an element of the difficulty setting for any game. So, if you were a good gamer, who expected a lot of interuptions you could pick 'Hard/Save Anywhere' for the difficulty, whereas if you didn't expect them you could pick 'Hard/Checkpoints only'
The funny thing is that I never voted for any of you to decided what save system is right for me.
As I said, I'm a married man, and I really couldn't give a fuck about your opinions about save games. Games with "save anywhere" systems get a ton of points because I can leave them anytime the wife calls. I'm just glad you silly geese opinions are not heard by anyone who matters.
I hardly ever play PS2 games anymore, because I can't afford to be annoyed by that ancient saving mindset. Portable and PC games don't try to impose some sort of moronic "honor" bullshit on my real life. Hell, even multiplayer games get in the way, because I can't just drop them.
On top of all that, I also happen to hate redoing stuff needlessly... i.e., replaying a piece of game because of a crash/corrupted memory card/wife called/ingame death, instead of replaying the whole game because I loved it. And plentiful saving helps me avoid that kind of thing. I've never beaten a LOT of my Gamecube and PS2 games thanks to memory card corruption.
If you guys like your games hard as a kick in the balls, fine, more hardness for you, but that's NOT my problem. If you honestly think saving is bad, just don't save, then. Just don't come try to convince me that free saving is cheating or wrong or cheap or unmanly.
The funny thing is that I never voted for any of you to decided what save system is right for me.
As I said, I'm a married man, and I really couldn't give a fuck about your opinions about save games. Games with "save anywhere" systems get a ton of points because I can leave them anytime the wife calls. I'm just glad you silly geese opinions are not heard by anyone who matters.
Nobody's trying to decide on a system system that should be used all the time for every game, because every game has different needs. I think most people here understand that. And I don't think anyone cares about your opinions either, but it doesn't really need to be pointed out or discussed, since that's a given for any online conversation.
I used to be a quicksave addict (well, not sure if I still am in FPS games) but I appreciate games with frequent (very frequent) checkpoints so I just keep going ahead and trying without mashing quicksave after every single corner.
Then again, I have been playing more puzzle/platformer/whatever games than singleplayer FPS games for a while. I bet if I continue Stalker again I will be mashing qui-
OH ... that reminds me of GTA 4.
FUCK checkpoints. I'll take my quicksave button addiction anytime over the GTA4 goosery.
All I ask for is an option where you can quicksave, quit the game but once you reload the save is lost. Like many roguelikes, NSMBWii etc.
That way the developers can put in checkpoints or whatever the hell they want and if I have to leave abruptly I can continue my game from where I left it...but if I die then I go back to the last checkpoint.
As long as they're not stupidly far apart it's a fine system.
TheBana on
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Sooooo.... I didn't realize this thread was going to cause so much controversy... but back to the task at hand - after seeing the replies, I guess my problem isn't so much with PC gaming, since yes, most games do allow you to save at any time. It's more with my PS3. I'd just like some recommendations of good games with save anywhere built in.
I went from playing the God of War collection to FFXIII and both have the damn save stations. Hell I don't really even mind a good checkpoint system, as long as they come frequent enough. MW2 for example is one that I didn't have a problem with.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have something like Demon's Souls, which saves ALL the time. Which was both a blessing and a curse, but hey Demon's Souls is meant to be a bitch if you're not careful
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited April 2010
The thing that I don't get is why anyone thinks a quicksave system is not suited to every game.
If the developers have a specific experience in mind, they can just say "for optimum game experience, we recommend waiting until pre-set autosave points to save your game. If you don't want to deal with our bullshit, feel free to hit the quicksave button at any time."
That way, you guys who like your checkpoints are happy, guys who like their quicksave points are happy, everyone is happy!
I've noticed that almost every PC game that uses checkpoints also lets you create a save if you can access the console (usually with the ` key). Most of the time you just type 'save' and it saves. Far Cry, for example.
I've read most of this thread, but not all, so I may be repeating what's been said. My preference is for a continual save system, combined with check points.
I want to be able to quit and save at any time because I have other stuff to do but I don't want to be able to save and reload quickly. It takes away the tension for me if I can just continually retry an area. What fun would a platformer be if you could save after every jump?
And putting a quick save option in and saying "Oh only use it if you want to" is all very well and good... but I would use it, I don't have the will power not to. I was playing Demon's Souls the other day and I KNEW pretty much as soon as I walked through one of those wobbly doors that something evil was lurking behind it. Something that could kill me in two hits. Something that could kill me and wipe out the last 30 minutes I'd put in to the game. And that was damn scary.
If I could have quick saved at this point it'd have taken away the whole atmosphere of the game. There wouldn't be the fear. I play games to be engrossed, not just to progress successfully at every step without mistake.
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Come on, games are marked up or down all the time based on their difficulty level. Apparently it would magically solve all difficulty problems if you could save state anywhere.
But my main point wasn't even regarding that, which I notice you carefully avoided. Sense of accomplishment from being forced into a difficult situation? Normal, intelligent people abusing systems where abuse is possible? Choosing to play a different game where the save system suits you? What about those games where death deletes your save?
No comment.
I have no problem whatsoever with quick save and exit that's deleted upon return. You can't save scum that, and you can quit at anytime. I just don't think saving anywhere should be allowed, in the interests of letting people pick their difficulty, because it simply does not work. It's like expecting someone not to mod a moddable game because they might want the "true experience." Everybody mods it, in practice.
For example, have quicksaving make a mild but cumulative penalty on some function of the game. Like finding ammo in boxes, you get a bit less if you quicksave just before you get to the box. Something like that.
This way people who are suffering through a really horribly difficult section can quicksave through it to get through it right then and there, but are still having the survival resource mentality because now they know that "damn now i'm not going to have as much ammo for the next bit" or something like that.
Integrate saving more tightly into the resources mentality.
People who quicksave a lot would end up with a game that is a lot more difficult to get through as the cumulative penalties would make the game a lot tougher.
Save anywhere means "record a fuckton more things", including where the player is, what he's holding, what crap he has on the ground, so on, so forth.
Save anywhere RPG saves tend to get pretty huge, while save point RPG saves are tiny.
I didn't avoid it. I just found your invented analogies pretty bad and wanted to criticise them in particular.
I agree with games which delete your save, that's a pretty obvious game design choice. Most of those games let you save to exit at any time though.
Accomplishment is not based entirely around quicksaving or not. You can up the difficulty of sections if you allow quicksaving. You can increase the complexity of the situations you have to encounter, etc. You gotta remember people need to react after loading, so they can't just quicksave in the middle of a fire fight while shooting at someone. They're going to load in and die because they're not going to be thinking the same way they were when they got to that point the first time. Anticipation is a large part of reacting, and coming in fresh from a load is like being dropped straight into a combat zone. It's not as helpful as you'd think.
But ultimately I do see the gist of the point of removing difficulty via free quicksaving, I just don't think it's a big enough argument to turn around and avoid quicksaving all together. I don't think it's black and white, obvious and unassailable.
In particular, quicksaving is most detrimental to games where strategising before you encounter each situation is more important than reaction speed and combat reflexes in each combat.
That's why most fps include quicksaves and it doesn't matter much. If you can't shoot straight, quicksaving isn't going to help you at all. These games tend to be so combat intensive, which each combat having so many possible choices and things to react to, that having long checkpoints in between combats can easily result in insurmountable difficulty.
But this can be solved by making quicksaves affect the strategic choices you make in quasi rpg style games, which is what survival horror tends to be (for example, deadspaces upgrading weapons and gear). As opposed to having them be a free resource.
I didn't think of it like that. Does the establishment of what to record take more work than establishing where you can record, though? Recording more data may not necessarily mean more work going into it.
This is leaning into the topic than I really expected to so I'll just take your word on it; again, didn't think of it that way.
This is not true for RPGs. FF1 on the NES allowed you to save anywhere on the world map, it didn't warp you back to a town or anything. Current HP, MP, items, everything was saved, and this was back in the 8-bit era. This stuff is not difficult.
If I save at a save point I also expect it to save what I'm holding and what's on the ground. Saving at any location in an RPG just means that instead of saving one piece of data (the ID of the save point you're at), it has to save the map you're on and your x/y/z position/rotation on that map. If it's a more complex game like an FPS it's as simple as saving all the variables currently in RAM, as if the game were paused and needed to be unpaused. This may be even easier than trying to save stuff like x/y/z position, since you can just say "do a complete RAM save" and be done with it. It might be a larger save file but nobody cares about data size anymore.
It gets ridiculous quick. I have to go back and delete very old saves from time to time because the folder is taking up multiple gigabytes.
Well, the file size thing is for sure, take Deus Ex, for instance, it records the positions of a ludicrous amount of shit you can drop, and there are a fuckton of npc states and conversation options and things like that.
I'm pretty sure that it takes one of the coders more time to make a system that tracks all that then a system that just saves your static inventory, like in FF7, for instance, and a few flags. Also, consider GTAIII. The save file has your cash, weapons, ammo, unlocks, basic stats (number of kills, deaths, etc) and missions. the state of the world is reset, it doesn't register your wanted level, the positions of any NPCs and peds and cars, etc.
And regarding the whole "should games have save anywhere" issue: I have a wife and a dog. FUCK YEAH I WANNA SAVE ANYWHERE.
I haven't played the Witcher, but to be honest I think this is just lazy coding. There is no good reason for a single save to be that large. I mean, consider the sort of data you'd have to save for one really dynamic object:
X/Y/Z position, and roll/pitch/yaw - 12 bytes
X/Y/Z acceleration and velocity - 12 bytes
X/Y/Z rotational acceleration and velocity - 12 bytes
Other positional data such as current map or screen - 6 bytes
Level and six stat points that can be up to 65535 each - 14 bytes
Inventory of up to 255 items, each one with up to 20 bytes of data - 5100 bytes
Other character data such as ID number in the game world and flags - 20 bytes
AI, current thoughts, current actions and behavior - let's say 2048 bytes
A lot of miscellaneous other items, such as skills or combos or score, to be generous - 512 bytes
That's 7736 bytes, or 7.5 kb. If you want it to be really really dynamic you can throw in complete mesh and texturing data and up it to an even 20 kb. Even with all that, it's enough for 51 objects/characters in a single megabyte.
And indeed, Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex games of all time, saves anywhere with complete positioning, inventory and AI, and I've got a save file right here that's less than 5 meg.
Is that supposed to mean it's too difficult, or perhaps that an 8 meg memory card is just a bit too small? It would be trivial for them to save your current surroundings in GTA3. The PS2 only had 32 meg of RAM, and you don't have to save things like building models and textures, just positions and AI of everything.
I think it's more that they want people to be sure they can load up a save from a year ago and not be surrounded by cops and about to die.
So true.
I end up having to keep games on pause for inordinate amounts of time and, while I am out running errands or doing whatever, have an irrational fear of my game console catching fire and burning down the house or overheating.
Honestly 'save anywhere' should be an element of the difficulty setting for any game. So, if you were a good gamer, who expected a lot of interuptions you could pick 'Hard/Save Anywhere' for the difficulty, whereas if you didn't expect them you could pick 'Hard/Checkpoints only'
Let people do something more easily, and they will, espescially if they can do it at any point. Let the player decide as part of the difficulty setting and go from there, then everyone is happy.
I think Borderlands struck a decent balance here. It saves every time I pass a lamppost thing, and if I exit the game it does a full save. Then when I restart it puts me at the last New-U I passed. And it works since areas always respawn anyhow.
Honestly, this just sounds like a lack of imagination on your part. I haven't played Witcher, and 150 megs sounds pretty monstrous, but 7-20kb is pretty tiny. That's like the size of an empty word doc. Having played Elder Scrolls games, where you can set a random item down just about anywhere in the world, run around, and come back and find it still there, I can see how there's a ton of things to keep track of.
Dwarf fortress may be a monstrously complicated game, but very little of that comes into play in a save file.
Just to make sure, you realize I'm saying it's 20k for one object, and not the whole save, right? An entire save for a decent game really should not exceed something like 5 megs. I wasn't specific on that in my earlier post.
I'm not a pro, but I do know what I'm talking about here. Tell me, what other data would need to be saved that would take up so much space? If you can take screenshots in-game, that could be a big deal, but you'd only need a meg or two at most per shot, and you certainly don't have to do it inside the main save file. You could let the player type out their own notes in a journal, but that only needs to be as big as a Word document too.
Think about what actually has to be saved about an item. The game already knows that "bronze dagger" is the text for object #11034, it sells for 100 gold and has two augmentation slots, and has a maximum durability of 150. You don't have to save that stuff. You save the fact that there is an instance of object #11034 at 3540x/2541y/130z, rotated 45/0/180 degrees, it has the essence of fire slotted into it and 113 durability left. That's up to 20 bytes. 52,428 objects of this type can be saved in 1 meg.
What do you mean, that Dwarf Fortress's complexity doesn't come into play? It has to save every dwarf's likes/dislikes hierarchy, their thoughts and how long they've been thinking about them, their plans for the future (move this stone to this spot) and the path they will take as they perform that action. I took that into account.
And what I meant about dwarf fortress was that you kept saying ai, but the actual ai has very little to do with saves, what's more relevant is the complexity of the model (this is me being overly semantic probably, but it's what I meant at the time). It's probably about as complicated in terms of the model with most simulation games (well, maybe not most), it just doesn't hide any of it from the player like most do. That's also why I think comparisons to it don't really work, more than any other game it shows you just about every single stat and number in the game, because you need to work with them yourself.
At any rate, my point is that it's hard to know, because for most games, it's doing a lot that the player might not be privy to. Like, EV's with pokemon. I would never have guessed the game was tracking the types of pokemon you fight to know what stats should go up when leveling (or whatever it does, I don't even really know), so I wouldn't have thought it would need that space. It just depends on how the engine of the game is structured.
I still haven't seen any argument that has convinced me that "don't save, then" isn't a valid option. Trying to trump up the difficulty issue is silly. Game mechanics vs. convenience. Having less health makes it harder, being unable save means I'm just repeating things over and over. Thats really all that means. Yes, you could say it changes the way you interact with the game, but you are still totally welcome to play it with as few saves as you want.
The best system is that Quake 4 system. If for no other reason, it has checkpoints, too. Want to play it that way? Then do it. Play by checkpoints and never save with your own fingers.
I haven't played Borderlands, but it sounds like the Diablo system. Which I've always hated. If I make a mistake, I'm completely boned. Accidentally sell that super armour of yours? Hah! NEH-NEH!
Thats just cruel.
I think portable games of all things have the right idea with suspend saves. Save at anytime, reload it up, but if you fuck up, back to the last real savepoint.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
As far as just having people save as often as they want for any game ever, I maintain that for particular games this definitely cheapens the experience. As already mentioned, random events just become something you reload for. And with something like Dwarf Fortress, quicksaves would suck all the random disaster fun out of the game; dig out the wrong wall and flood ten floors with magma, tough shit. Figure out a way to fix it and deal with the consequences. Considering that most modern games won't even let you lose more than 5-10 minutes of progress, I'm not seeing how quicksaves are some vital thing. I play all sorts of games and I can't even think one in recent memory which didn't have multiple checkpoints and autosaves and so on for every level.
Why should developers have to drop down the difficulty of every game they make just because some people feel the need to hoard things? The save system of Dead Space did nothing to discourage me from exploring every nook and cranny. To me, the limited saves plus the checkpoint system were a far better choice than letting a player save every five steps. Dying could actually mean something besides a 5-second time penalty as I loaded up my last save.
I've got a job and family to work around too, but is pausing the game long enough to deal with something really that heinous? If there's a real emergency, the last thing you'll be worried about is losing ten minutes of a game. If it isn't, throw it on pause or take a couple minutes to hit a save point. People went nuts about the save system in Dead Rising; I played it last week and had zero problem with the save system considering any place to save was no more than a minute or two away.
I definitely see where some people are coming from on this, but I also think that doing away with limited saves entirely would make certain games far less entertaining for lots of people. No risk, no reward, which is how I view being able to save anywhere in anything. But an easy solution would just be the one from Blood Money: each difficulty level means fewer saves with the top having no saves. If people want unlimited saves, they pick the appropriate difficulty level; people who don't can pick a higher difficulty level.
The already existing Hitman system was much better, if not feeling arbitrary (don't wanna save? Don't save! repeat ad nasuem). It had the scaling limit, but you could, ya know, get bored after an hour and leave the game. I always felt that was a handy feature, because things like experimenting were plausible. In both SA and Contracts, I have countless "moments" saved, when I've set-up everything just right for some dramatic purposes. I love going back and playing those moments again, delete-on-exit is silly. Sometimes you just want to chase down a naked guard through a British mansion, with all his buddies lying on the floor.
Nobody should ever advocate such a system unless they have a grudge against time and effort.
No, the ONE PART of the Blood Money system was bad; the gradation of saves vs difficulty was a great idea. And even then, I actually did not know that since the levels are all short enough to complete in 20-30 minutes. Considering the quality of the rest of the game, the save system is definitely not what I remember most about Blood Money.
As for the idea of being able to "suspend" console games (and some PC games as well), yeah, that would be a pretty great idea. People who want to save and quit wherever they are can do so and the game doesn't have to suffer for it.
I don't know if BM was really easy, or if it was my having played all previous installments, but I went through each level with Silent Assassin rating in what felt like minutes. Possibly because all I ever had to do was find the target, push him down stairs, run away. Exploring the more entertaining manners of execution would require time, time I won't be allotting if I can't disperse it.
That aside, the BM save system was the same thing as previous games (I think, wasn't it?), with that horrible attachment to it. Delete-on-quit is just silly. I don't know how else to put it, its silly. I can see what they were trying to do, because in previous installments you could get around the 7/5/3/X saves by loading up an earlier save and not using as many saves moving forward. It still doesn't excuse how they just tossed out replayability to a make the game "hard"... even though it isn't on any setting. Its a fallacy, that save systems make a game hard, they don't, game mechanics do, and I don't count saves as part of that mechanic.
I point you to Velvet Assassin for the ultimate failure of checkpoint saves. That game was... I got it free, and I'd like to pretend it simply never happened.
For the life of me, I cannot think of a game that benefited so greatly from checkpoints/autosave/whatever, that it makes sense to actually nix proper save systems. Granted, I never spent time in the town of Silent Hill or Raccoon City and I don't own any consoles, so I'll never really get checkpoint/auto/whatever-only save systems.
I'm also curious as to what people mean by suggesting people will abuse a proper save system. Is the suggestion that it, in anyway, matters how I or others get their enjoyment from the product? Because thats silly. If the argument is that you will not be able to resist and save everywhere, then that is your problem, one that should not hamper my own enjoyment because devs got this zany idea that less is more. Again, the perfect system will incorporate just about every type of save system, allowing the player the responsibility of that "difficulty". I keep getting the feeling that its the latter option, and I can't help but think of that as odd.
It is my favorite thing
I didn't mind the "save point" system that many older games had more commonly, but this is a much better solution
For the worst save solution ever, direct your eyes to Tomb Raider III
Conversely, if you can't handle the idea of actually having risk in a game because you can't save every minute or two, that's your problem and I don't think all of my games should have to get crutches for that. Blood Money was focused on a being a tense, story-driven game of assassination, not a sandbox game about funny ways to kill people. For this intent the given save system, aside from the clear-on-quit nonsense, was perfectly acceptable. Yeah, it could've been better, but while killing people in a clown suit is all good fun, it isn't what brings me back to the game so I couldn't care less if I can't keep a perfect Killer Klown save hanging around. Blood Money could've done just fine with a mode which didn't "count" for anything (like advancing to the next level) but let you save wherever and whenever you want and keep a stack of saves, but of the two options I'm glad that it went with limited saves over unlimited ones forever.
Take an extreme example like I Wanna Be The Guy. If you could quicksave anywhere, beating the game would be meaningless. Places which should be nightmarish would be breeze. I argue that, like IWBTG, some games are objectively better if people can't effectively cheat their way through each and every difficult situation. I posit that Dead Space was one of these since the game relied hugely on atmosphere, particularly the atmosphere of imminent death. Given the option, a person is going to quicksave constantly simply out of human nature. Removing the option means they have to confront the tension rather than kill it by quicksaving every ten feet. It's perfectly understandable to not like it that way, but it's a superior way to present the game.
I just think it's not a great idea to assume that what would work well for many games would work well for all of them. I've played all sorts of games on all sorts of PC setups and consoles and think that there are certainly times when a limited save system is a much better choice for a given game. I certainly wish it was present in something like Just Cause 2 so I could more easily do crazy things, but that's only one variety of game.
I was going to suggest the PS3 PS button, which drops you into the PS3 interface over the game you're playing. But that doesn't really do the whole low-power bit. They almost had it!
I'll also add this - checkpoints are far more tolerable in genuinely good games. A situation where the core mechanics are just fun to play around with (such as Mario Galaxy) or where dying is frequently hilarious and encourages strategic thinking (such as Resident Evil 4) means that replaying small sections is no great chore - although much longer than this and even they risk becoming tiresome. Most games, however, just don't hold up well to this - much like the average book or film, seeing something for the third or fifteenth time is just immensely boring. I can't count the number of games where I've hit a difficulty roadblock of some kind, gotten bored and given up - a quicksave would frequently make these situations avoidable.
So are quicksaves just a crutch for lazy design? Often, yes. A perfectly structured and paced game would place checkpoints very frequently after each 'beat' in the game's flow, and you'd never feel the need to quicksave. But this assumes such games exist - I can't think of a single checkpoint-only game where at some point I haven't become immensely frustrated by a combination of bad game design and poorly-placed checkpoints. Remember the gulag shower sequence in Modern Warfare 2? Quick saves might be a crutch, but sometimes I need that crutch to actually enjoy something.
Of course, I approach games as 'interactive entertainment' - I gain no satisfaction from succeeding at some arbitrary challenge imposed by the developers - so this has doubtless coloured my views.
Is this like the first one, where there are giant blue glowy crystals that actually disappear once you use them, so in order to not waste them you have to ignore them and forge ahead and come back to use them later?
That was even worse than Resident Evil. Every typewriter breaks after one use!
When game designers don't think that, and think their challenge should be getting through a selection of encounters, they use checkpoints.
I side strongly with the designers in this case.
As I said, I'm a married man, and I really couldn't give a fuck about your opinions about save games. Games with "save anywhere" systems get a ton of points because I can leave them anytime the wife calls. I'm just glad you silly geese opinions are not heard by anyone who matters.
I hardly ever play PS2 games anymore, because I can't afford to be annoyed by that ancient saving mindset. Portable and PC games don't try to impose some sort of moronic "honor" bullshit on my real life. Hell, even multiplayer games get in the way, because I can't just drop them.
On top of all that, I also happen to hate redoing stuff needlessly... i.e., replaying a piece of game because of a crash/corrupted memory card/wife called/ingame death, instead of replaying the whole game because I loved it. And plentiful saving helps me avoid that kind of thing. I've never beaten a LOT of my Gamecube and PS2 games thanks to memory card corruption.
If you guys like your games hard as a kick in the balls, fine, more hardness for you, but that's NOT my problem. If you honestly think saving is bad, just don't save, then. Just don't come try to convince me that free saving is cheating or wrong or cheap or unmanly.
Nobody's trying to decide on a system system that should be used all the time for every game, because every game has different needs. I think most people here understand that. And I don't think anyone cares about your opinions either, but it doesn't really need to be pointed out or discussed, since that's a given for any online conversation.
Then again, I have been playing more puzzle/platformer/whatever games than singleplayer FPS games for a while. I bet if I continue Stalker again I will be mashing qui-
OH ... that reminds me of GTA 4.
FUCK checkpoints. I'll take my quicksave button addiction anytime over the GTA4 goosery.
That way the developers can put in checkpoints or whatever the hell they want and if I have to leave abruptly I can continue my game from where I left it...but if I die then I go back to the last checkpoint.
As long as they're not stupidly far apart it's a fine system.
I went from playing the God of War collection to FFXIII and both have the damn save stations. Hell I don't really even mind a good checkpoint system, as long as they come frequent enough. MW2 for example is one that I didn't have a problem with.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have something like Demon's Souls, which saves ALL the time. Which was both a blessing and a curse, but hey Demon's Souls is meant to be a bitch if you're not careful
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If the developers have a specific experience in mind, they can just say "for optimum game experience, we recommend waiting until pre-set autosave points to save your game. If you don't want to deal with our bullshit, feel free to hit the quicksave button at any time."
That way, you guys who like your checkpoints are happy, guys who like their quicksave points are happy, everyone is happy!
Roguelikes also let you save any time you want ;)
I want to be able to quit and save at any time because I have other stuff to do but I don't want to be able to save and reload quickly. It takes away the tension for me if I can just continually retry an area. What fun would a platformer be if you could save after every jump?
And putting a quick save option in and saying "Oh only use it if you want to" is all very well and good... but I would use it, I don't have the will power not to. I was playing Demon's Souls the other day and I KNEW pretty much as soon as I walked through one of those wobbly doors that something evil was lurking behind it. Something that could kill me in two hits. Something that could kill me and wipe out the last 30 minutes I'd put in to the game. And that was damn scary.
If I could have quick saved at this point it'd have taken away the whole atmosphere of the game. There wouldn't be the fear. I play games to be engrossed, not just to progress successfully at every step without mistake.
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