I wish all games would just let you save whenever you want to! Why is using checkpoints and auto saves so common?
At least add a quit and save option if you want to avoid save scumming.
These days I just want to be able to squeeze in some gaming whenever I can even if it’s just quick sessions. That’s annoyingly hard in games that won’t let you save.
Game state can be a tricky thing. By saving at certain points you just need to maintain a few things, like player health and inventory and which checkpoint they were at. And it’s only got worse the more things a game has to keep track of.
The solution was used by all last gen and current gen consoles and even the DS and 3DS, which is to suspend the game. This is fine, the Steam Deck can do this too. It’s not perfect. Power loss can lose the data, and some won’t let you play something else while another game is suspended. But for general use over short sessions, it’s alright.
It’s less useful on PC because it probably will crash the game anyway, and normally you’d want to use the PC for other things.
It was tricky when the hard drive space was limited. Now we have basically free SSDs and saving the game is just the nature of serealisation of all the data. You don’t have to write your own solution even, it’s all was figured out decades ago
Sure, but none of it is as simple as just saving what you need to at fixed points, and letting the console handle the suspend function.
Oh, and additionally: what happens when you softlock yourself by saving just as you’re about to die? Is the player to blame? Sure. Will they blame you anyway? You betcha.
Depends on how weird of a bullshit you’re doing and what engine are you using, but sometimes it’s even easier, you just use the readily available module.
As for the second point, you avoid it by giving the user control on when they save, you allow them to save unlimited amount of times, and you do some autosaves here and there. We have this technology since forever, we just never used it on consoles before because hard drives for it were expensive
I do use that. I have a Series X but I play on PC as well. Some games aren’t available on xbox and sometimes the TV might be occupied or I might want to squeeze in some quick gaming while already at my desk.
Iirc they are working to integrate it into the Steam client on desktop wherever possible (and to try to allow for cloud syncing the game state between devices.) Not sure how it’s been going but iirc it was never going to be made available until after the UI update (which came out quite recently.)
Kill enemy, save, make certain jump, save. Takes a lot of risk out of the game. I like when games let you save anywhere but if you restart the game or load your save you start in the beginning of a room regardless of where you saved from. (Like ocarina of time)
I have to agree with this, for certain games limiting the saves is the correct answer honestly.
Something like the Fear and Hunger series wouldn’t work as well with unlimited saves anywhere because a large part of the appeal is to have to struggle and power through horrible conditions, that would be lost if you could reload every time one of your pals got their arm cut off in a fight and stuff like that
This just reads to me as an excuse for people with no self control to ruin the experience for others. I you want to limit saves, no one is making you use a quick save feature but yourself.
For a well adjusted person that seems absolutely, ludicrously stupid.
I will avoid or return any game that doesn’t respect my agency as a human being. I don’t need external systems to limit me because I’m not a mental toddler and I understand how to have fun.
I understand limiting saves to avoid savescumming. Not allowing you to save and quit whenever you want in Funger makes no sense though. I quickly installed a mod for Termina to suspend and resume the game because it’s ridiculous to have to play 3+ hours straight before being allowed to close the game.
That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have “save and exit” create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.
Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.
Indeed. But on the other hand, the thing at risk is the player’s time, and only the player can manage it appropriately. A game that doesn’t respect that can quickly become a chore.
Either the developers hit technical limitations of their save system and couldn’t reliably restart everything. I feel like RDR2 did this because most of their missions were very specific scripted sequences that needed to be kept on track from the start. A lot of roguelikes are unable to save during a run or within a node of that run. For example Peglin and Void Bastards. It’s much easier to say what node or position the player is at than all the AI states, combat, etc. Additionally, automatic saving has always been difficult. Everyone knows the whole “the game auto-saved and now I die instantly over and over again” bug that happens in any game. The way to negate this is to use checkpoints with areas where you know the player isn’t going to get attacked. Another way is to try to detect when you are in combat or not but this can lead to the game never saving. Overall it’s much easier to just save a state that you know the player will be okay to start back up in.
Or the designers felt like it added something to the game like in Alien Isolation. Save points allow you to exit and designers are trying to focus on keeping players playing. So save points are also an exit point. When you allow the player to save, you allow the player to exit without feeling like they must continue going. Designers use this to try to keep their games more engaging. Super Meat Boy removed a few exit points from typical platformers in order to make the game faster. A lot of games try to be so easy to keep playing that they make it hard to stop. In some ways, this can be seen as a dark pattern in game design. Typically though, designers aren’t trying to be nefarious but instead trying to keep the game engaging.
Ugh… I wish more developers kept their customers engaged by making good games instead of creating some meta game to keep the hamster wheel running. That feels like a lot of MMO’s…
In some cases, yes, they are trying to keep the wheel running and make the player less likely to quit by using psychology. Valve is very famous for deploying psychology in their games. Specifically DOTA and CSGO. But a lot of the time the design intent is innocent. In Super Meat Boy the intent was clearly and well stated that they didn’t want the player to blame the game and to keep them trying again as quickly as possible. If you are going to make a tough platformer then it’s clearly a good design choice to allow players to keep trying as fast as possible. With Alien Isolation, again the design intent is innocent as they are just looking to add tension and give the player some sense of relief from that tension. Most media follows a flow of tension then drops to relief a bit, then tension. If you keep the reader/player/viewer/etc tense all the time then they become dull to it. Frankly, it’s why I haven’t gone back into Red Dead 2 for about a week. The game has just mounted tension over and over again without a break to just be a cowboy. Always something to do and something to prepare for.
That’s funny I found the total opposite with red dead. Too much stupid bullshit like fishing and getting shaved and twenty minute fucking horse rides and not enough actual fun gameplay, just filler all the time. Of course I tried to play it like a completionist when I probably should’ve treated it like grand theft auto and just advanced the story by doing more missions.
I agree in that regard. It’s more story tension rather than action or shootouts. The downtime doesn’t feel like downtime to me but instead character-building. In the next parts of the game immediately something happens to that character. So they build the character up just to get you invested so when something happens it feels like it went to shit but it’s a constant rushed pace. I didn’t engage in the hunting or fishing more than what the story required as much as I am into the robbery and stuff that mainly comes from the missions but the missions bring this character drama that while really good, is too much at times.
Eh, that’s honestly not a great solution. It’s a bandaid workaround. Getting better detection on when to auto-save or auto-saving at known good times is a lot better. The multiple auto-save solution is a good fallback but not the definitive answer. You could also just make the player invincible for 1-2 seconds after a save load and then also cast their position to the navmesh to make sure you save them in a place that they aren’t going to immediately fall to their death or out of the map. A lot of open-world games now just restart your character entirely leaning up against a building in the world or camping or whatever. Making it feel like the player character has their own agency and actions while you just play them for a while.
It’s also a compounding issue, that’s just one of the technical issues over many. In the end, it really depends on the type of game you are building. Every game is released incomplete, even the biggest masterpiece, the developers wanted to do something more. So you balance the technical issues between saving the real-time states or just saving off some simple data like you were at this mission in this area, with this inventory, with these player stats. Even that is a lot to keep track of and test. To then add stuff like AI states, active combat, randomization data, etc. I understand why a lot of roguelikes don’t save most of the active game data. After all, developing games is very hard and the save system is not a high priority to the general experience of the game.
No, those are all worse than just having multiple saves and more user control. I hate those approximate save systems because they force me to waste time getting back to what I was doing when I load a save.
That’s fair, you can certainly like the multiple saves and more user control. Personally, I feel like it boils down to what type of game I am playing. If I am playing a large RPG then yes, auto-save multiple times and let me have a ton of user control. if I am playing a roguelike in which a run will be over in 15 minutes, I don’t mind not having any control over my saves because I don’t care about an individual run most of the time. If I do, I spend the extra 5 minutes and finish up the run. For something like Just Cause or RDR2, I feel like their general save system is fine enough and gives a good cinematic feeling which outweighs any time I spend getting back to whatever I was trying to do. Which is typically just a few steps away from what I found.
That said I’m probably diving too deep into this stuff. I develop games for a living so I am constantly thinking about the best system for the game. I don’t think every game would be better if it had a multiple-save slot auto-save system. I can understand why it’s not in scope or would hurt the experience. If Alien Isolation had just saved where ever you are, that game wouldn’t have been as intense as it was. It’d ruin the game.
It’s fine to like the system, it works well for a lot of games but maybe it’s not a one-size fits all solution?
I just watched a video that covered this in part. You want to keep the player immersed in the game experience. The more interfaces you give them, the more they’re taken out of the experience.
So autosaves are a great way to keep the user interacting with the game and feeling immersed.
Autosaves are great and all… I just want to be able to quit whenever. There’s usually a confirmation when you’re trying to quit anyway. Just save and quit then. :P
I’m glad at least some games still allow you to do that.
The easiest way to break immersion is frustration. Not adding options to take color blindness into account does not add immersion for colorblind people because it’s more like the real world or has less UI. It adds frustration and ruins any chance of them being immersed.
What frustrates us is not a universal and static list of concepts, so neither is immersion.
I hate when folks ask for this and assholes say “people will just use this to save scum, don’t cheat.” As if working adults with children should be able to dedicate a whole hour totally uninterrupted.
Also, who cares? It’s your game; play it however you like. I mean, isn’t the whole reason why people play video games is to have fun? If save scumming is your idea of fun, I say scum away.
The problem being that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is that will make them happy. Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy. Being to save the game state at any point makes a lot of games much too easy to be any fun. And while you might argue “well just don’t save all the time,” people are also bad at creating their own handicaps to increase fun.
Yes, there are exceptions to every generalization (see: OSRS Ultimate Ironman) but by and large there’s a reason why the most popular kind of games are set up the way they are.
You ever play Monopoly Go? Straight-up not fun because it’s basically impossible to lose.
I know what will make me happy and it’s not being forced to sit for a full hour through a rogue like just because of whiny goobers complaining to the devs so they don’t implement save and quit.
Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy
That’s how you feel about it, though, not an objective thing everybody feels the same about. I absolutely cheat whenever I’m finding a game too difficult, and I assure you, I’m still enjoying the game. I don’t know what people get out of what I find to be the extremely infuriating act of repeatedly failing over and over until I finally get it right, but I have not ever felt the sense of accomplishment I’m told I should feel after finally beating something I struggled with. I feel angry and like I wasted a bunch of time when I could have been enjoying something more fun.
I’m just trying to have a good time, not compete with myself or prove that I can learn just the right way and right time to hit certain button combos or whatever.
The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.
Different games are for different styles of fun and for different people. Heck, some games are more like walk-through stories than actual games. If the game is too hard for you to enjoy, then that game just isn’t for you, that’s all. Let other people have their difficult games and find a different one to enjoy. When I played Monopoly Go and found it boringly easy, I didn’t complain that they should make it harder so I could enjoy it, I just recognized that I wasn’t the kind of player they were targeting and found something else to play.
These are subjective statements though and different people want different things. And difficulty variation can broaden the audience while not really changing the game. Sometimes I love a fight. Sometimes I want a story. Sometimes I want to couch coop with my youngest kid and he struggles with some games that he otherwise loves (looking at you Cuphead) that an easier mode would totally fix. And he absolutely loves Sonic, but the originals would be unplayable for him if not for modern saving and non permadeath. Or emulation with save states and cheat codes.
Why are you trying to convince people that if a game is too difficult or long periods between saving doesn’t work for them then it is their fault and not that of the game design. That’s a weird stance to take. If someone designed a car that was generally very nice but with the gear shift next to the passenger seat door, would you say that is just a car for people with super long arms or would you say that was a poor design choice that is going to massively limit an otherwise nice car?
This is more like you complaining that some cars don’t come with automatic transmission options. Sorry buddy, some of us like sports cars and having an automatic transmission option would devalue the very concept of what that particular car is.
I still haven’t beaten Super Mario Brothers. I’ve gotten very close, but I choked on the final Bowser multiple times. I’m not mad at Nintendo for that. I’m not even mad at myself for that. I had loads of fun playing Super Mario Brothers and being able to save would lower the value of the game.
I don’t understand why you’re insistent that all games need to cater to your desired difficulty level. Some games are made for you, some games are made for other people. Chasing the widest audience possible is how you end up with bland art, be it games, movies, social media platforms, or any other thing people enjoy.
Look, you said it yourself. Different people want different things, and what some people want is fundamentally incompatible with what you want. So, you get a different set of games than they get.
This seems to act like games and their default difficulty options are commandments carved in stone when they’re not. If I find a game to difficulty to enjoy and then find it enjoyable by cheating, that’s what I’m gonna do.
Piggybacking your comment to mention that for single player games on PC, setting CheatEngine’s “speedhack” to 0x multiplier will effectively pause many games, albeit this does eventually crash some games.
I use it on a toggle hotkey to go get water, let the dogs out, take out my laundry, sign for a delivery, etc. when playing games with no pause system.
That’s a large part of why, with older games, I prefer to use emulators, even if they’re available to me in other ways. I love the “save state” option. It’s terribly exploitable, of course, but it sure is convenient to be able to save literally anywhere.
The exploitable argument never made sense to me for single player games. I play Fallout, if I wanted anything and everything with a 100ft tall character, every companion, and infinite health. But of course I don’t do any of that because it would ruin my own fun.
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there’s people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I’m enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
I agree, though I think part of why that is is that so few games make failure interesting. The only one I can think of that truly accomplished making failure compelling is Disco Elysium.
Again, I see the desire to savescum as a symptom more than anything else. If you find yourself reaching for the quickload button, it’s because the game didn’t make it interesting enough to keep going despite something going wrong.
This is at least the case for choice-based situations, where it’s incredibly common for there to be an “optimal route” and for the alternative or failure-state to be much inferior in both rewards and enjoyment.
For games where overcoming a challenge is the primary experience, such a beating a Dark Souls boss, then sure. Being able to quicksave at the start of each phase of a boss would be bad since the point is to overcome the challenge of managing to scrape through the entire fight.
I think that’s a matter of preference. I don’t think many video games have good writing (even compared to a lot of casual popular “beach read” type books), so I get my story telling from however many audiobooks I can squeeze into 2x 40-50 hours a week. I want challenges in games and I want distinct fail states to punish failure.
The only reason is hardware limitation. I imagine it’s more difficult to load at any point in the game in a massive game due to how much is stored in your memory.
Let’s say you’re playing a game and there’s 6 NPCs outside and they’re doing their own thing.
If the game has a traditional save system, when you exit the save location it’s normal for these entities to rest let their position. Maybe at best their properties (maybe they were wet because of rain) are saved.
But it’s much easier to just not save any of this info and reload everything from scratch and only save your progress and location.
I think some custom game engines have creative solutions for handling instant saving and loading. For example System Shock has save and load without any delay. But it is a fairily simplistic game at the same time.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back.
If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
The thing I fucking hate is when the game doesn’t make it obvious when a checkpoint is activated. Then you go to quit the game: “Everything since the last checkpoint will be lost”. Well WHEN WAS THE LAST MOTHERFUCKING CHECKPOINT, ASSHOLE?
I hate that even when it is obvious. If I save and then immediately quit and it says “everything since the last save will be lost” I’m always paranoid that it means I didn’t actually save correctly.
I mean, I hate that too. “I’m going to lose 5 seconds of progress?! Oh no!” It ought to be able to see that I didn’t do anything progress-relevant in those 5 seconds and just skip the dialog…
Add counters to progression:
20/180 quests completed
1805/9456 dialogue choices explored
567/568 npcs killed
95/102 areas explored
And whatever else you define as progress
Add this info into your save data. When quitting the game, open the most recent save, read the counters, compare to current values, display a nondescript “you’ve had a little/a lot of/no progress since you last saved, are you sure you want to quit without saving?” Shouldn’t take so long that it triggers a lag spike, I don’t think.
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Game state can be a tricky thing. By saving at certain points you just need to maintain a few things, like player health and inventory and which checkpoint they were at. And it’s only got worse the more things a game has to keep track of.
The solution was used by all last gen and current gen consoles and even the DS and 3DS, which is to suspend the game. This is fine, the Steam Deck can do this too. It’s not perfect. Power loss can lose the data, and some won’t let you play something else while another game is suspended. But for general use over short sessions, it’s alright.
It’s less useful on PC because it probably will crash the game anyway, and normally you’d want to use the PC for other things.
It was tricky when the hard drive space was limited. Now we have basically free SSDs and saving the game is just the nature of serealisation of all the data. You don’t have to write your own solution even, it’s all was figured out decades ago
Sure, but none of it is as simple as just saving what you need to at fixed points, and letting the console handle the suspend function.
Oh, and additionally: what happens when you softlock yourself by saving just as you’re about to die? Is the player to blame? Sure. Will they blame you anyway? You betcha.
You can still have checkpoints and auto saves at intervals. That way you can reload if you save a second before dying or whatever.
Depends on how weird of a bullshit you’re doing and what engine are you using, but sometimes it’s even easier, you just use the readily available module.
As for the second point, you avoid it by giving the user control on when they save, you allow them to save unlimited amount of times, and you do some autosaves here and there. We have this technology since forever, we just never used it on consoles before because hard drives for it were expensive
All consoles support game suspension these days. The Xbox lets you keep multiple games suspended, just use that.
I do use that. I have a Series X but I play on PC as well. Some games aren’t available on xbox and sometimes the TV might be occupied or I might want to squeeze in some quick gaming while already at my desk.
There also exist PC gamers though
Sounds like a them problem. And to be fair, you can suspend games via Steam OS so it’s more of a windows problem.
Pretty petty response to the hole in your grand sweeping statement left by literally millions of gamers.
Also “to be fair” is a phrase meant to give the benefit of the doubt to the side you’re arguing against, not to reinforce your own argument.
emulators have this ability
True but that won’t help with many modern games.
I believe steam can also
Really? Any idea how?
I have to test it more but it was just resuming the game on steam
I think creators should make the games they want and users should buy the games they want
Meh, annoying save systems won’t stop me for buying an otherwise great game but it will somewhat bug me while playing.
Sounds like you’re buying what you want.
Well of course. There’s always room for improvement though.
Hear hear.
Rest mode if you’re on the PS
Yeah, quick resume on xbox as well and that’s great, most modern games use it. Not all though and not on PC.
Implementation probably. Checkpoints are easy because you don’t have to save the entire game state, just the progression.
Yeah, good point and that’s a valid reason I suppose.
It’s still very nice when you have more flexibility.
Wish PC games could implement something like the xbox quick resume or something.
That’s already a thing on the steam deck and it works with almost any game.
Microsoft could implement it for Windows too, but people will want still use their computer when pausing a game so it’s a lot harder to do.
Wonder is Valve could implement that on windows as well?
Iirc they are working to integrate it into the Steam client on desktop wherever possible (and to try to allow for cloud syncing the game state between devices.) Not sure how it’s been going but iirc it was never going to be made available until after the UI update (which came out quite recently.)
That would be awesome, I hope they can do it!
Kill enemy, save, make certain jump, save. Takes a lot of risk out of the game. I like when games let you save anywhere but if you restart the game or load your save you start in the beginning of a room regardless of where you saved from. (Like ocarina of time)
I have to agree with this, for certain games limiting the saves is the correct answer honestly.
Something like the Fear and Hunger series wouldn’t work as well with unlimited saves anywhere because a large part of the appeal is to have to struggle and power through horrible conditions, that would be lost if you could reload every time one of your pals got their arm cut off in a fight and stuff like that
This just reads to me as an excuse for people with no self control to ruin the experience for others. I you want to limit saves, no one is making you use a quick save feature but yourself.
The medium is full of design decisions that measurably saved players from ruining their own good time.
For a well adjusted person that seems absolutely, ludicrously stupid.
I will avoid or return any game that doesn’t respect my agency as a human being. I don’t need external systems to limit me because I’m not a mental toddler and I understand how to have fun.
That’s the reason for a lot of gameplay design decisions these days.
Players have zero self-discipline so developers need to adjust their games so that players don’t optimize the fun out of them.
I understand limiting saves to avoid savescumming. Not allowing you to save and quit whenever you want in Funger makes no sense though. I quickly installed a mod for Termina to suspend and resume the game because it’s ridiculous to have to play 3+ hours straight before being allowed to close the game.
That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have “save and exit” create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.
Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.
Indeed. But on the other hand, the thing at risk is the player’s time, and only the player can manage it appropriately. A game that doesn’t respect that can quickly become a chore.
It’s a balancing act, artistic choice and such. Also depending on the company, it might be designed to increase engagement to keep you addicted
Perhaps, but that can just as easily backfire. A game that disrespects my time earns my contempt, both for it and for the people who made it.
For example, I returned Red Dead Redemption 2 and now avoid Rockstar games, in part for this reason.
I liked on Postal where if you saved too often it would announce “My grandmother could beat the game if she saved as much as you do”
I feel like the answer is twofold.
Either the developers hit technical limitations of their save system and couldn’t reliably restart everything. I feel like RDR2 did this because most of their missions were very specific scripted sequences that needed to be kept on track from the start. A lot of roguelikes are unable to save during a run or within a node of that run. For example Peglin and Void Bastards. It’s much easier to say what node or position the player is at than all the AI states, combat, etc. Additionally, automatic saving has always been difficult. Everyone knows the whole “the game auto-saved and now I die instantly over and over again” bug that happens in any game. The way to negate this is to use checkpoints with areas where you know the player isn’t going to get attacked. Another way is to try to detect when you are in combat or not but this can lead to the game never saving. Overall it’s much easier to just save a state that you know the player will be okay to start back up in.
Or the designers felt like it added something to the game like in Alien Isolation. Save points allow you to exit and designers are trying to focus on keeping players playing. So save points are also an exit point. When you allow the player to save, you allow the player to exit without feeling like they must continue going. Designers use this to try to keep their games more engaging. Super Meat Boy removed a few exit points from typical platformers in order to make the game faster. A lot of games try to be so easy to keep playing that they make it hard to stop. In some ways, this can be seen as a dark pattern in game design. Typically though, designers aren’t trying to be nefarious but instead trying to keep the game engaging.
Ugh… I wish more developers kept their customers engaged by making good games instead of creating some meta game to keep the hamster wheel running. That feels like a lot of MMO’s…
In some cases, yes, they are trying to keep the wheel running and make the player less likely to quit by using psychology. Valve is very famous for deploying psychology in their games. Specifically DOTA and CSGO. But a lot of the time the design intent is innocent. In Super Meat Boy the intent was clearly and well stated that they didn’t want the player to blame the game and to keep them trying again as quickly as possible. If you are going to make a tough platformer then it’s clearly a good design choice to allow players to keep trying as fast as possible. With Alien Isolation, again the design intent is innocent as they are just looking to add tension and give the player some sense of relief from that tension. Most media follows a flow of tension then drops to relief a bit, then tension. If you keep the reader/player/viewer/etc tense all the time then they become dull to it. Frankly, it’s why I haven’t gone back into Red Dead 2 for about a week. The game has just mounted tension over and over again without a break to just be a cowboy. Always something to do and something to prepare for.
That’s funny I found the total opposite with red dead. Too much stupid bullshit like fishing and getting shaved and twenty minute fucking horse rides and not enough actual fun gameplay, just filler all the time. Of course I tried to play it like a completionist when I probably should’ve treated it like grand theft auto and just advanced the story by doing more missions.
I agree in that regard. It’s more story tension rather than action or shootouts. The downtime doesn’t feel like downtime to me but instead character-building. In the next parts of the game immediately something happens to that character. So they build the character up just to get you invested so when something happens it feels like it went to shit but it’s a constant rushed pace. I didn’t engage in the hunting or fishing more than what the story required as much as I am into the robbery and stuff that mainly comes from the missions but the missions bring this character drama that while really good, is too much at times.
The right way to handle auto saves potentially being at bad times is to just keep the last 5 or so of them, and allow multiple manual saves too.
Eh, that’s honestly not a great solution. It’s a bandaid workaround. Getting better detection on when to auto-save or auto-saving at known good times is a lot better. The multiple auto-save solution is a good fallback but not the definitive answer. You could also just make the player invincible for 1-2 seconds after a save load and then also cast their position to the navmesh to make sure you save them in a place that they aren’t going to immediately fall to their death or out of the map. A lot of open-world games now just restart your character entirely leaning up against a building in the world or camping or whatever. Making it feel like the player character has their own agency and actions while you just play them for a while.
It’s also a compounding issue, that’s just one of the technical issues over many. In the end, it really depends on the type of game you are building. Every game is released incomplete, even the biggest masterpiece, the developers wanted to do something more. So you balance the technical issues between saving the real-time states or just saving off some simple data like you were at this mission in this area, with this inventory, with these player stats. Even that is a lot to keep track of and test. To then add stuff like AI states, active combat, randomization data, etc. I understand why a lot of roguelikes don’t save most of the active game data. After all, developing games is very hard and the save system is not a high priority to the general experience of the game.
No, those are all worse than just having multiple saves and more user control. I hate those approximate save systems because they force me to waste time getting back to what I was doing when I load a save.
That’s fair, you can certainly like the multiple saves and more user control. Personally, I feel like it boils down to what type of game I am playing. If I am playing a large RPG then yes, auto-save multiple times and let me have a ton of user control. if I am playing a roguelike in which a run will be over in 15 minutes, I don’t mind not having any control over my saves because I don’t care about an individual run most of the time. If I do, I spend the extra 5 minutes and finish up the run. For something like Just Cause or RDR2, I feel like their general save system is fine enough and gives a good cinematic feeling which outweighs any time I spend getting back to whatever I was trying to do. Which is typically just a few steps away from what I found.
That said I’m probably diving too deep into this stuff. I develop games for a living so I am constantly thinking about the best system for the game. I don’t think every game would be better if it had a multiple-save slot auto-save system. I can understand why it’s not in scope or would hurt the experience. If Alien Isolation had just saved where ever you are, that game wouldn’t have been as intense as it was. It’d ruin the game.
It’s fine to like the system, it works well for a lot of games but maybe it’s not a one-size fits all solution?
I just watched a video that covered this in part. You want to keep the player immersed in the game experience. The more interfaces you give them, the more they’re taken out of the experience.
So autosaves are a great way to keep the user interacting with the game and feeling immersed.
Autosaves are great and all… I just want to be able to quit whenever. There’s usually a confirmation when you’re trying to quit anyway. Just save and quit then. :P
I’m glad at least some games still allow you to do that.
The easiest way to break immersion is frustration. Not adding options to take color blindness into account does not add immersion for colorblind people because it’s more like the real world or has less UI. It adds frustration and ruins any chance of them being immersed. What frustrates us is not a universal and static list of concepts, so neither is immersion.
I hate when folks ask for this and assholes say “people will just use this to save scum, don’t cheat.” As if working adults with children should be able to dedicate a whole hour totally uninterrupted.
Also, who cares? It’s your game; play it however you like. I mean, isn’t the whole reason why people play video games is to have fun? If save scumming is your idea of fun, I say scum away.
The problem being that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is that will make them happy. Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy. Being to save the game state at any point makes a lot of games much too easy to be any fun. And while you might argue “well just don’t save all the time,” people are also bad at creating their own handicaps to increase fun.
Yes, there are exceptions to every generalization (see: OSRS Ultimate Ironman) but by and large there’s a reason why the most popular kind of games are set up the way they are.
You ever play Monopoly Go? Straight-up not fun because it’s basically impossible to lose.
I know what will make me happy and it’s not being forced to sit for a full hour through a rogue like just because of whiny goobers complaining to the devs so they don’t implement save and quit.
That’s how you feel about it, though, not an objective thing everybody feels the same about. I absolutely cheat whenever I’m finding a game too difficult, and I assure you, I’m still enjoying the game. I don’t know what people get out of what I find to be the extremely infuriating act of repeatedly failing over and over until I finally get it right, but I have not ever felt the sense of accomplishment I’m told I should feel after finally beating something I struggled with. I feel angry and like I wasted a bunch of time when I could have been enjoying something more fun.
I’m just trying to have a good time, not compete with myself or prove that I can learn just the right way and right time to hit certain button combos or whatever.
The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.
Different games are for different styles of fun and for different people. Heck, some games are more like walk-through stories than actual games. If the game is too hard for you to enjoy, then that game just isn’t for you, that’s all. Let other people have their difficult games and find a different one to enjoy. When I played Monopoly Go and found it boringly easy, I didn’t complain that they should make it harder so I could enjoy it, I just recognized that I wasn’t the kind of player they were targeting and found something else to play.
These are subjective statements though and different people want different things. And difficulty variation can broaden the audience while not really changing the game. Sometimes I love a fight. Sometimes I want a story. Sometimes I want to couch coop with my youngest kid and he struggles with some games that he otherwise loves (looking at you Cuphead) that an easier mode would totally fix. And he absolutely loves Sonic, but the originals would be unplayable for him if not for modern saving and non permadeath. Or emulation with save states and cheat codes.
Why are you trying to convince people that if a game is too difficult or long periods between saving doesn’t work for them then it is their fault and not that of the game design. That’s a weird stance to take. If someone designed a car that was generally very nice but with the gear shift next to the passenger seat door, would you say that is just a car for people with super long arms or would you say that was a poor design choice that is going to massively limit an otherwise nice car?
This is more like you complaining that some cars don’t come with automatic transmission options. Sorry buddy, some of us like sports cars and having an automatic transmission option would devalue the very concept of what that particular car is.
I still haven’t beaten Super Mario Brothers. I’ve gotten very close, but I choked on the final Bowser multiple times. I’m not mad at Nintendo for that. I’m not even mad at myself for that. I had loads of fun playing Super Mario Brothers and being able to save would lower the value of the game.
I don’t understand why you’re insistent that all games need to cater to your desired difficulty level. Some games are made for you, some games are made for other people. Chasing the widest audience possible is how you end up with bland art, be it games, movies, social media platforms, or any other thing people enjoy.
Look, you said it yourself. Different people want different things, and what some people want is fundamentally incompatible with what you want. So, you get a different set of games than they get.
This seems to act like games and their default difficulty options are commandments carved in stone when they’re not. If I find a game to difficulty to enjoy and then find it enjoyable by cheating, that’s what I’m gonna do.
Pretty much this. And if they’re worried about that just make it so you can only save and quit?
This is a big part of what I like about the steam deck, being able to stop instantly is huge, especially on a handheld.
Piggybacking your comment to mention that for single player games on PC, setting CheatEngine’s “speedhack” to 0x multiplier will effectively pause many games, albeit this does eventually crash some games.
I use it on a toggle hotkey to go get water, let the dogs out, take out my laundry, sign for a delivery, etc. when playing games with no pause system.
In my opinion, single player games without a pause function are disrespectful to the player and I’m not going to reward them with money.
“But my game is hard! You should never be able to feel safe! Not even to pause! Because it’s hard!”
Yes, well, sometimes I have to use the toilet.
I never thought “being able to pause the game” would be on a list of deal breakers for me, but here we are.
That’s a large part of why, with older games, I prefer to use emulators, even if they’re available to me in other ways. I love the “save state” option. It’s terribly exploitable, of course, but it sure is convenient to be able to save literally anywhere.
The exploitable argument never made sense to me for single player games. I play Fallout, if I wanted anything and everything with a 100ft tall character, every companion, and infinite health. But of course I don’t do any of that because it would ruin my own fun.
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there’s people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I’m enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
I get what you’re saying, but save scumming is a pretty easy trap to fall into.
@conciselyverbose@kbin.social
I agree, though I think part of why that is is that so few games make failure interesting. The only one I can think of that truly accomplished making failure compelling is Disco Elysium.
I’m perfectly fine with it being a setting you can disable, but I do personally strongly prefer a game to enforce some kind of save restriction.
Again, I see the desire to savescum as a symptom more than anything else. If you find yourself reaching for the quickload button, it’s because the game didn’t make it interesting enough to keep going despite something going wrong.
This is at least the case for choice-based situations, where it’s incredibly common for there to be an “optimal route” and for the alternative or failure-state to be much inferior in both rewards and enjoyment.
For games where overcoming a challenge is the primary experience, such a beating a Dark Souls boss, then sure. Being able to quicksave at the start of each phase of a boss would be bad since the point is to overcome the challenge of managing to scrape through the entire fight.
I think that’s a matter of preference. I don’t think many video games have good writing (even compared to a lot of casual popular “beach read” type books), so I get my story telling from however many audiobooks I can squeeze into 2x 40-50 hours a week. I want challenges in games and I want distinct fail states to punish failure.
The only reason is hardware limitation. I imagine it’s more difficult to load at any point in the game in a massive game due to how much is stored in your memory.
Let’s say you’re playing a game and there’s 6 NPCs outside and they’re doing their own thing.
If the game has a traditional save system, when you exit the save location it’s normal for these entities to rest let their position. Maybe at best their properties (maybe they were wet because of rain) are saved.
But it’s much easier to just not save any of this info and reload everything from scratch and only save your progress and location.
Ironically Bethesda games track tons of stuff on the world state and still let you save pretty much anywhere.
That is one thing they got right I guess.
Some games seem to manage it quite well though? But yeah, they probably had to pit a lot more energy into implementing it.
I think some custom game engines have creative solutions for handling instant saving and loading. For example System Shock has save and load without any delay. But it is a fairily simplistic game at the same time.
Reason is “Game state is hard”.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back. If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
The thing I fucking hate is when the game doesn’t make it obvious when a checkpoint is activated. Then you go to quit the game: “Everything since the last checkpoint will be lost”. Well WHEN WAS THE LAST MOTHERFUCKING CHECKPOINT, ASSHOLE?
Yeah, it really can’t be that hard to show a saving indicator…
I hate that even when it is obvious. If I save and then immediately quit and it says “everything since the last save will be lost” I’m always paranoid that it means I didn’t actually save correctly.
“obvious” means, I think, that it says something like “last saved 5 seconds ago”
I mean, I hate that too. “I’m going to lose 5 seconds of progress?! Oh no!” It ought to be able to see that I didn’t do anything progress-relevant in those 5 seconds and just skip the dialog…
Now you’re talking about doing a save state comparison to avoid one line of dialogue. Have fun with the preceding lag spike, I guess.
Add counters to progression:
20/180 quests completed
1805/9456 dialogue choices explored
567/568 npcs killed
95/102 areas explored
And whatever else you define as progress
Add this info into your save data. When quitting the game, open the most recent save, read the counters, compare to current values, display a nondescript “you’ve had a little/a lot of/no progress since you last saved, are you sure you want to quit without saving?” Shouldn’t take so long that it triggers a lag spike, I don’t think.
Will a change in position be considered a progress though? How far?
There are a lot of questions to answer in such a case, so I’d argue that a timer is good enough