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.
I wonder what the reason for this is?
Back in the day of 8/16bit computers we had the solution for this. The action replay cartridge. Could save the exact machine state at any time.
Save states would be nice. Just dump the game’s data from ram to disk.
That would probably take up a ton of space though. :)
Well, it adds a bit of suspense to a horror game. Not very scary if you can just save every minute.
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.
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!
Or pause during cut scenes!
Or skip cutscenes.
Or allow you to accidentally skip cutscenes when you didn’t mean to.
OMG this drives me nuts.
Yes!
Fucking death stranding
To be fair, Kojima games are primarily vehicles for cut-scene delivery. Gameplay is a bonus.
You can pause during cutscenes. Just finished it yesterday, and certainly needed it because some of those suckers are 30 minutes long.
That was my only issue with the otherwise excellent Shovel Knight! It had very long levels and only saved once you beat them.
Because that’s how the 8 bit games it was replicating worked, if they even had saves at all.
I’d never play that on PC. It would work on xbox though since quick resume just let’s ju pop out to the dashboard and resume whenever. It’s not foolproof but I’ve only had to restart from a checkpoint a few times.
Like someone else above said, on PC you can just use Cheat Engine to speed hack it to 0x speed, pausing the game!
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
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)
Takes a lot of risk out of the game.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Dude, I remember people going OFF on Returnal not offering any saves and people having to keep their consoles in rest mode for days at an end because they wouldn’t want their runs to end. I kept arguing with people on rexxit that any respectable rogue-lite/-like has a save function - STS, Hades, Dead Cells - yet they still kept arguing that implenting saves would “ruin the vision of the game” and “make it too easy”.
Guess what Housemarque did: they added a save on exit option. You can now suspend your run and finish it whenever. Not having to potentially brick your console just because you can’t save mid-game sure is a boon lol. The game sure got a lot easier with this implemented. /s
STS does allow you to cheese the game with its save system, which is why most roguelikes also delete the save file after they load it, only saving the game when you need to put a bookmark in it to come back later.
Fair, not the best example
It certainly helped me during my first Slay the Spire runs, when I’d often mess up the order of the cards (the most common being applying vulnerable AFTER doing all of my attacks).
Oh no, some cheated in a single player game!
It’s a problem when cheating changes people’s opinions on how fun the game is. If the game forces you to use a certain mechanic that you otherwise would have ignored, that often gives you a better appreciation for the game. In the case of a roguelike, if you can cheese the save system, you’re no longer required to actually get good at the game systems and can instead keep reloading until the memorize the solution, which is the entire problem the genre is out to solve.
Why do you care? It’s like Sheldon complaining that people are having fun wrong.
I mean, if you’re knowingly turning on cheat codes in a game, you know you’re deviating from the intended experience, but if you’re doing something the software lets you do, that’s something the designer is trying to tune to steer you toward having a better time. Often times you can take a dominant strategy and think less of the game for it being too easy or one-note, which can and does happen when you can exploit a save system like this. I got through the first Witcher game mostly by save scumming, and I didn’t think particularly highly of it, but the sequels did a much better job of introducing me to the potions, oils, and monster hunting mechanics that would have made the game easier and more solvable without save scumming. Had I known for the first game what I knew of the sequels, I might have enjoyed the game more, but that first game especially didn’t force me into learning those systems.
You’re viewing games as perfect and the designers’ vision as always correct. That’s not always true. Take XCom 2. Many people may tell you that ironman mode (prevents save scumming) is the only real way to play but the game is buggy as hell. Not only do things not always work right sometimes the game just crashes. A buddy of mine has lost multiple save files because of it. The game doesn’t force you to use ironman mode so it’s not a counterargument to what you’re saying but it is illustrative of the point I’m making about games not being perfect.
Also, why do you view save scumming as the dominant strategy? In reality, many difficult and unforgiving games all but force players to use specific strategies to win. Everything you’re saying about gamers avoiding fun choices for optimum ones is not unique to save scumming. Many games already force players to do this and things like save scumming can actually allow players to try different builds that are less optimal.
It’s like someone saying the only true way to enjoy a book is by physically reading a physical copy and that audiobooks are more optimal and therefore less fun. No. Different people just want different things.
Many of the B side challenges in Celeste I played with the 90% speed accessibility option. Trying for 30 minutes to try and get a single damn strawberry was just too much for me. I still had a blast playing it.
I’m neither assuming that a game is perfect or that the designer’s vision is always correct, but the designer is intending for you to experience a game a certain way, and it’s often most fun that way. If certain strategies are dominant such that they invalidate large portions of the game that are there, it usually results in that game being boring. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that’s how these things tend to go. The Witcher is a much more interesting game for me when you utilize potions, oils, and monster manuals, and I found the combat to be quite boring when I didn’t know how to interact with those systems and instead just reloaded saves for better dice rolls. By forcing you to play a certain way, like by omitting certain save systems, they’re making sure you play the way they intended, and if the game is as good as they hoped to have made it, it will result in the most people having the best time.
Here’s another example. Batman: Arkham combat is an amazing replication of what Batman is in video game form. It’s one man taking on dozens of others, usually more lethally armed than he is, with some athleticism and a bunch of gadgets. You’re incentivized via the scoring/XP system to never button mash, use every move in your arsenal at least once, never get hit, and to take out every enemy in the room in a single flowing combo. However, it didn’t steer most players into playing that way very effectively (at least on normal difficulty), and many leave the combat system disappointed that they can beat it just by attacking with X and countering with Y.
That became a problem when achievements/trophies were added.
Oh no, someone is lying about achieving an achievement.
Exactly… when you can cheat achievements in any game you want anyway. It’s a non-issue.
One of my favorite things about the DS family was its pick up and play nature. Sure not every game would let you save and quit, but you could just shut the lid and come back later and everything will still be right where you left it.
Steam Deck and all home consoles let you do that now. It’s only PC gamers who don’t have the function.
New to the Deck, am afraid to do that since it screwed up with Cloudpunk the one time i did it, just sent it to sleep with the power button and when it came back it had issues (don’t recall exactly what right now, a black screen i think) and remained until i did a full Deck reboot, feel like it’s a classic PC issue which makes sense, now i don’t send it to sleep until i’ve saved and quit
Some games will fail on it. It’s more of a hack, than something that game devs coded for like they have to on other platforms.
Same, and now one of my favorite things about the Switch and Steam Deck 👍
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?
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
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.
Recently playing Child of Light. The game has this autosave system that whenever you use a skillpoint or craft an oculi (gives attributes) by accident, it just saves then and there. Kinda fucked me up often
