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?
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.
“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 progressAdd 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
Yeah, it really can’t be that hard to show a saving indicator…
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.
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.
Yes!
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!
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.
I get what you’re saying, but save scumming is a pretty easy trap to fall into.
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 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…
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.
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.
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).
Fair, not the best example
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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.
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The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.
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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.
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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.
Pretty much this. And if they’re worried about that just make it so you can only save and quit?
Omg remember games that didn’t have saving but had a code you had to write down on physical paper to get back to where you were?
JUSTIN BAILEYVery much so! For the longest time I had a xerox of some gaming magazine with all the save codes for Lemmings!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 👍
