Shelf Moments: Save Systems
Inspired by the comments for the last post on shelf moments, I’ll give save-induced shelving its due.
Jennifer brought up New Super Mario as an example: you can only save after beating certain types of levels (the harder ones), or you can hackily “purchase” a save by spending coins to unlock an area. The result is that the more expert NSMB players never have to replay an area– but the people already struggling with the game get to repeat the same areas over and over again, just to reach the boss and die again.
(As an aside, NSMB is a great counterexample to the popular opinion that Nintendo is going for casual gamers and non-gamers. Super Mario Galaxy will be another: its intricate control scheme is about as hard core as console games get nowadays.)
Modern save system failures, for the most part, can’t hold a candle to the fantastically punishing systems of old (excluding Steel Battalion, which deletes your saves if you die). The original system, of course, was no save at all: run out of lives on the last boss, and you get to replay the whole game from the beginning. Beating a game was an accomplishment, a testament to your mad gaming skillz. Everyone was happier this way– except maybe they weren’t.
One of my very first shelf moments was playing Wasteland. Its flaw: a single save, which automatically saves whenever you change zones. The moment: my party, about 20 hours in, slips crossing a river while in a sewer. The rushing waters take them away, right out of the zone– saving the game– and outdoors, where they’re dashed against rocks and killed. Load game: dashed against rocks, killed. No escape, restart from scratch. I learned my lesson, and when I replayed the game years later, I frequently made backup copies of my save. My friend Erik (well, one of them) even automated the process to do it for him every 15 minutes.
Why do I still remember this? Because Wasteland was one of my favorite games, truly amazing in many other respects. And because the same thing happened to me again with a newer game: Escape Velocity Nova, which saves over your single game every time you land (gigantic army waiting to kill you or no).
Let’s assume that those egregious cases are errors. Let’s assume that it’s only the less pathological cases like New Super Mario that designers will consciously subject us to. Cases like Metroid Prime: Hunters, which allows you to replay from frequent checkpoints, but doesn’t actually allow you to save at them (don’t run out of power for your Nintendo DS!). Or like Final Fantasy, which sprinkles its save points with great reserve: the better to force multiple pre-boss cutscene viewings.
Why do they do it? Why do designers force us to re-defeat levels we’ve already completed? Why do they force us to see dialog we’ve already seen? Why do they force us to play for longer than we’d like, in order to reach the next save point? What are the reasons, justifiable or not, for these sometimes shelf-moment inducing save systems?
I’ve got a couple ideas of my own, but I don’t think I really get it. So please, help me out in the comments!
August 30th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
I can only think of one reasonable answer, but I’m not sure its a good one: Challenge. If anyone could pick up a game and brute force/luck their way through, would it be less satisfying to beat it? I’ll admit this has some appeal to me, but as some of you know I’m a completionist, so I probably come at a game at a slightly different angle.
I will say, there have been some good solutions to these problems. In the Monkey Island series, you could save at any time, and it was impossible to die or otherwise get a game into an unrecoverable state (with the exception of staying under water for more than 10 minutes in the first one, but I forget what happens when you do that). In the most recent Grand Theft Auto, when you fail a mission, once you get in a car you can “fast forward” to get back to the mission start, and I think after a couple failures it makes the mission a bit easier (less enemies, slower AI) - this doesn’t always work out so well, as you are typically disarmed on death and, well, most GTA missions involve killing something. In Diablo II, there was a Hardcore mode where death was permanent - but since it was an active choice, that was just for the people crazy enough to try it. Metal Gear, despite insane dialog and cryptic plots, has a good system as well with a difficulty setting and a rank - the crazy people (like me) can try to finish on the hardest setting without a) using lethal force, b) using healing items and c) going as fast as possible (I still have not quite hit “Big Boss” status in MGS1 or 2, but I intend to try it again sometime).
For my $.02, I prefer games that are targetted to an average or casual gamer, but either have enough extra content or more challenging modes for the pros to show-off. Even then, crazy gamers will come up with their own ways to make a fun game challenging - be it a speed run through super mario or clearing zelda with 3 hearts and the crappy sword. It seems to me that a save or retry system can match that same style. All I can say is, thank goodness games have abandoned giving a player 3 lives and 3 continues, and then you have to start all over again.
August 31st, 2006 at 3:41 am
Someone? That’s all I’ve been reduced to?
So yeah, in my last attempt at playing through Wasteland, I was running it under dosemu in linux, and had a cronjob that copied it off with a pretty ridiculous frequency.
Next time (and yes, there will be a next time), I’m going more advanced: the cronjob will be checking my savefiles into CVS.
If you’re disciplined, and you plan this out a little on the early side, I think it wouldn’t be too hard to be able to save the state of every variable you use at any given moment. Well, that’s probably overkill, but you could do it.
The only reasons I can think of to reduce savepoints is either it can be abused to game-imbalancing effect (big deal. The sort of person that would save this frequently is probably also the sort of person that would go hit the internet to look up the IDKFA god-mode equivalent), and the idea that most consoles still use flash memory for the savefiles. Flash memory is still burndened by a finite number of write/erase cycles, so an argument could be made that you don’t want to blow out somebody’s GBA game. Or have memory cards/sticks/boxes/baloons/monkeys/trees/goats/whatever burning out at a rate that spells class-action suit.
I suspect there’s a good balance that can be struck, even if your intent is to limit savepoints. If there’s a big boss coming up, offer a savepoint. If said big boss needs some special item, be sure that they can get back to pick it up if they need to. Minimize or eliminate any situation that means certain death upon restoration of a save.
The Mario series of games has some lessons in it. So Super Mario Bros. had no save mechanism, but everyone I knew with an NES all seemed to pick up on some of the shortcuts in time. Eventually it evolved to reduce the linearity a bit. Some common area where you could save with impunity, but if you entered a level/area, there was no save option until you got back to the common area (either by success or failure). I think I like that model quite a bit more than a “spend coins to save” sort. The spending-model strikes me as encouraging less-than-fun behaviour (collecting coins, even on levels you’d otherwise finished) rather than making progress towards some goal.
I’ll tell you the sordid tale of my DS someday in a less public forum, but let’s just say that I get more mileage out of my GBA.
-erik
August 31st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Erik: Doh! Fixed.
Regarding challenge, there’s a wide range of perspectives in the comments to the Dead Rising thread here: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08/31/saving-yourself-while-killing-zombies/. Much of the discussion is surprisingly more sophisticated than the usual save system holy war stuff.
Geoff: good points. Some people in the joystiq comments mentioned achievements. I think that’s a great opportunity: you can give achievement points for all sorts of crazy-ass difficult things in the game, including beating it with very few (or even zero) saves.
The joystiq thread highlights the importance of multiple options if you’re aiming at the mass market: there are numerous people who feel the system makes it feel more intense, but then there are also people like this:
“The save system absolutely pisses me off to death with Dead Rising. I havent played it very much since I bought it,maybe 3 or 4 times,and it’s due to the save system…. This game pisses me off so bad that the only ‘memories’ I have of the game is me snapping out at it’s flaws.”
It’s interesting that even among the supporters of the save system, it’s not that they enjoy repeating the older content and trying to do it better or differently. It’s that having to repeat the content is a powerfully motivating punishment. The presence of that punishment makes them plan ahead so they can get it right the first time, rather than learn from mistakes.
September 1st, 2006 at 2:15 am
ok, so this is a half-baked idea, but I’ll throw it out:
Unlimited saves, but with a slight stats penalty.
Maybe you can’t jump as high, fly as fast, certain random elements get just a slightly nastier weight against you. Whatever. This penalty is cumulative, but needs to wear off in time.
Maybe this is slightly based in the debt systems that certain MMOs have, but I think if it’s not totally punitive, you can keep people trying to overcome certain challenges, but if they want to take the totally safe path and save every 100ms, they can. Sure, they can finish the game, but it’ll be a lot harder than if they just accepted a certain amount of risk of replaying some sections.
You’d have to make it clear that they incur a certain penalty for each save, but I’d suggest you don’t make it so onerous that they get tempted to shelve it (I’d also recommend that you don’t give them hard numbers as to the feedback, but some sort of generic status bar)
Depending on the theme of the game, you can even explain it away as a thematic element. Trying to sort out multiple parallel realities can be taxing on the intellect. Scatterbrained.
The hard part is striking finding the right coefficients for the penalty. But that’s what beta testing is for.
I think this might be workable. If you watch one of the speed runs of certain games, you know that as long as the game is fun, there’s going to be people that don’t care about saving or not. That population has the OCD tendancies that skew the whole system anyhow.
I will say that I’ve played many “classic games” in emulators, and the truth is that for me, a good portion of the fun comes from the accomplishment, even when I tend to rely on many emulator’s capability at saving state snapshots.
-erik
September 1st, 2006 at 11:26 pm
I had an automated save backup for Uplink, since that had a fairly brutal auto-save-upon-failure feature.
All the old Ultimas behaved like Wasteland (one save, auto on zone change), and I remember getting into the habit of simply turning the computer off and back on whenever anything horrible (and avoidable) happened.
Our systems will all be gamed in the end.
September 1st, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Holy crap lots of awesome responses. This topic is excellent… so much contraversy right now on how you’re supposed to go about it.
Before the 360 came out my big theory was that games had almost totally moved away from achievement into the realm of experience. Then MS released the (aptly named) Achievement system which I thought was going to be utterly retarded, but seems to have massive appeal to 360 gamers. You could argue that 360 gamers are more hardcore than most since they are early adopters of new tech… but damn… there just seems to be a lot of people backing it which wrecks my theory all to hell.
With respect to the save system… Dead Rising crushed my soul. I’m so used to -not- getting punished when I play games these days that I don’t even think about saving during normal gameplay. I die and I fully expect the game to reset me very close to my death… not 15 minutes, 3 cutscenes, and 5 loads ago. :\
With all this being said… Matt’s definitely hitting the nail on the head with offering multiple ways to enjoy the game. I think that completionists and accomplishmentists (I just made that word up) can really get into Dead Rising… but experiencists (I made that one up too) don’t really want to wrestle with the game. They just want to enjoy it. It’d be nice to split it up so that everyone can enjoy what is an obviously fun mechanic in Dead Rising’s case: smashing the shit out of zombies.
Holy shit this post is long… one more real quick: in a game like Resident Evil you’re trying to inspire a spooky sort of tension… if there’s no penalty for death then that tension becomes slightly weaker. Who cares if that dog jumps through the window, scares the shit out of you, and then eats you? You’re going to be handed a free restart anyway… I don’t think I agree with this philosophy… I think people still care about their character and are still genuinely scared by these moments. I think that we can do better as an industry than using ill-placed save points to create tension and difficulty.