I think alot of people are either ignorant of the issue, or ignore it. Quite simply, I believe that it is absolutely nessecary in certain cases that teh designer be in charge of when a player can permisave their exact state.

I agree completely that a player should be able to stop and quit at any time they need to, I can’t stress this enough, but being able to save a game state exactly and indefinately is something that must essentually be restricted in many games to properly balance the gameplay.

When playing Goldeneye, one’s inability to save during the middle of a level is neccessary for the sake of the gameplay. As a player, my goal is to beat a given level on a given difficulty, by any means neccessary in the context of the game and strategies involved. The game itself is naturally one of endurence, the player must do his/her best to get to the end of a level while completing all objectives, getting hit as few times as possible to ensure their chances of survival. The challenge comes from this endurence, the test of survival is what makes the game.

By adding the ability to save at any time, the challenge is drained because each section can be done individually, the challenge of tackling the level as a whole is removed. In order to make a game where you can save at any time challenging, you must introduce design that impliments ‘difficulty spikes’ as opposed to endurence, which I feel is a far inferior design practice.

That is why as much as I advocate being able to save at any time, saving the state of a game at any possible point is a no no in many games and should be kept as such.

I’m much more inclined to believe that people implement checkpoint systems because they think that that’s what people want on consoles. And — my personal convictions are showing here — I think that’s crazy talk. I think save points make sense as a way to do rolling backups that make some intuitive sense and don’t require aggressive user participation (so that I’m not taken out of the game after every fight so I can go save and protect my work), but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the ability to save arbitrarily in addition to that.

Psu: I read your rant about Zelda. Many of your problems have nothing to do with the save system – they are about how the world of Zelda works. For instance, the reseting of the rooms in Zelda happens whenever you leave a room or area – it has nothing to do with the way the save mechanism works, if you see what I mean. Basically, the root of your problem is the game world abstractions for Zelda, not the save system, per se. I freely accept that in the absence of knowledge of either how the game saves it data, or how the world abstractions work, the two issues become one, though, so this isn’t meant as a rebuttal, just a brief commentary.

I suspect you are not alone in having difficulties with the Zelda world abstractions, although none of the case studies I’ve gathered so far reflect it so it may be a minority issue. (Or, more likely, the fanbase for Zelda is fairly insular so players who would dislike the world abstractions tend not to play it in the first place). Nintendo are planning to change the world abstractions for the Zelda franchise after Twilight Princess, I understand, perhaps this will produce a game more to your tastes.

On reflection, however, I should never have cited Zelda as my example – that was lazy of me. There are better examples of ratcheted progress elsewhere; most 3D platformers have a decent checkpointed autosave system which constitutes ratcheted progress. My apologies for any confusion this dodgy example may have engendered.

I apologize if I misrepresented your position. I think I decided that since some of the characters in your dialogue used some of the terms of art that you favor (“fiero”, for example), and since they used the terms “Hardcore” and “Casual” as defined by your taxonomy, that they must be thinly disguised avatars of your own opinions. Sorry for making that unwarranted assumption.

Everyone else: go read Chris’s article instead of relying on my summary.

-Peter
PS: But games that don’t let me save anywhere are still the devil.

That was just one of the many reasons I traded in the game unfinished, despite being really curious where he got his eyeshine.

My position is that if a game can be paused, if the game can be so interrupted, that such a state should be storable and resumable from a persistent medium (HD, flash mem card, etc). I did not mean to suggest that ‘pause’ is an acceptable save mechanism, sorry if that was what came across.

Chris clarified that saving at a pause ‘bookmark’ would indeed pretty much require a full state save on at least the PS2, which is also rather extreme. I mentioned that PC legacy platform emulators do this all the time, but this does require the availability of some high volume storage medium (HD, flash mem, etc) which so far limits to PC or XBox.

I don’t think I’m adding much value on this one, but thanks for the opportunity to rant a bit!

Not surprisingly I hate the Zelda save system.

http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000285.html

I wrote that about Wind Waker, but Link to the past is similar.

Secondly, there’s always the possibility (inevitability?) of the kit getting turned off in the meantime. Especially if it’s also what you use as your DVD player, or you want to play another game. “If you can pause you can save” just doesn’t cut it. (Don’t get me started on games that don’t even let you pause, for example in the middle of FMVs or cutscenes. The phone’s ringing, if I was watching a movie I could pause it, why can’t I pause the cutscene in this game???).

Chris: no save game system, ever, saves things like textures in memory (or at least shouldn’t). The ability to save anywhere does not require that the entire state of the memory in the console be saved – it ONLY requires the designers/programmers of the game to make the decision to allow you to do it. A game that does NOT allow it, does so only because someone, somewhere, has consciously made the decision that *they* should be in charge of *your* game experience, and *they* don’t want *you* to save. In which case, *I* won’t play *their* game. (Sports titles excepted?)

peterb: I completely agree with you!

This is why bookmark saves are easy on PC and Xbox – you just dump out all the game state, textures and all if necessary (although outside the PS2 it is rarely necessary as I understand it). The memory card on the PS2 isn’t exactly big (8 meg), though. With 32 meg of memory the worst case is presumably that you have to save a 32 meg save file!

A disclaimer, however – I’m not a programmer and hardware has always been my weak point, so this just represents my dim understanding of the issues involved.

“but on the other hand he agrees that a “let me stop playing now” checkpoint save is pretty much a requirement for reasonable games. Don’t such saves present approximately the same QA load?”

What I believe is that the player should be able to stop playing at any time with no significant loss of progress. There are two ways to do this – bookmark saves, which can be done easily by exporting the full game state thus producing huge save files (too big for anything but PC and Xbox), or designing the game with inherent ratcheted progress. The latter is my preference, especially for mass market products. Look at Zelda. You don’t need to save anywhere in Zelda, because the game is designed to record any significant progress automatically (at least, it was when it was on a cartridge).

So, to clarify, there is no voice in the dialogue I posted that represents *my* voice – even the game designer voice is not my own – every voice in the dialogue represents opinions I have heard overtly or implicitly in my time as a game designer, and so writing as if these views are my own is a nearly libellous. Of course, this is partly my fault for not making it clear that this is what I was trying to do. I will update the post accordingly to avoid any future misunderstandings.

Psu said in my comments “I have never read a convincing argument in favor of not implementing save-anywhere” – the reason for this is that no-one actively advocates not having save-anywhere, and it is actually a web of tensions in game development that prevent it from happening. I decided I’d try and get across a snapshot of the situation in an effort to explain why it is that save-anywhere doesn’t happen all that often outside of PC games. I’m starting to regret my impulse to help in this instance, since it has kind of had the opposite effect.

Anyway, it has provoked some general discussion on the subject, so there’s no harm done – unless your post convinces anyone that I am against the player’s right to save and quit at any time. Thankfully, there’s not a great deal of risk of this.