Long time readers will recall my distaste for the standard Zelda save system. My main complaint, you will recall, is that when you save the game from the middle of a dungeon, you have to trudge through the whole dungeon over again when you restore the game. Why, I opined, can’t the game just come up with a way to save my position in the dungeon and save me from this boring grunt work?

Well, the new Zelda game does fix this and yet again proves that you should be careful what you wish for.

I think it’s the case that if a normal developer had approached this problem, they would have made your position in the dungeon part of the save file. Then, when you load the save file, the game would just put you back where you were. The developers of Zelda can’t do this. They need to take the habits of long time fans into account. These players might actually be upset that the game didn’t do the wrong thing when they saved the game. There would be a general hue and cry about the “save-game” glitch where you save your game, and when you load it it loads exactly where you were when you saved. People would be outraged. They would demand a refund, a recall, a patch DVD. Just imagine the chaos.

Given that they have to work around this problem of a large legacy of installed players, the developers of Twilight Princess chose to take something that ought to be completely transparent to the player and make it into a gameplay mechanic. Let me summarize.

Early on in the game, you find a creature in one of the dungeons. This creature, as Pete has described, looks like a woman with blue nipples crossed with a chicken. The chicken lets you warp from wherever you are in the dungeon back into the outside world. When you do this, you take the head of the chicken’s child with you and keep it in your pocket. Using this head, you can warp back to the chicken and then keep playing.

So… to save your game and your position in the dungeon, warp out of the dungeon, save, then when you restore you can warp back to where you were. Don’t forget to bring the head of the baby of the chicken woman with blue boobs!

All of this to avoid shocking their fans by giving them a save system from the 1980s. You can’t make this shit up.

 

13 Responses to “The Legend of Zelda: Chicken Savepoint Woman”

  1. Laura says:

    Clearly, it is not a chicken. It is a small, friendly species of harpy, performing the traditional harpy function of snatching you up and moving you from place to place.

    Don’t be calling her a chicken. The most mystical thing you can do with a chicken is read its entrails. Harpies are MUCH more talented.

  2. peterb says:

    Oh come on. When was the last time you saw a bald harpy?

    For those who don’t know what we are talking about, here’s a small movie with “Oocoo”, the blue-titted chicken woman in question.

  3. Laura says:

    What, harpies can’t have hairstylists now?

  4. psu says:

    EDIT: I linked to the movie in the body text of the piece. It had to be done.

  5. Matt says:

    I did find one other practical use for this system. In the sky city where the Oocoos live, I often found myself running out of arrows due to trying to pick off the numerous flying enemies in each room from long distance. It was handy to be able to warp back to the store at the beginning of the dungeon to resupply, then warp straight back to where I was.

    There’s also an interesting limitation that when you revisit a dungeon to, say, pick up missing heart pieces, warping is no longer an option, so after finding the right chest, you have to retrace your steps to the beginning. I suppose in this case, it would work to save, quit, and reload, but that tends to ruin the experience of a nice gaming session for me.

  6. Chris says:

    As someone who liked the old Zelda system of hermetic saves, I found the new system of restoring control of the saves to the player to be slightly annoying. I agree that design decisions were made for this game that attempted to balance the expectations of established fans with an attempt to fix outstanding complaints. Like you, I feel that the ultimate result satisfies no-one.

    It didn’t even occur to me for quite some time that I could use chicken lady in the manner you describe – I was using her to go and explore the overworld in my spare time when my wife and I were working through a dungeon together. I even used her in the Temple of Time to find an alternative solution to a problem I was stuck on, which was a nice piece of lateral thinking on my part, but still a bit bizarre.

    However, I can at least explain why the game does not save position in the dungeon… I strongly suspect it is because it is hypothetically possible that the player can save in a dungeon in an untenable position – one that results in death or entrapment every time you reload. (Note that the problem here is that it is impossible to test in QA all of the possibilities; the risk is actually very low that this might actually happen, but since it cannot be eliminated as a possibility…) The fix for this is that you must save dungeon position out of the dungeon, so that when you reload you always have a second option – to re-enter the dungeon. Now that said, just because chicken lady fixes this problem doesn’t mean that this was the best solution. I think we can all agree that there were better ways around this problem. Still, at least we all get to be freaked out by her blue nipples. ;)

    Best wishes!

  7. peterb says:

    I hear this argument proposed every time this subject comes up, and I don’t buy it, not even a little bit. For one thing, “ruin the user interaction of a game just to avoid hypothetically possible programming bugs” is pathological. For another, you could solve this problem trivially by just giving the player a damn Warpy Dungeon-B-Gone Escapey stone when the game starts, and then go ahead an implement the non-retarded solution from the start. In other words, the goal of protecting against this sort of programming bug is entirely orthogonal to the need to implement an utterly retarded save system that doesn’t actually save.

    We can all agree, at least, that Oocoo is not even half as creepy as Tingle.

  8. Ben says:

    You could also, rather than saving the exact position, simply save the room you are in, starting you at the last door you went through upon load. Reworking your way through a small room is next to irrelevant (not to mention you often back track through rooms many times anyway trying to solve puzzles), and solves a lot of problems, such the saving in inescapable locations, as well as issues of what happens to enemies? i wouldn’t want them to respawn every time i load if my exact position happens to be surrounded by them, not to mention the extra memory required for saving the exact positions and state of every (relevant) object and enemy in the room. On the other hand if i restart at the entry to the room and everything is reset, there is no problem.

    I’d like to add though I’ve never had any serious problems with the save system. Being aware that I would restart at the entry if i quite mid dungeon, I have always endeavored to complete a dungeon in one sitting. This usually means leaving the game as I enter the dungeon, and dedicating my next play session to the dungeon. The save system only becomes annoying if I have to leave it for some reason, or if the dungeon is so long I want to take a break.

    Unfortunately this is still just a work around. Myself adjusting my play sessions to compensate for the games problem. I shouldn’t have to do this, but none-the-less it has resulted in very few save irritations. So despite the broken save system, I can’t say I have anything to really complain about.

  9. psu says:

    The new Zelda, even with the warp harpy, really does only save the room you are in. Not your actual position in the world.

  10. Chris says:

    The Japanese are more paranoid about QA issues than Western developers in my experience – to an extent that does negatively affect their game design decisions, sadly. If the Japanese could ease up on this, and the Western developers tighten up the odd insane design decisions which could never be adequately QA’ed, we’d all be in a better place. But as psu notes (and I had forgotten), the actual position isn’t saved anyway, so any logical argument vanishes quite quickly. *shrugs* I withdraw my case, m’lud.

    Occoco less creepy than Tingle…? Well, I was about to agree, but then the idea fell into my head of the two creatures breeding together. *shudder*. I feel queasy now.

    Have fun! ;)

  11. Benoit says:

    The full state isn’t large. Let’s call it 32 bits each for x/y/dungeon/hp/type. So, 20 bytes per thing you save. If you give me a mere megabyte, I can save 50,000 objects (monsters, piles of cash, whatever) around the world. Whack it with gzip to at the very least double the number of objects.

    To the “untenable position” thing, simply allow the user to save to a file. Then you can save as many savegames as fit on your storage media. If you want to be fancy, it wouldn’t be *that* hard to provide unlimited undo (but it would start to cost enough memory to maybe, perhaps, start worrying about space usage).

  12. vextorspace says:

    In the original zelda you could hit start and select and it would send you back to the start. Actually, I think it killed you. I think I remember being back to 3 hearts when you did it.

  13. Ben says:

    Yes I believe it had a ‘save and quit’ or something, so when you restarted you were either back and the overworld start or at the start of the dungeon.

    Benoit: saving to a file won’t solve the problem though. I might let you load p an old save if you were silly enough to save yourself stuck – but that only works if you saved iterations in the first place, and even then you still lose an amount of gameplay time. it also has the potential to over-complicate what should really be a simple system (though I admit there are times where I would like multiple save iterations as well).