Save Game Systems - what do you love and hate?

Springing from a Sacred 2 preview thread, the idea of what devs allow in terms of saves and so on.

So what is your opinion:
- Save anywhere, unlimited number?
- Checkpoints only
- Autosave by game
- Some variation?

My gaming sessions can run from a couple hours down to about 10 minutes. That makes checkpoints very problematic for me. While I prefer the flexibility offered by "save anywhere, anytime", I wouldn't be completely against games controlling a single-slot autosave, ala a Wiz8 ironman game. I can work with that.

I can't stand watching my kids play a checkpoint game in which I *know* they have no hope of completing it in their 30 minute daily limit. LEGO Star Wars II is one of those - most levels they can do in the time limit, but the largest Tatooine level was much longer, so I let them use their time in serial rather than parallel mode and work until they got past it.

I liked the save system in Soldier of Fortune II - you dictate the difficulty, loadout and number of saves per level. I also like the generous auto-saves of Half-Life 2 - I never found myself in a 'die and retry' loop.

Save anytime, anywhere, unlimited save slots.

If people like making their games more difficult by setting limitations to when, where and how often they save, they should use self restraint and stick to their own rules.

Not able to save anytime, anywhere is a nighmare for someone who has to be able to stop gaming wheever real life calls. Limited Saves are annoying, because I like to use triple saves, and save after important moments. There is nothing more annoying then only having one save and then after 100 hours of gameplay finding you've made a mistake/ the save got corrupted and you can start all over again.

Yes, I know some people reload every bit they aren't happy with and do it again… so what? as long as it is single player it doesn't matter what someone else do in their game.

Complaining about saving anytime/anywhere is like complaining about the devs leaving in the console so you can enter cheatcodes: if you don't like it, don't use it

While I agree completely with you, Sorcha, developers seem to have real philosophical issues with a lenient save system. Granted, it can make the coding a little more difficult to freeze a huge world, but the comments we get from game makers seem like the trend toward limited saves is more than just lazy programming. They seem to think it's good for us. That's where I'm willing to compromise a little if it keeps them out of this silly checkpoint nonsense.

I couldn't agree more Sorcha Ravenlock the idea some dev has a *brain fart* then thinks, "Hey, lets not allow save games" is cruising for a bruising.

I think it's great to allow limited save game usage as a “choice” of skill difficulty.
The best example of this is Hammer & Sickle and the game is so damn hard it's not possible to complete without being able to save, afaik.
Some people found an extreme challenge like replaying a single battle over 50 times till they get lucky and win once, “wow”.
I played it on easy and enjoyed it much more than many who gave up due to the difficulty.

The idea that a dev would “force” no saves anytime, on a game owner should be fired or shot.
The mere idea that they would “force” people, in a world constantly on the go, is inconceivably arrogant and as I mentioned in the other thread nothing but a sanctimonious design decision.
Grrrrrr!
Couldn't tell I have strong opinions on this, right?

What I acttually hate, really hate, are absolutely bloated savegames, that consume 10 MB or so space, but are consuming in a .ZIP file only a fraction of this.

Why, I thought, are developers not able to compress their savegames before they let the prog write them on disk ?


What I really do like :
In Beyond Divinity, they included in a patch a built-in function that really tested whether a savegame could actually be written onto the harddisk before actually doing so.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
What I really do like :
In Beyond Divinity, they included in a patch a built-in function that really tested whether a savegame could actually be written onto the harddisk before actually doing so.

That used to be standard practice in the good old days of 5.25" floppies. As storage became cheap and abundant (double density 3.5", look at all that space!), programmers stopped worrying about it.

I hate savepoints!! I want to be able to save anywhere and anytime. I also want a PAUSE function for when the phone rings etc. RL demands frequently interfere with gaming, and being halfway through something, but not able to save my progress, is not only frustrating, but often leads to uninstalling the game. I don't want devs forcing me to play how THEY think it should be done!!

Case in point; I would never have gone far into the remake of Bard's Tale if I hadn't been reviewing it, since its savepoint totally annoyed me and many times I felt like just giving it away!!

It totally depends of the game.

In a roleplaying game. Quicksave is a must to have because every player has their own way of playing these games and devs can't possible to imagine when it is a right time for a save.
in a shooter quicksaving can become too tempting and then destroy the tension very easily. However if done via checkpoints, they need to plenty and be in right places. In half-life 2 I rarely used quicksave since autosaves were done so cleverly. An other way is to do like in hitman bloodmoney. You have limited number of saves and your are free to use them whenever you like. Imo this is the best saving system i've seen in action games. If i recall correctly easy difficulty had unlimited number of saves, normal had seven saves, hard had 3 saves and very hard had zero saves.

In some games like swat or rainbow there shouldn't be any other saving method than beetveen the missions. Otherwise it would DESTROY the tension. And swat 4 is a game where that tension is the key element of gaming experience.

However what i really dislike is the saving system in resident evil games. You will have to find a tape and then use it in the typewriter that are scattered around the gameworld. For some reason japanise devs have an obesssion for these kind of saving rituals.

I totally agree with Dez, it depends on the game.

RPG: Anytime, Anywhere.
FPS: Checkpoints.
RTS: In-Between Missions.

I only play RPG's and this is an RPG site, thus the main thrust for the anytime, anywhere save!! Different genres, different rules:- who saves during an adventure game!!

Originally Posted by Sorcha Ravenlock
Save anytime, anywhere, unlimited save slots.

That's the best for me as well…

Sometimes auto-save works good as well. The game has to be designed for it to work.

I hate hot-spots saving completely.

i agree with dez's coments on action games and also with others that rpgs should have anytime saves. blade of darkness had a cool system where it 'ranked' you based on saves. if i recall (its been years) a perfect rating was 0-2 saves. it might have been only zero, but regardless i beat the game once with that top ranking. for games that have missions or levels it is almost a necessary feature to have checkpoints or limited saves as it not only adds a challenge/realism to the game but it helps to prolong an otherwise shorter game genre. blade of darkness if i recall doesn't have checkpoints either so playing a whole level 'all or nothing' can be hell or heaven depending on your take…

Anytime, anywhere, with critical autosaves thrown in for good measure, regardless of genre or platform - it's not as if I needed a challenge, I want to play for fun.
I'm glad some emulators include the 'save anywhere' feature for older games which originally didn't have it .

Originally Posted by Corwin
who saves during an adventure game

I usually do. Often.

Originally Posted by curious
blade of darkness had a cool system where it 'ranked' you based on saves.

Now I recall that, it was an interesting idea and might be good if implemented in bit different way in RPGs.

Being able to save at any point of time is essential, or game time will eat into real life.

Otherwise I wouldnt mind having a severe save restriction in that you only have ONE autosave slot per character. It adds to the tension of the game. But it also requires the game to be forgiving in that it doesnt have any points of no return where you can put yourself in a position where the game cant be completed. It sucks to have played for tens of hours only to find out that you have to restart. So that kind of system could work well in a game like Mount and Blade, but not in Gothic or Arcanum… And I assume MMOs work like that too.

Save points on the other hand are utterly retarded. Forcing you to grind to the next savepoint seems like a legacy from the old console games where all you needed to store was a given location, which was handled by giving the player a password rather than actually saving something. It doesnt make any sense with proper storage available even on consoles (if we have a game state in memory then it can be saved as any other data, anything else is just lazy engineering) and is a hassle for the player.

EDIT: I could make a concession for mission based games, but then the save points need to be reasonably close to each other in time. I remember the first GTA where I could spend hours on a level without being able to save, and it made me give up on the game (not just because I am a lousy player, but because I rarely had that much time to spend in one go).

Originally Posted by Zaleukos
I remember the first GTA where I could spend hours on a level without being able to save, and it made me give up on the game (not just because I am a lousy player, but because I rarely had that much time to spend in one go).

That remains true even on the 'portable' versions - you have to start from your haven, go to get a mission, complete the entire mission and return to your haven before you can save again.

One more note - It's always nice when the developer tries to come with some original schema of game savings. Usually when they try to enforce some type 'save only sometimes' it is nice when they do it in a way that clearly explains it. Such as that you can save only at home and the like.

The only save limit I like to see is no saving in combat. Though generally you only see that limit in turn-based games -- obviously it's harder to determine whether you're "in combat" for real-time systems. Saving in combat all too often turns into a metagaming tactic that ends up being required to win hard fights. Players saving during combat makes it easier, so the devs compensate by making opponents more powerful, either doing massive amounts of damage so one hit takes off 75% of your health. Two hits in a row kill. Or you're one saving throw away from death due to paralysis, turn to stone, kill spells, decapitation, etc. In the worst cases, it devolves into literally having to save after every single attack that doesn't kill you. That doesn't happen in many games, but I despise it when it does.

In principle, I like iron-man modes. In practice, I hate them, since games where iron-man is optional do not scale the difficulty. The games stay just as hard as when you're free to abuse saving. So you're all too likely to be wiped out by random chance, without any tactical way to avoid it. About the only time when iron-man becomes inviting is as a challenge when you've got the whole game memorized -- common for instance with Wiz8.

For my own game (if I ever get it finished), I'm thinking of using a pseudo-iron-man mode. The only option you have is "save and quit". But the game makes auto-saves under the hood as you're playing. If you do get killed, or the game should crash (not that that would ever happen), you'll be able to revert to a recent auto-save, losing only a few minutes of game play. You don't have to worry about getting killed, but now you're not able to abuse save/reload if you don't like the results of a random die roll or change you mind about what dialog options you wanted to pick.