Pet peeve, games that won't let you save
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 BAILEY
Very 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.
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.
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
Same, and now one of my favorite things about the Switch and Steam Deck 👍
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.
That was my only issue with the otherwise excellent Shovel Knight! It had very long levels and only saved once you beat them.
I'd never play that on PC. It would work on xbox though since quick resume just let's ju pop out to the dashboard and resume whenever. It's not foolproof but I've only had to restart from a checkpoint a few times.
Like someone else above said, on PC you can just use Cheat Engine to speed hack it to 0x speed, pausing the game!
Because that's how the 8 bit games it was replicating worked, if they even had saves at all.
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
Kill enemy, save, make certain jump, save. Takes a lot of risk out of the game. I like when games let you save anywhere but if you restart the game or load your save you start in the beginning of a room regardless of where you saved from. (Like ocarina of time)
Takes a lot of risk out of the game.
Indeed. But on the other hand, the thing at risk is the player's time, and only the player can manage it appropriately. A game that doesn't respect that can quickly become a chore.
I liked on Postal where if you saved too often it would announce "My grandmother could beat the game if she saved as much as you do"
That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have "save and exit" create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.
Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.
I have to agree with this, for certain games limiting the saves is the correct answer honestly.
Something like the Fear and Hunger series wouldn't work as well with unlimited saves anywhere because a large part of the appeal is to have to struggle and power through horrible conditions, that would be lost if you could reload every time one of your pals got their arm cut off in a fight and stuff like that
This just reads to me as an excuse for people with no self control to ruin the experience for others. I you want to limit saves, no one is making you use a quick save feature but yourself.
I understand limiting saves to avoid savescumming. Not allowing you to save and quit whenever you want in Funger makes no sense though. I quickly installed a mod for Termina to suspend and resume the game because it's ridiculous to have to play 3+ hours straight before being allowed to close the game.
Back in the day of 8/16bit computers we had the solution for this. The action replay cartridge. Could save the exact machine state at any time.
Save states would be nice. Just dump the game's data from ram to disk.
That would probably take up a ton of space though. :)
The only reason is hardware limitation. I imagine it's more difficult to load at any point in the game in a massive game due to how much is stored in your memory.
Let's say you're playing a game and there's 6 NPCs outside and they're doing their own thing.
If the game has a traditional save system, when you exit the save location it's normal for these entities to rest let their position. Maybe at best their properties (maybe they were wet because of rain) are saved.
But it's much easier to just not save any of this info and reload everything from scratch and only save your progress and location.
Some games seem to manage it quite well though? But yeah, they probably had to pit a lot more energy into implementing it.
I think some custom game engines have creative solutions for handling instant saving and loading. For example System Shock has save and load without any delay. But it is a fairily simplistic game at the same time.
Ironically Bethesda games track tons of stuff on the world state and still let you save pretty much anywhere.
That is one thing they got right I guess.
All consoles support game suspension these days. The Xbox lets you keep multiple games suspended, just use that.
I do use that. I have a Series X but I play on PC as well. Some games aren't available on xbox and sometimes the TV might be occupied or I might want to squeeze in some quick gaming while already at my desk.
Rest mode if you're on the PS
Yeah, quick resume on xbox as well and that's great, most modern games use it. Not all though and not on PC.
Well, it adds a bit of suspense to a horror game. Not very scary if you can just save every minute.