# Arguments FOR checkpoint-based game saves **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [July 24, 2013, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364 "2013-07-24T06:43:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/21 "2013-07-24T23:37:35Z")
> [@Recusant](#): > > Taking out manual saves can add to the tension of a game, but then, so can playing it while being attacked by walruses. Hmmm. I’d like to try that the next time I tackle Baldur’s Gate, but based on a rapid Googling the delivery fees seem downright unreasonable. Gonna have to settle for ferrets, but it’s not the same, is it ? ---
**Author:** ![Recusant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/838e76/32.png) [@Recusant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Recusant)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/22 "2013-07-24T23:53:49Z")
> [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > In-game walruses or live, gonna-mess-you-up-sukkaghhh-ahhhaghh-ahhhghh walruses? > > I almost understand the idea that it adds tension, but then they include the ‘easy’ mode that you can change in and out of. And no save-on-exit really undercuts that too–as if part of the tension is wrapped up in searching those twenty corpses, wastebaskets and looking behind each toilet door. And the mindset that would enforce the trade-off between overall enjoyment (not slogging through the empty rooms, replaying a scene over at-will, taking dumb risks just to see if you can take down a Big Daddy with each weapon, etc.) and playing it the way the developer wants it is veritably incomprehensible to me. > > I guess if I think of it like Apple’s walled garden approach it almost makes sense. I only know about the crazy guy behind Duke Nukem and Valve’s Gabe, so maybe there is that kind of culture among game developers in general. Real, live, I-can-kill-a-polar-bear-with-my-canine-teeth-without-even-having-them-in-my-mouth walruses. And the tension added isn’t entirely artificial. If you’ve ever played Nethack (WARNING WARNING WARNING: IF YOU HAVE NEVER PLAYED NETHACK, DO NOT START NOW), or most other Roguelikes, you know what I mean; you lose the back-of-your-mind vibe of “it’s just a video game; I can always reload”. It works, and it works well. But that’s a very specific type of experience, for a very specific audience. In most cases, it’s horribly disruptive. Perhaps a smoother comparison would be if you went to see a play, and the theater had given the playwright control of the thermostat, in addition to the lighting and sound. If done right, it could add a whole other dimension to the experience, and really draw you in. If done poorly (as it would likely be), you’d be thrown back out, since your sweat is freezing to your skin. ---
**Author:** ![Mekhazzio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b38774/32.png) [@Mekhazzio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mekhazzio)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/23 "2013-07-25T03:09:48Z")
There are assorted gameplay design reasons, but they’re all fairly mild so it’s safe to say that most developers don’t really care one way or the other. The driving reason for the proliferation of checkpoint saves is technical. A checkpoint save system only has to save a minimum of data, because everything else can be rebuilt on demand. Look at Dark Souls; when you load a game, you always appear at a bonfire, and the entire world is initialized to a predetermined state. All you need to know to load that game is the various stats of the player, the ID of the bonfire to spawn at, and a pile of tightly-compactible yes/no flags for the major game states (Boss A dead, Boss B alive, etc) and which items have been picked up. A load-anywhere-anytime system like in, say, Doom, is a different creature entirely. To fully restore the game to the same point it left off, you need to save & load the current states of every single dynamic entity in the world. Imp 23 is 74ms into a fireball throw and has 78 hitpoints left, Imp 21’s fireball is 3 meters away from the player moving at such & such a vector, Barrel 2 back at the start is an exploded husk lying so and so degrees on its side, etc, etc. Load-anywhere requires an order of magnitude more data, which is a problem for a cross-platform game because save space is at a premium on consoles. A Dark Souls save is already 4 MB. Multiply that by, say, 50, to get save-anytime capability, and you’re now using 40% of a player’s cloud storage on one savegame. All that extra data to crunch means saving & loading takes that much longer, and it can be a pain in the butt to implement and debug, depending on how the game’s internals are structured. Then you also need to keep multiple saves around, because if a player manages to save after they got stuck / failed / etc then they’re out of luck, unless you’ve kept something like a level-start save too. Then you need conveniently-accessible quicksave & quickload buttons, and good luck squeezing those onto a gamepad, and the list goes on… Checkpoints are vastly less work. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 7:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/24 "2013-07-25T07:28:15Z")
I remember that, at least pre-enhanced edition, the original Witcher’s saves were something like 1.5GB a piece. It was nice when I finally found what was taking up so much space on my computer. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/25 "2013-07-25T11:47:20Z")
> [@Mekhazzio](#): > > There are assorted gameplay design reasons, but they’re all fairly mild so it’s safe to say that most developers don’t really care one way or the other. The driving reason for the proliferation of checkpoint saves is technical. > > A checkpoint save system only has to save a minimum of data, because everything else can be rebuilt on demand. Look at Dark Souls; when you load a game, you always appear at a bonfire, and the entire world is initialized to a predetermined state. All you need to know to load that game is the various stats of the player, the ID of the bonfire to spawn at, and a pile of tightly-compactible yes/no flags for the major game states (Boss A dead, Boss B alive, etc) and which items have been picked up. > > A load-anywhere-anytime system like in, say, Doom, is a different creature entirely. To fully restore the game to the same point it left off, you need to save & load the current states of every single dynamic entity in the world. Imp 23 is 74ms into a fireball throw and has 78 hitpoints left, Imp 21’s fireball is 3 meters away from the player moving at such & such a vector, Barrel 2 back at the start is an exploded husk lying so and so degrees on its side, etc, etc. > > Load-anywhere requires an order of magnitude more data, which is a problem for a cross-platform game because save space is at a premium on consoles. A Dark Souls save is already 4 MB. Multiply that by, say, 50, to get save-anytime capability, and you’re now using 40% of a player’s cloud storage on one savegame. All that extra data to crunch means saving & loading takes that much longer, and it can be a pain in the butt to implement and debug, depending on how the game’s internals are structured. Then you also need to keep multiple saves around, because if a player manages to save after they got stuck / failed / etc then they’re out of luck, unless you’ve kept something like a level-start save too. Then you need conveniently-accessible quicksave & quickload buttons, and good luck squeezing those onto a gamepad, and the list goes on… > > Checkpoints are vastly less work. Of course, if you’re not worried about a little cheating you can get rid of some of it. For instance, not saving spells in progress, or not saving projectiles, and so on. Sure, **somebody** will probably save and quit and reload in a boss battle just to dodge spells, but most people probably won’t bother. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/26 "2013-07-25T12:47:16Z")
> [@Teuton](#): > > In Bioshock Infinite (which I generally loved, and completed), there’s a bit at the start where you first come across bad guys to shoot and then, perhaps 10-15 minutes of fighting later, you come across a ‘big bad’ mob who drops an object you have to pick up to continue in the game. When I did it, the big bad dropped his object in a place I couldn’t get to it (it was behind a gate), and so I had to restart from the autosaved checkpoint… which was all the way back at the start of the fighting. I damn near stopped playing for good. > > The annoying thing about the B:I autosaves isn’t so much that it checkpoints, it’s that it doesn’t tell you where the checkpoints are. There’s a bit of chat in this thread about Dark Souls, and getting the to bloodstains of the checkpoints, thus telling you where it has saved (I haven’t played DS). B:I does its damndest to not tell you when it has saved, to keep the experience fluid, but it frequently doesn’t do it often enough. See, I didn’t know, as I’ve only watched the first parts of a Let’s Play. In that particular situation, I agree that the saves are too infrequent. I also agree that it’s not really a problem with autosaving or checkpoints in general. BTW, if the object is what I think it is (the thing also used for fast transport between islands), it wouldn’t surprise me if they put an autosave right after that, as it’s so important. So that would be even more frustrating, right? Still, in that particular situation, it seems like the real problem, then, is a bug in letting that object wind up behind a gate without giving you a way to reach through and get it. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/27 "2013-07-25T12:56:01Z")
> [@Mekhazzio](#): > > There are assorted gameplay design reasons, but they’re all fairly mild so it’s safe to say that most developers don’t really care one way or the other. The driving reason for the proliferation of checkpoint saves is technical. I don’t agree. I think you’ve hit on a false dichotomy. It’s not just checkpoints and save-anywhere. There’s also the most common form back in the day–save points. And I think not including those is definitely for gameplay purposes. (Though I guess it could also be for story design purposes if they feel like they’d have to have an in-universe explanation for why the save points exist.) I think Zelda has always done a good job with save points. You save at entrances, which seems quite natural. But the game is designed where you can start with all the items you had from when you quit, instead of only having what you had when you crossed that door. And no cutscenes repeat. So it’s almost a combination save-anywhere and save-point system. ---
**Author:** ![Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/arrogance_ex_machina/32/192_2.png) [@Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arrogance_Ex_Machina)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/28 "2013-07-25T13:38:26Z")
I mostly hate checkpoints, but there’s a few recent games where I think it works fine: both Borderlands games, Mark of the Ninja and Gunpoint. In Borderlands dying and then respawning is part of the whole game and most likely damages the flow of it less than quick-saving and -loading constantly. It still isn’t very short play time -friendly though with the enemy respawns (the last DLC is especially bad since there’s tons of trash mobs and no way to bypass them) but as long as you keep on playing death tends to be a minor annoyance. And of course it has Save & Exit feature. In Mark of the Ninja the checkpoints are so close to each other that if you die, you have to re-do maybe 1-2 rooms before you get back to where you were, and in Gunpoint you basically go back one action. ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/29 "2013-07-25T13:42:10Z")
Game makers need to understand that the majority of their players - and the ones with the money - are 20- and 30- and 40- YOs, who have a life and jobs and a family and NEED to be able to save at will, any time. I can’t stand games that don’t have savepoints anymore - even checkpoint saves are better than nothing. > [@](#): > > the original Witcher’s saves were something like 1.5GB a piece :eek: And then there’s ridiculous! ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/30 "2013-07-25T15:48:00Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Hmmm. I’d like to try that the next time I tackle Baldur’s Gate, but based on a rapid Googling the delivery fees seem downright unreasonable. Gonna have to settle for ferrets, but it’s not the same, is it ? Plus they’d probably get distracted and settle for trying to steal your mouse/controller. ---
**Author:** ![Teuton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/teuton/32/3864_2.png) [@Teuton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Teuton)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/31 "2013-07-25T16:23:51Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > BTW, if the object is what I think it is (the thing also used for fast transport between islands), it wouldn’t surprise me if they put an autosave right after that, as it’s so important. So that would be even more frustrating, right? > > Still, in that particular situation, it seems like the real problem, then, is a bug in letting that object wind up behind a gate without giving you a way to reach through and get it. It was clearly a big bossfight, and my gamer instinct upon coming across one of those is to quicksave. Sadly, it didn’t let me. And yes, immediately upon getting the item, it autosaved then, although it was a different object to the one you’re thinking of. B:I got around what could have been _truly_ annoying about it by letting you continue the game when you died - you woke up nearby, and you carried on having already picked up all the stuff you had so you didn’t have to look around all the nooks and crannies you’d already looked in. As for the “save game size” issue, I think if Skyrim can do it, and on the consoles, then it’s obviously not that much of an issue. I don’t like checkpoints, generally, especially in 3d games. To me, they hark back to an older age of scarce computer resources, and I really don’t see why I can’t have the ability to stop playing when I want. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/32 "2013-07-25T17:53:00Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > I think Zelda has always done a good job with save points. You save at entrances, which seems quite natural. But the game is designed where you can start with all the items you had from when you quit, instead of only having what you had when you crossed that door. And no cutscenes repeat. So it’s almost a combination save-anywhere and save-point system. Except for the first one. You had the choice between committing suicide to save (ruining the no-death bonus, even if it was rather pointless), or finding the (near impossible to discover by accident) button combination that allowed you to save. This required having the manual, if it’s even in there, or advancing 10 years and waiting for GameFAQs to come out. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/33 "2013-07-25T21:07:11Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > I don’t agree. I think you’ve hit on a false dichotomy. It’s not just checkpoints and save-anywhere. There’s also the most common form back in the day–save points. You have a very recent definition of “back in the day.” Checkpoint saves were a common developer’s shortcut when consoles started really taking off, but computer games had mostly used “save anywhere” systems for some time before that. It wasn’t until consoles became the driver in game development that you started to see save points show up in computer games, which was generally not well received by PC gamers - the reliance of checkpoints in console games was a frequent argument in the interminable “Console versus PC” debates of my youth. When I was in high school, the console-driven proliferation of checkpoint saves in PC gaming was a matter of global import on the scale of the break-up of the Soviet Union. But I’m much better now. > [@Teuton](#): > > As for the “save game size” issue, I think if Skyrim can do it, and on the consoles, then it’s obviously not that much of an issue. _Skyrim_’s a pretty good argument in either direction. It can handle a fuckton of data per save - but it doesn’t always handle it particularly _well_. Bethesda games are notorious for their save bugs. I recently had to abandon a 30ish level character because, somewhere along the line, something had corrupted the save files so that there was an intermittent crash when I accessed the quick menu. Apparently, it had been in the save files for a long time, but only manifested itself after I’d installed one of the DLCs - I know it’s in there far enough back that it’d be easier to just restart the character. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/34 "2013-07-25T21:12:02Z")
Ugh, seriously, its checkpoint saves? And after Bioshock 1 and 2 were the “save anywhere” type. This seriously bugs me as a gamer. Artificially increasing difficulty by limiting saves is the mark of a stupid developer, and while they struck gold with Bioshock 1 and 2 and everyone seems to say Bioshock: Infinite is a terrific game, such small details bug the shit out of me. Maybe there’s a mod I can find to change this… ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364/35 "2013-07-25T21:23:15Z")
There’s a staggering number of (3)DS games that use checkpoint saves for gameplay reasons, but have what I’d term “destructive” save-and-quit saves. Phoenix Wright, for instance, only lets you save progress at key checkpoints, but will let you save and turn off your DS whenever. However, when you resume the save deletes itself and reverts back to the checkpoint save which is where you’ll load from if you actually fail the game. Granted Phoenix Wright is a stupid as all hell example because the penalty for failing is sitting through a bunch of text and solving puzzles you’ve already solved again so I’m not sure why they don’t just let you save scum, but hey, it was the first example that came to mind. There are better examples but I can’t think of them at the moment. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/arguments-for-checkpoint-based-game-saves/664364.md?page=1)