When you think of particularly good save systems or analogous mechanisms, what stands out?
What are the common pitfalls of save systems?
Can you think of possible save systems or save-like systems which haven’t been tried?
If this weren’t about video games, it would sound almost like a homework question.
And what system is best depends on the game. But the two most common pitfalls is that, if games allow you to save too often, you can always turn a defeat into a victory by reloading and doing things differently, possibly (depending on the game) even cheesing through the random number generator. Or, if a game doesn’t let you save often enough, then you find yourself needing to go to bed or to work or to dinner or something, and can’t save and have to lose progress.
The most important factor in a save game system is allowing you to add personal notes so you know what stage the save is made at. Sadly, this feature is severely lacking in a lot of modern games, especially RPGs. The most vile offender is Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, in which every save made on the overworld is labeled with the general region you’re in – and that’s it. Basically analogous to taking photographs of the Grand Canyon, Mount McKinley, and the temple of Chichen Itza, and labeling all of them “North America.” :smack:
Savescumming is a way of life, for some people. And I’ll stand by that.
Games should make save scumming unnecessary. Like I remember Planescape: Torment. You’d get a random number of HP per level (I think related to your current class, but that’s not relevant here). You can bet that I’d reload until getting the max. Thankfully someone once put out a mod that always gave you the max for your class. Save scumming is not shameful, but if they wish to discourage it it should make its use difficult but not impossible. Like Fallout: New Vegas which discouraged reloading only at the casino by adding a post-load timer. You could still abuse it but it just became more tedious to do. So I just set a limit where I’d play multiple hands and load if I lost an excessive amount but not before that point.
One option to discourage save scumming is to run the RNG early for the next several steps. Like you load and then attack and your damage will always be the same each time. Obviously this requires a bit more programming finesse.
Roguelike-like saves can be fine in limited use or for hardcore games. Here, you save and can quit and return to the same point, but afterwards it deletes your save so you can’t abuse it. Not for every game, though.
“Checkpoint-style” saves have become popular in the last few years. They’re fine sometimes, but I hate when it saves, and any dialogue or whatever that follows is only accessible once.
The absolute worst is games that allow a limited number of saves, such as Resident Evil games (or at least the old ones, I haven’t played for years). Nobody has time for that crap.
Here is what I want.
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You can save any time you like.
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It also autosaves at safe and significant moments, that way you have a backup save if you save at the point of death.
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Your quicksave button actually cycles through 3-4 quicksave slots, not just saving over your same quicksave every time.
Wizardy 8 did 1 and 3, but many games today seem to only autosave, which can be frustrating if you want to quit and it hasn’t saved in awhile.
Just give me a quicksave and maybe a “Major event” save under a different file. If people want to savescum, who cares? I have other stuff to do and want to be able to end the game session on my own terms.
To the point Chronos makes, Dragon Age: Inquisition had a “pre-save” thing going where you couldn’t savescum legendary crafted items because it already baked the results in ahead of time before you even used that special item.
The roguelike style of “save and exit” can work, but there are two common ways to exploit it: You can often find ways to exit without saving, and you can find the save game files and back them up. The latter can be prevented by storing the saves on the cloud instead of locally, but the former is a persistent problem, and can often be used for duping. In Diablo II, for instance, it was once just as simple as using control-alt-delete to quite the game instead of the menu option, with the result that duping was rampant in the early days of the game. They eventually fixed that, but that just meant that duping required crashing the server instead, which had even bigger drawbacks. And it wasn’t just “well let people enjoy the game the way they want to”, because they were trying to establish a consistent online economy that was thrashed by duping, and PvP play was even worse.
Somewhat relevant: 8 Things That Always Happen When You Go Back to an Old Save