Restricting Saves - Opinions

I have been thinking about how to direct players of my current project to a careful (not reckless) style of play. To do this, I was considering removing the save function in the main menu and placing certain checkpoints within levels where a player can save. This would also limit a players ability to save scum, not that I mind save scumming, if someone wants to 'cheat' in my game, by all means they can.

I was thinking of having something like an ornamental sand-timer that a player can interact with in order to save, placed in convenient locations within levels. I have seen similar save restrictions in other games and feel it would be acceptable.

I do however worry that it won't be to everyone's taste. A level in my game lasts 30-60 minutes and I had originally decided on having one save point in the middle of a level (and players autosave at the start of a level), meaning that saves could be as frequent as 15-30 minutes.

I had thought of offering different game modes, e.g. Easy mode could provide the save function in the main menu, while Hard mode could disable the function.

Does anyone have thoughts on removing a players ability to save? Has anyone done it before now and received positive or negative feedback for doing this?

 

Personally my feeling is that I need the option to save. I have kids that need attention, stupid people always seem to know when I'm at a critical point in a game & ring or knock on the door etc. Would minimising save opportunities add to the game immersion/atmosphere or is there another reason why you want to limit it?

The 2 options you mention would work, would the player be able to switch mid game or are they forced to continue with what they chose at the start or start again? or you could have an achievement for doing a level without any save, 2 in a row, 5 etc. So the player can save when they have to but miss out on achievements instead. You could even grade those achievements if you keep track of how many times they do the level, give platinum if they do it first go, gold for 2nd etc just in case they save the first few times to learn the level & then do a run through without saving.


I guess it depends if you want to punish the player for saving or encourage them to try the game without saving

 

I hadn't seen it as punishing a player until now - That's unfortunate.

I like the idea of having a mode where achievements are attainable, while the other it isn't. In Commandos 2: Men of Courage, a player was scored after a level, with one part of the scoring criteria being how many/few times they had saved.

 

Sorry, I guess punish is a strong descriptor & I didn't mean it to be taken the wrong way, but a brief explainer from my perspective. If something happens & I have to stop & can't save then I will be frustrated. After a while if I have a bad run of these instances ( eofy=charities annoying me, sick kids hanging around etc) it is likely that I will just give up as it's just to hard to continue playing. Some people like that in a game but others similar to me don't. The good thing is that If you can find a way to satisfy both then you are basically doubling your potential market. If you can find a way to encourage people like me to try the other option but fall back on what we like if we want to we will stick around till the end & may even go back to what we think are the easier levels & try for one of those achievements.

 

Yeah, I got what was meant by 'punish', I get that it isn't a means to say "you suck at my game, go and do something else" or "you have real-world commitments? How dare you prioritise something above my game!". I don't want to upset customers! Various examples of games have save restrictions based on difficulty, and that should be a way to satisfy different groups of players.

'Ironman mode' in Paradox Interactive games is a good way of looking at restricting players I guess. A lot of Paradox players want to be restricted to feel that they are playing the game properly (and are capable of collecting achievements) and 'non-Ironman mode' is played by those who aren't interested in collecting achievements. There are various major differences in the two different modes.

 

I think checkpoints are fine, but 15-30 minutes apart is far too long. Like @tedthebug, this would make the game basically unplayable for me; I don't always have that much time at once to commit to a game.

However, games I've seen that have done save points well have them more like every several minutes, and certainly right before any particularly tricky part. In a way this helps maintain immersion, because you don't have to exit to the main menu and save manually.

 

Watch someone on youtube play ninja gaiden. The one for xbox (original). They have save locations in game. That game was hard for me as a kid and I definitely had to get better at the game to proceed. The save statues were fairly far apart but didn't take more than 5-15 minutes to get between.

It's a well established design, so as long as you're ok with upsetting casuals and other people your game is not targeted towards, you will succeed.

 

I hate having to find a checkpoint to save...and I hate it when my kids play those. I don't know how many times I have said, "time to eat" or "time to go to bed" and they tell me...it will take me time to get to the place I can save!

Nope, don't like those games. And they are not casual gamers, but I would toss the game in garbage...or remove it from their computer, after the umpteenth time that I get that answer. 15 minutes is a long time when the rest of us are waiting to eat dinner.

 

Thanks for all the feedback. I can see that restricting saves isn't for everyone. As a hardcore gamer with few commitments, I am fine having checkpoints, but not everyone falls into my category of gamer. I am starting to reconsider trying to make the player more careful by giving them less saves. Perhaps I'll look at removing/lessening the amount of health regen or giving my NPCs more attack damage to encourage a more careful approach from players.

 

Here is my thought on things like that: Make it so the player believes he has a choice. If you give your NPC's more attack damage, the player will believe that he can still thwart the NPC and "win" so he is okay with that. If you remove/lessen health regen, it is something he can never really affect. It will feel like a punishment.

In my experience working with developers, every one of them goes through a stage where they add punitive design to the game....and usually they figure this out before release. I think it is a normal thing. We have our vision and want players to see our vision, even if we have to force them to do so.

I am going through that with a young programmer at the moment who is working with us. I am sure I did the same thing...but it was a long time ago, and I have blocked that from my mind. lol

 

Of course the less-easy option is going to be the less-popular one. You just have to decide if you're going to make a game for yourself and your target audience or if you're going to pretend you're owned by Activision so if it isn't casual friendly then it isn't good.

As an indie developer, you'll still do well if you don't sacrifice your design so that people ages 8 to 800 can play & beat it.

 

The entire game industry changed when you could save a game by entering a code into it. The goal became making that easier and easier for the player to save their progress at any reasonable point. The industry never looked back... for good reason. Losing progress happens for a lot of reasons. Power outages, family yelling at you, being late for work... and simply not being good at the game.

I believe you're better off finding ways to reward better play than punish poor play or life happening. That does not prohibit "Ironman mode" or any other difficulty settings you wish to add... but simply beating the casual player over the head for being a crappy gamer is never a good idea.

Go back and replay some old NES games that don't have saves- See how many times you want to restart the game before you're sick of it. I'm betting one time only

 

The only people still doing this are japanese developers. Dark souls, monster hunter, ninja gaiden... these games don't get any easier on you. Some of them are harder on you when you fail Dark souls costs you your souls and degrades your equipment, monster hunter costs you time to finish your objective and degrades your equipment, ninja gaiden has sparse checkpoints and if you die enough in the beginning you unlock easy mode xD

 

i plan to not allow saves other than when quiting,
making the player be VERY careful with what he does, allowind a more stealth or coward gameplay.
i personnally hate BFG and the like , i love knives and hiding.
the player will not be dead that easy too to keep a good balance.
foolish risks meaning wounds, wounds meaning less health , less speed, les power and the need for a shelter and medics > meaning taking lower risks until he recovered all the abilities.
less "enemies" but Deadly enemies stalking you...

 

It's a different kind of mentality. An RPG that spaces out it's save points is asking for you to commit to it, and it's justifiable in that longer sittings make for better experiences. You can't really say that a game is punishing you because you don't have the time to allocate to it (outside of time specific bullshit that is basically dictating that the game becomes a part of your life). You wouldn't blame a movie for not being able to sit down to watch it, and expecting that every game limits the level of commitment to that of a mobile game just means that games end up being shallow.

The irony is that punishment is mostly based on perception. Classically WoW experimented with a "you've been playing too long" debuff to experience, which ended up being hated. They turned it around to be a "well rested" buff, which changed nothing numerically, and people were fine with it. Alternately, there was the first Dead Rising game which had a single save slot and auto saving that people hated, for reasons I'll assume are because the normal expectations are that people can beat a game with a good ending and get to ~80-90% completion on the first try.

 

That sounds like the best compromise. It's like a "suspend" button that saves the current state and exits the game. When you resume, it picks up at the same place. You wouldn't be able to abuse this to go back in time and undo a mistake, but it would let you immediately stop playing to go take care of real life emergencies. It also aligns better with what we're used to doing every day on mobile devices where we can hit the home button on our phones and tablets to instantly suspend an app.

 

right, and at the same time it makes the game more risky as you can't undo reloading a game...
i find this sometimes useful but very boring...
a game should allow diferent paths to a goal instead of being stuck at a damn level with the repeating scene.

 

For me as a gamer I think the perfect structure is simply checkpoints spaced out 10 to 20 minutes apart combined with being able to pause the game at any time. I find it very odd that some games these days don't allow you to pause them. On the NES it was a perfect solution to dinner or have to leave the house. Just pause the game and resume later. Handles all of the minor stuff such as phone calls, people coming to the door, dinner and so forth. And then you can resume and push on to that next checkpoint.

Regarding the actual topic I think just add more challenge to playing the way you don't want them to play and more incentive for playing the way you want them to. If they still play the "bad" way then so be it. Let them have their fun and enjoy the game the way they want to. If the players are enjoying the game that is the important thing. They are having fun.

 

You need to break this problem down into smaller pieces. Here's what I think you want:

• A system that does not allow a player to micro manage their gameplay by saving the game and reloading repeatedly
• A system that does allow the player to walk away and return at any arbitrary point
• A system that does let the player fail occasionally without having to restart the entire game

You don't really want to limit the ability to save at any point. You want to limit the ability to load at any point. Let that sink in.

A good save system will allow you to exit at any point, and resume from exactly where you left off. So a save on exit and a load on open.

A good checkpoint system will bring you back at a suitable location to retry when you die.

Check out Dark Souls for a good example of this. Dark Souls also includes a penalty for using the checkpoint (all monsters respawn).

 

Yes. No saving. The player must play for the enjoyment of playing, not for the reward of completion. A good game can easily be played over and over from the beginning, in fact... it's a joy to start over. Maybe the question is, why do you need a mechanism that ensures people they only have to play any part of your game one time?

Just make sure they accomplish something definite every 5-7 minutes and incorporate an auto save whenever they hit a major goal. That way, the most you lose is 5-7 minutes and you never lose anything that was important.

If they aren't progressing consistently enough to ensure a goal every few minutes or so (in such a short game, no less) then you have a pacing issue, and you're probably trying to spread 10 minutes of content out over an hour. So I would say 5-7 minutes is perfect, about the average time you wait for just about anything, ever. Probably that's the extent of most people's patience, after which they would probably start wondering if they're lost or if this game is even very well designed.

Saving whenever you want with no checkpoints or resets... recipe for disaster imho.

No saving is still the coolest, though. Not so fashionable these days, though.

 

very this, the pace. something must happen... but those things may change depending on game type.
that need for pace is a story killer

 

I've always found that those "Ironman" options in games like XCOM: EU are a nice way to save while preventing reckless play. By only allowing one save file, you permit the player to save whenever they want or need to, but prevent most serious attempts at save scumming. Every player is going to have a different taste, but I think a save system like this strikes a nice balance; at the very least, it may at least be a decent starting point. Without really knowing the type of game you're thinking of (as this seems to be more of a hypothetical situation), I can't really say much more than that.

 

I like auto-save at key points, then have the player jump back to a previous location with loot and xp still with them when they die. But also have a save and quit option in case the player needs to get up.

But however you do it, you will always have people complain if there's not a "save any time" feature, which I think completely ruins the emersion.

EDIT: Oh, and one MAJOR pitfall with doing things my suggested way is if players are not presented clear choices and suddenly find themselves commiting to a quest branch without even realizing it. That plain sucks.

 

Not the OP, but I'm still going to chime in.

Major flaw in your logic: You don't get to dictate what people enjoy.
I enjoy the reward of completing a hard game and I'm not the only one (see: the popularity of Dark Souls).

Having great replayability isn't a necessary condition for being good. Antichamber is a fantastic game with absolutely no replay value whatsoever.
Some games are just one-time experiences and there's nothing bad about it.

Besides that, having tons of replay value doesn't make a bad game any better.

See Antichamber: It's a puzzle game. The fun comes from figuring out the solution. If you already know it, there's no more fun to be had in the particular chamber.
Another example would be linear, story focused games. You'll want your story to be told like "ABCDE" and not like "ABABBCDCDE". Think about people who keep repeating themselves over and over again.

5-7 minutes is awfully little. Maybe these are accurate numbers for casual-/mobile gamers, but for core gamers? No way.

Only if there's a one-save-slot restriction. Otherwise it's fine because you can always reset by loading a previous save.

Because it's a completely retarded thing to do for most games. Don't forget that games that take 6 hours to finish are considered short.

 

not being able to pause and save, then load back and continue; is evil.

 

The OP should really watch this

While at certain ages, when you have nothing but leisure time to play games, restricting certain features seems like a good idea to enforce a challenging game, that doesn't always hold true. For instance, my generation is running into this head-first; a decade ago I could easily throw a summer at a game or three, and "master" them. Now, I simply don't have that kind of time - bills won't pay themselves, I've got a sick family member, despite all of this it would be nice to have a love life, and that's not even counting the fact that I need "me time."

Another thing to look at, is this older (2012) Austin IGDA "microtalk" from Sheri Graner Ray and her presentation on why player's time is valuable.

Hope those help give you some useful thoughts.

 

Have you played Alien-Isolation? The save system is part of their game, to prevent save-scumming. And, it is probably the best system I've seen. The game is extremely hard, so getting BACK to a save point is a major accomplishment. It builds anxiety, and fits perfectly with the horror theme of the game.

As others have mentioned, you also have to consider people's lives. If you are going to use a save system, I recommend putting a variety of save points around your level, so that they can't save every 10 seconds, and yet, don't have to wait 15 mins to save. Though there is no right answer, I do recommend you think about this very carefully.

Gigi

 

Play RE4 if you want to see a 'good' save system. You can save by using typewriters and speedrunners and hardcore players can choose not to use these typewriters, but they do get 'checkpoint saves' after cut scenes.

I'd say players trust on a checkpoint system in some form so at least have auto saves after cut scenes or important sections in the game, but make it reliably so that the player knows when the game does auto save. You can then offer a save system such as the typewriter that they encounter at important sections in the game, and to which they might be able to return to save when they feel like it.

But having a player save in 15-30 min intervals is way to large of a time gap.

 

Their system reminds me a lot of ninja gaiden's. You progress between saves, cause major changes to the area, have major changes in objectives and need to backtrack between different save points.

I wish more people played that game because it did a lot of amazing things for its time.

 

One thing that I hate in saving systems is systems that encourage an optional save and restart before every encounter. If your game is going to be set up to allow saving at arbitrary points, at have the decency to auto save at high frequencies. Nothing breaks gameplay immersion like having to go through the menus and manually save every couple of minutes.

 

You can put in a quick save though by just pushing a button or a combination of buttons so that you save without ever having to open the menu.