Game save systems in RPGs

I've never been a big fan of quicksave. It’s always struck me as a prop for lazy design, and lazy play. It also allows you to exploit any kind of random features within a game (see the Civ 2 huts as an example, or Oblivions Sigil stones) My biggest gripe, though, is that it absolutely kills any kind of fear or tension you might feel in dangerous situations. About to do something tricky or dangerous? Just save.

Of course, you could always just use willpower – and not save, but this approach has always been ridiculed here at the Codex as an excuse for bad design, and rightly so. Why should that stop now?

Quicksaving does have its upsides. I’ll admit that its flexible, and eases the frustration – but this since the challenge tends to up itself accordingly, we just end up with a ridiculous “save/die/reload” approach to gameplay.
There must be another way.

You could adopt the checkpoint feature, where the game will save your progress every time you complete a milestone, or perform a certain activity, but doesn’t allow you to choose when. I guess an example of this would be an autosave whenever you leave a dungeon or a town. The only problem here is that people would end up entering and exited dungeons (or whatever) simply to save.

Another variant could be the “save crystal”, style approach, where you can save whenever you want, but only in certain locations, like taverns for example – or your house, should you own one.

You could also adopt a limited number of saves approach. Maybe one per game day, or one per real hour, or one in between every visit to your house/a tavern.

Then there's the resident Evil style approach, where you need to find your save “tokens”. I'm not really convinced that this would work that well in a large freeform world.

You’ve even got the ridiculously hardcore Nethack style approach, where you can quicksave at any time – but if you die. You die.

My point is that none of these are perfect, but to me at least they work much better then the old (crap, and unchallenged) system that we seem to have in place at the moment.

Personally speaking – I’d like to see a system where you could only save at safe houses (Pubs/ Taverns/ Your House/ Brothels/ Tents) and can carry one manual save between visits to these safe houses. Not sure how this would work in practice I have to admit, but it would make players afraid when they should be, stymie cheesy play, make the cosy safety of taverns a reality, and still allow a little flexibility for those who suddenly realise they have to stop playing mid quest. If there's any flaws, just tell me!

Oh.

 

I think there should be two options when starting up the game, like in Mount & Blade. The regular save anywhere you want option when you can quicksave and load anywhere you want, and the "limited saves" option, using one of your ideas. The choice should be permanent, and made at the start of the game.
Personally, I've played way too many FPS with horrid checkpoints systems, and now I hate anything other then being able to save wherever I want. Sure, people do abuse the unlimited save systems, but what happens if between one checkpoint and the next, the power goes out or the game freezes? You loss all your progress.

 

Yeah, but then it comes back to good design I guess. (re the FPS with horrid checkpoint systems)

Realistically how often is there a power cut? And as to games freezing or crashing – yep it happens, but it shouldn’t (poor design again)– potentially a reason why the checkpoint style approach is more often used on consoles.

I do agree though, that you want at least a little flexibility in there.

 

I don't agree. I usually end up with a strong detest of games that do not allow you to quicksave, as playing these almost always equates to frustration build-up. I'll admit quicksave has some potential for abuse, but that hardly outwheighs the irritation of having to play through the same boring piece of a game a zillion times.
The only system I could possibly come to terms with, is a limited number of saves that are granted to the player in between 'save zones' (houses, taverns, towns, whatever, ...), with the option of using them at any time. Even then, balancing the amount of saves so that frustration is removed in favour of some added tension, does not seem linke an easy taks. Quicksaving is just fine I'd say...

 

Nethack-style save anywhere WITH save points (crystals or whatever).

When exiting the game, you have the options of making a temporary save that will be reloaded and deleted when you start up again. If die or load while in game, you can load at a previous save point.

Gameplay should support the system. Placement of save points should be appropriate. The player should fear death, but not insta-death - i.e. the player should have a reasonable amount of time to decide if whatever situation they are in is too hot to handle and thus avoid death. In other words, interpreting risk of death should be straight forward, but willingness to brave said risk is up to the player.

Finally, any random number seeds associated with "die rolls" should be saved as part of the save point save game state. This prevents the abuse of save points (save, try, load, try, load...) to get better "die rolls".

 

My preference is for unlimited anytime saves. Reason being is the realworld tends to intrude on my playtime and quite often I need to stop where I'm at and go.

I have no problem with M&B "no quitting without saving". Although you can't die either so all your risking is your army and wealth.

 

If you do that, one of two things happens:

1) you get into some asinine situation that is really too hard for your chracters (think the first vampire the masquerade before they patched it) and have to reload over and over and OVER just for this one patch.

2) they dumb things down excessively and remove a lot of the challenge.

Both of them suck.

I have no real temptation to reload over and over, except once in a while just to fuck around.

 

I like save slots, as they limit saving a little bit more and discourage constant saving. Otherwise, the only other restriction I would place would be saving during combat, which has always struck me as a little cheap. I kind of like Escape Velocity's system of saving every time you dock. That way, you can quit or leave any time, but battles will generally have to be fought the way that they were meant to be, not ground up into little pieces. Also, it means that you are never far from the "save point," it being in the same place in every system.

 

As I think I said in some other thread, what kind of saving system you use depends on the game design. If you design a game where the player dies often due to random numbers, or where the player is expected to overcome obstacles via the resurrection fallacy (that the death of the PC is a legitimate antecedent to getting past a point in the game, even though the game itself does not recognize that the PC has died), then you cannot in good conscience also limit the player's ability to save. Heck, if the player dies often, period, it's likely that now you'll need to offer some kind of saving mechanism, because players (rightly, I think) are no longer willing to have the majority of their playtime spent replaying areas they've already passed. (In the olden days, NES games had maybe 45 minutes worth of playing time, but you wound up getting hours out of them because you'd die and then have to replay everything you'd already cleared before.)

M&B strikes me as a great compromise, especially because the consequences of death aren't that high.

 

Same here.

Still, limiting saves to, say, only places where a party could camp safely or spend the night makes sense to me. I guess my party COULD save/camp in that dark, dank dungeon, but I certainly wouldn't be sleeping during everyone else's watches. And saving while I'm burgling a house or fighting for my life? I have one giant safety net that's going to catch me when I fall/fail, and that removes much of the risk. Still, I save anyway.

 

...

 

If you don't want to save 'abusively'... just don't.

Many people will though, occasionally or routinely. There is no reason to change the conventional system for saving except your lack of confidence in yourself.

 

I've given it a lot of thought and had some new ideas:

Saves in combat can be limited to time. If you have a long battle, you mite want to take it easy until save time and then attack. Creating a flow of battle and being willing to take injury towards the end of a save period.

I move extreme idea that has never been used is my Karma system idea. While playing the game, failures and bad results give positive karma. Loading a saved game to undo bad results gives negative karma. Enough positive karma could boost some willpower stat, while negative would reduce it.

This takes into account a meta-law of averages and getting laid back when you get really lucky or adapt when things turn out bad. Loading saved games is messing with fate and should have an effect. This means that getting a crippled limb isn't auto-reload and that lossing a party member mite be a tragic event instead of reload.

 

There is absolutely no excuse for not letting me save wherever and whenever I want to (well, except for cutscenes and the main menu, but shaddap). It's not a matter of "cheap" and "exploitable" to me. In any case, what's the difference between seeing a big baddie and going "uh-oh, better reload and take the other fork in the road" and seeing the big baddie, getting killed by it, and then going "well, better reload and take the other fork in the road"?

I can see why this sounds neat, but the problem is that it means you get exactly one shot at everything. This is basically the iron man mode in ToEE, where you can only save when you quit the game. I don't think that's what an RPG ought to play like, because if you don't beat an encounter, you ought to get to try again. That said, it's always fun to include an iron man mode for the masochists among us, but it really shouldn't be the default mode of play.

The key thing to keep in mind, I think, when it comes to save mechanics, is that if I need to stop playing and go to work/class/do dishes/whatever, I should be able to do so at any time, and not when it's convenient for the game.

 

"This means that getting a crippled limb isn't auto-reload and that lossing a party member mite be a tragic event instead of reload."

I am playing through fallout right now and have eye damage and without doctor skill apparently I am just stuck with it and it FUCKING sucks. The combats are an extreme pain in the ass, and at night I am just worthless. Taking out those deathclaws cost me fitty stim packs.

 

I agree with the saving at anytime camp. Real-world intrusions mean that I don't always have time to wait 15 minutes to get to a save point. Remember The Bard's Tale I and II, where you always had to go back to the adventurer's guild in the city to save your game? That was a massive pain in the ass.

However, it does lead to the save-die-reload-try again issue.

As a game designer, you need to keep in mind that players will reload a saved game if something doesn't go right. One solution is simply to not have death equal Game Over. The middle Ultima games (IV through VII at least) would have you reincarnated or simply wake up after being defeated. I think the earlier games gave you a slight XP hit in this event.

Perhaps the key is that when designing around a save-at-anytime feature, you need to reduce the consequences of failure. Because if the consequences are bad enough, the vast majority of players will simply reload the game and try again. That doesn't mean the same thing as making challenges easier to overcome. And write it into the fiction of the game. In Torment, you are simply reborn again when you die. Obviously that doesn't work in all games. In Ultima VII, Elizabeth and Abraham happened across you just as you fell. In the middle of the Tetrahedron Generator. Yeah, okay, so it doesn't always work elegantly.

Some earlier RPGs had harsh consequences for a character dying. After coming back to live, they permenently lose a Constitution point. Okay, time to reload. Most players are not going to keep playing with those penalties, so why bother including them?

That doesn't mean eliminating consquences for failure either. It just means making them minor enough that players are willing to accept them, rather than reloading and playing the last few minutes to perhaps a half hour over again.

 

I don't think this is a good idea. You can too easily end up in a situation where you have to revert to a much earlier save point because you are low on healing resources and have unlucky die rolls saved with your game. It shouldn't punish the player like that.

 

Keldryn -- That's pretty much the position I took in the earlier thread (and I think I got derided for being too much of a pansy). My point was that in P&P RPing, death is a rare, rare sanction, while in cRPGs, it is the first sanction with the understanding that the player will just reload around it. From an ease of use standpoint, I think you *must* let players save anywhere, any time. The problem is that once a developer implements that feature, it seems to think that you can then require the player to use it often. (I gathered a bunch of quotes from FAQs / hint guides from major cRPGs about saving often, before every fight, etc., etc.)

The best solution to me seems to be allowing the player always to save, but forcing the player to save when he quits. Then give him "bookmarks" or "checkpoints" or whatever at major turning points in the game, where the player might want to reload just to see what would've happened had he taken the other path (and thus avoiding the need to replay sections to get to new areas). Those "bookmarks" are always there and don't get saved over. Finally, the player never loses the game but merely suffers setback from losing encounters (as in M&B, the Ultimas, early console RPGs -- where you traditionally lost half your gold -- PS:T, etc.).

From a gameplay perspective, that seems by far the best solution. The only real trouble is that it's hard (as you note) to construct plausible plots around the last element (that the PC never suffers "true death"). Even PS:T, which was very elegant, started to get strained when bosses would just sit there and wait for me to come back to life and attack them again, and would never leave the area and get on with their nefarious plots.

 

That is why with the karma system, with a tragedy comes some adaption.

With a save-anytime it can be: play with high penatlies to feel good about not reloading, which I don't think many do the first time around.

 

Agreed. And it is often seemingly quite random. I remember playing King's Quest V, and walking too many screens in the desert in one direction (looking for the oasis), only to die and have to reload. I know it's not an RPG, but this is poor design in any genre. Death should never be a consequence of a task that essentially boils down to trial and error.

Yes, it has to be there from a usability standpoint. But if you include it in your design, you need to design around that feature as well. I like the idea of saving my game being something I use when I'm done playing, not something I use before every time I do anything involving a risk.

I assume that means having only one save file/slot in addition to the bookmarks? The main issue I have with that is that RPGs can be very buggy, particularly the sort that many of us here enjoy. You can't risk having that one save game getting bugged, and forcing the player to either restart the game, or from a much earlier point.

Definitely an interesting idea, the bookmarks. To ensure that what I mentioned above doesn't happen, you'd have to make the bookmarks very frequently.

Short of making the PC some sort of immortal or Chosen One, yeah it's difficult to construct a plausible plot. One idea that I had for a fantasy RPG was to not have permanent death, but for dead characters to be sent to the Netherworld -- the Land of the Dead -- upon death. If a party member dies, you need to venture into the land of the dead and somehow rescue that party member, bargain for his or her life, etc. If the PC dies, then he or she goes to the Netherworld, and perhaps has to fight to get out or make a bargain with the divine or supernatural guardian of the dead. And then I got the idea that it might be really cool for, upon certain events such as a "boss" battle, if you die and have to return from the Netherworld, you could meet a recruitable character in the land of the dead that you couldn't otherwise meet. So there could be a very rare occasion where it might be to your benefit to die... just to make things interesting.

A big plus to this is that it doesn't require the PC to be an immortal or the one chosen to save the world -- from a game fiction standpoint, anyway. Every mythology has its own beliefs about where you go and what happens when you die. You just need to work it to your advantage.

 

When I suggested this, I was thinking more about non-combat stuff, such as pickpocketing, lockpicking, enchanting, etc. in Morrowind. You could still have "random" die rolls for battle damage/healing etc.

 

This is a weird (and depressing), but probably true, point that I had not considered. It's quite seldom that I've had a save get "corrupted" in that sense, though, and indeed I often *do* just use one save slot (probably foolishly), even when I'm save scumming. Part of me wants to just say, "Don't have broken quests!" but that's silly; obviously if designers could avoid them, they would.

Well, I don't know. I'd say you could get away with risking the player losing an hour's worth of game time due to a glitch. But you may be right. I've just never thought of saves as "backups," so I haven't thought through that issue well enough.

But I don't think immortality / Chosen One solves the problem anyway. As I noted with regard to PS:T, it's wildly implausible that villains with some goal just sit there waiting for your return (as Trias does) and fail to properly deal with your corpse while you're KO'd, regardless of whether the villain is goal oriented (Trias) or just sitting around waiting for adventures (like the guy in the Modron maze). Some of them *know* you're immortal in advance (Trias, for example) and still don't take measures to deal with you between lives. Those who don't know in advance would figure it out the second time you died to them, at which point they'd burn your corpse or lock you in a vault or something. Instead, they apparently just dump you back where you can rest, while leaving your entire party alone. It just doesn't make sense.

Ehh . . . . I've heard this idea bandied about before (esp. in the MMORPG context, where it's a little more plausible) and it never appealed to me. You still have to explain recovering your equipment / body (which may have just been scorched with a fireball or pierced by a spear or whatever), you're left without any rationale for why plot-important deaths are permadeaths, and the mechanic for resurrection likely becomes just an annoying grind. If it's too easy in a SP RPG to get through the Netherworld, it loses its point and becomes totally trivial; if it's too hard, players will just reload.

Soul Reaver used this mechanic quite well, of course, but that required an immortal / chosen one plot, plus a lack of save-anywhere, plus a lack of companions, plus a lack of reload-to-where-you-saved. (Like a lot of console-style games, it let you save anywhere, but when you reloaded, you started at square one. Teleporters helped get you back where you were reasonably quickly, but you still had to expect at least a couple minutes of backtracking. Since getting out of the netherworld usually took less than a minute, there was no incentive to save scum.)

 

Save crystals? Special save locations? What the hell is this shit? I like being able to save wherever I want and whenever I want. A game forcing me to backtrack to a save location wastes time.
One of the many reasons I stopped playing GTA: SA was because of the save location system. I hated being unable to save close to a mission location or in the mission itself. Having to spend time redriving to the mission location and replaying until one gets to the difficult part struck me as a worthless time sink.

 

No kidding, a save system should be a meta-feature. I don't want gameplay based around finding crystals, or film for a camera or whatever. And the dungeon crawl, to big dialog to fancy batter to save point is a cliche I could go with never seeing again.

I'm not sure how Imbecile could say it was a prop for lazy design (well it does make more sense when I right it out like that) - in life, things don't come at you in easily digestible save-points. A game design based around them is already limiting itself in many ways.

What's better than giving every player the freedom to do it anyway they want? Feel free to make iron man modes, or anything else you like as an option, just let people play your game the way it best fits into their lives. Let Max Power , grind through, never saving and burying character where they fall, and let Captain Interrupt save when he needs to go rather than rushing through 30 minutes of content in 5 minutes to save or leaving his machine on all day, and yes let Furry The Carebear make 40000 saves.

 

Obediah -- The point I made in the other thread (I should just find it and hotlink) is that developers who make games with free save-loading then tend to expect the player to save often ("Remember: Save before every battle because you never know how it will turn out!"). At that point, you're forced to save often unless you want to do massive amounts of replaying. Games that have limited save options tend to be more forgiving in terms of the consequences of failure. I would take save anywhere and non-game-over failures as my ideal, of course, and ultimately I'd rather have the current regime of constant quicksaving to the oldschool save approach. But still.

I stopped playing GTA for the same reason, by the way.[/i]