I posed this to the bombast: I've been playing Demons Souls recently and looking forward to Dark Souls. One of the most frustratingly honest features of the game is the fact that there is no formal save feature. It's all autosave. Kill an NPC, autosave. Miss a sword, gone. Use a healing item, autosave. Every arrow you shoot is accounted for and saved. So when you reload that profile, it's aaaaaall been saved. This got me thinking. What if more games had been this way. What if my choice in New Vegas to serve NCR or Legion, House, or myself were an actuall choice, and not some fork in the road checkpoint to cheese the last three hours four times. What if my team in mass Effect were really gone because of the choices I made in the end? How many times have we done the save/reload trick in Oblivion, Half Life 2, Bioshock, you name it, simply because it was safe? I fear for my life in Demons Souls. Not because of the enemies, but because of my choices. So, would you like to see more games strip away the save button for the chance to make real choices and live with the consequences?
Should more games be Autosave ONLY?
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No. I hate how many games don't support quick saves as it is. If you want to set super restrictive rules on your games then do it yourself and just don't load older saves. Asking developers to implement systems in their games to force everyone to play games the way you like to is just silly.
Games would need to get better first. Way more testing would be needed, too. Something like a Bethesda/Obsidian game could never get away with it.
Some games are able to get away with it. Dark/Demon's Souls are two good examples: giving the player the ability to manually save (either hard or quick saves) would imbalance the game, which is all about careful and high risk/reward gameplay. The Gears of War series, for instance, are heavily checkpointed and I've never felt the need to have a hard save. But those are just a minority. Not letting players save whenever they want could be disastrous. Mass Effect? That game is all about tailoring the story to what you want it to be. If you get rid of the element of "plot exploration" (i.e. solving this situation this way, then reloading and doing the opposite to see what happens), you're basically fucking up the game experience. And for games like Fallout: New Vegas (or anything by Bethesda), that would be a nightmare, both in terms of coding and playing.
Besides, how the player (ab)uses the save system should be left to the player. Why don't we force a constant Internet connection to the developer's servers, so the player can't use cheats? Derp.
The lack of full load/save and the forceful limiting to just autosave is one of the most stupid things to ever happening in video game design, plain & simple. It does nothing to enhance the experience, but goes a long way to completely fuck the experience up for a lot of players. Want to revisit your favorite moment? Play the last 20h again. Missed some details in a cutscene and want to rewatch it? Play again the last 20h of gameplay. Encountered a glitch? Have fun starting from scratch. Want to show the game to a friend? Don't even try, it might ruin your save.
If I wouldn't have had a bunch of savegames to fall back to on the "Kill Rex" situtaion in Mass Effect I would have thrown the game in a dumpster and never touched it again. It was a classical situation not of "living with your decisions", but being forced into a stupid situation with no way to resolve it due to lack of experience points in one of the skills (and yeah, having skills to decide dialog choice is probably the second most stupid thing to ever happen to game design).
The only games where I consider autosave-only tolerable is in games that are very episode driven and where you can essentially revisit levels and scenarios whenever you want (Assassins Creed, Resident Evil 5, etc.). I still would prefer a free load/save in those games, but I can see why they don't do it, as it keeps the interface simpler and easier to understand. And it should be noted that there having only one save has broken Assassins Creed for some people after that sole savegame corrupted.
The stupid save system is one of the main reasons why I never bought Demon Souls.
Oh hell no, Some games require the manual save. Imagine if fallout 3 had been autosave only. When a glitch fucks up your game 50 hours in, you'd have to restart the whole game again! They would have to do heaps more testing to get away with autosave only.
Also Horror games where i save every few minutes just incase the next corner i turn will kill the shit out of me I wouldnt be able to play anymore.... please dont take that away from me.
No game should be autosave only.
I don't think every game should have it, but I'd be more than happy to have autosave only / your hard save deletes when you load it in most games. It would make me care about my decisions instead of reloading it to fix my own mistake.
@Nux said:
No, that would be the worst.
Damn it, that was my answer.
I like the idea of your choices being conrete but it would have to be a certain type of game. Heavy Rain for example ends in many ways, reloading any before any "bad" choices would result in everyone having the same ending. Thats kind of boring.
I'm fine with Demon's Souls because it creates tension. Not being able to reload makes your actions way more meaningful.
I would say yes to something like Fallout or Mass effect... The only thing is that they are kind of poorly polished games. What if where I autosaved in Fallout turned out to be in a rock I couldn't jump out of. I'd be stuck there forever. What if there was something I really wanted to do in Mass Effect but the stupid morality system said I didn't have a enough Paragon to break up a fight between Miranda and Jack. That wasn't a tough choice I made, it was the game being stupid.
There would certainly be a case for it - IF games work as intended. I mean, imagine playing Fallout 3, or New Vegas and getting to a point where it autosaves when you have hardly any health left. Seconds after the auto-save you get shot and die. So you load the save, get shot and die. So you load the save again, get shot and die. So you throw the controller at the wall and never play the game again.
However if you can get an autosave system that works properly and won't leave you in a situation like that, then it definitely sounds like a good thing for certain games. The issue is developing a system like that. It's not easy. One glitch or bug and it could totally ruin 60 hours of progress, and leave the player totally infuriated at the game. It's something that probably won't become standard for many, many years purely for that reason.
In Fallout 3 I was trapped in a locked door that I couldn't pick, didn't have the key to, and no NPCs opened. If there was Auto-Save only, I would have lost 20-25 hours of progress. While I see the upside of being Auto-Save only, games are too buggy for it to work now.
The reason it works for death soles is because the game is built for it. When you die you go back to the check point. Not all games are created that way. Fallout 3, oblivion and other games like that you die and you reload your save. If it only had one save more then a few people would get into situations were they would be stuck because they couldn't get out of the situation with out dieing.
I sort of like the idea of an open world game in which you don't have the option to save manually. Since so many people are mentioning what that'd be like in an RPG, I think that if the game was solid enough, it'd really help with the immersion to only have one life with no saves. Although something along those lines would be way, way too hardcore for most audiences, but it'd be nice to see something like that as an option. That said, I sort of like the feeling and constant tension of constantly autosaving in Bethesda games or in games like STALKER where there's just as much a possibility of the game suddenly breaking as there is being suddenly killed by something unexpected. It's weird, but constantly hammering on F5 does add a bit of tension, somehow.
I have this quirky habit of saving the game (with a custom name if possible) before cool cutscenes, when i arrive to a new location or otherwise pivotal points in the game. Right now I'm replaying Fallout: NV and i like to explore everything, reach a high level and collect most or at least my favorite unique weapons before i actually start any quests. It'd be kind of nice if i could save the game before i start the quests, and after I'm done with NCR i can go with legion without the need to start a new game.
Short answer, no, games shouldn't have just autosaves.
Gamers will not accept any level of failure at any point. They will find a way to subvert your game, or they will be permanently angry that the game didn't take everything they did as a win. We have an example in this thread itself where someone blamed 'the stupid morality system' for not being able to break up a fight between Jack and Miranda. People played LA Noire resetting the game in every interrogation if they got one wrong answer. People learned that if you failed in Heavy Rain, you could go back to the beginning of the chapter. Keep in mind, all three of these examples don't make the game impossible to complete, every one of them was designed to allow for failure... but why bother, when gamers will manually reload when Jacob gets carried off by seeker swarms.
Gamers will not tolerate failure. I wrote a tl;dr blog about it last week. Developers are largely wasting their time in creating 'worse' outcomes dependent on player interaction. The only thing you can do is offer two equal options to a player... and even then they'll be upset that they couldn't have both.
We have an example in this thread itself where someone blamed 'the stupid morality system' for not being able to break up a fight between Jack and Miranda.The problem isn't failure itself, but the game taking control away from the player and leading him into a dead end. Once you failed to break up the fight between Jack and Miranda, not because you made bad arguments, but because the game gave you no other choice, you have no way to recover from it. You can go with them on every single mission for the rest of the game, but you can't have a simple talk with them. The game locks you out and doesn't allow you to interact with the world. That's not a good way to present failure, that's just plain stupid and breaks the immersion a million times more then reloading the game a dozen times to get things right.
Games are about interaction and the way most games present 'failure' is by taking that interaction away, no wonder that players get angry at shitty game design.
I would love permanent decision. It would give a weight to every decision and make it actually matter. It would create the sense that I was making real decision and not just exploring a game. Not the right fit for all games but I sure would like to see it a hell of a lot more than I do now. I am purposefully ignoring the how auto-saves could get you stuck and make you restart your game. I will leave that up to the designers to figure out. I would just like more permanency to decisions is all.
Videogames aren't stable enough to warrant saves by autosaving, nor is the life that is around the momentary playing of games.
Not having to re-do passages over and over again is the reason I play on easy. I want to relax, I can't take the challenge anymore, I could when I was younger, but no more.
I shouldn't be penalized for having to leave bc of real life stuff and be forced to re-do stuff.
I'm one of those who actually used to leave my NES turned on over-night...
It's the same as Vinny's hatred of lockpicking scores. The game is designed to reward players who invest in lockpicking... they get to open doors that combat focused characters don't. But approaching a door to see that you haven't spent enough points in lockpicking is a form of failure, and gamers (or Vinny) will not accept it. They'll either turn the game off or subvert the rules.
If the solution is to take the difficulty check against statistics out, then you've created another scenario where gamers will not accept failure. If unlocking the door is action prompts, gamers will quickload every time they break a lock. If convincing Miranda and Jack to cool off is a series of dialogue trees, they will quickload until they do it right. 'Taking control away' has nothing to do with it, it's purely intolerance towards failure.
Wrong. I played the game twice, doing basically all paragon. Once I succeeded, once I failed. No idea why, my guess is that the order in which I played a few side missions was different, thus not having enough points in one play through and enough in the other. Essentially nothing I had control over, just the gaming say "fuck you" and ruining my second play through.If you were focused in either of them, your Shepard would have the ability to squash the beef.
Yes, because the rules are shit.They'll either turn the game off or subvert the rules.
If the player should accept failure, failure must happen because of his own doing, not because some Excel spreadsheet in the background told it to be so.If the solution is to take the difficulty check against statistics out, then you've created another scenario where gamers will not accept failure.
Which just goes to show that the lockpicking mechanics are shit. The reason why people don't accept failure is because failure is boring, immersion breaking, forced and all kinds of other things that make the game feel worse. If failure would actually be interesting, there really isn't much reason to be bothered by it. Let a failed lockpick result in an interesting conversation with an NPC, a chase sequence or other kinds of interactions that are fun and might lead to reward in itself and people won't quickload after a lockpick fail. But as failure is binary, you get the goods or you don't, with no interesting consequences, of course people will quickload.If unlocking the door is action prompts, gamers will quickload every time they break a lock.
Or alternatively, how about simply letting the player train lock picking and gain experience in it that quickload becomes unnecessary. It's one of the most annoying things of RPGs that they force you into a class right at the start of the game, a much better way to handling things is to actually let the player choose what to train on while actually in the game and having some idea what different talents and things are good for. Also get rid of stupid level caps, if I want to go around and take the time to learn everything in a single play through, let me. Why do games feel the need to restrict player choice in unnecessary ways?
The correct solution isn't to have one dialog tree that ends in a dead end and forces quickload, but open dynamic interaction. Players would be a hell of a lot more willing to accept failure when they would know they could recover from it later, but in most games these days failure is permanent, even if it makes absolutely no sense in terms of the game world for it to be permanent. it makes no sense that I kind talk with Miranda ever again, even so I am with her on dozens missions and flying with her on the same spaceship for weeks or months.If convincing Miranda and Jack to cool off is a series of dialogue trees, they will quickload until they do it right. 'Taking control away' has nothing to do with it, it's purely intolerance towards failure.
Never. Too many times have I had the problem where you're on low health and the games quick saves, then you die and the process repeats leaving me to put the game down permanently. Moving to Autosave only would be a serious mistake and I would play less games than I already play.
Fuck no, as many have already said games aren't perfect, also I play games to you know have fun, its one of the reasons I still am not getting Dark Souls even though its a type of game I would love to play it just looks difficult to the point of frustration and I am a perfectionist so the moment I lose a batch of souls I will be raging hard and I don't want to make the people around me uncomfortable because the faces/sounds I will be making would make someone think I was insane.
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