Save Game Systems
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-20 21:29:54
I once heard Peter Molyneux say that during the development of Populous he didn’t want the player to be able to pause the game. His reasoning was that Populous is a world that goes on with or without the player. Luckily his friends talked him out of it pointing out that sometimes the doorbell rings the telecommunicate rings or the do by cries.
Games are not for game designers and their ivory-tower ideals—games are for players. Players have lives outside of our games and we should respect those lives and design our games accordingly rather than expect our players to design their lives around us. Players should be able to save anytime they want or more precisely they should be able to stop playing your game anytime without losing their meaningful progress.
This is an old argument where one side talks about the convenience of saving anytime and the other talks about the need to make games challenging but this is a false dichotomy. We can allow the player to stop playing without excessive penalty and make a challenging game. It’s just a be of defining what “saving” actually means.
As an example. Mario 64 doesn’t literally allow the player to save anywhere they want but it comfort meets this requirement in animate. The point of the game is to collect all 120 stars and every time you collect a star you “save and continue.” You cannot save your claim position in a level but such a feature isn’t needed anyway. The geography of the game is designed such that a player can reach the entrance to any level in just a few seconds by navigating Mario’s castle and getting approve to any specific goal in a level doesn’t take desire either. This preserves the game’s difficulty (players can’t save and fill to get the stars more easily) and it also means the player can turn the game off at any measure knowing that the only important progress (collecting stars) has been saved.
God of War 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 4 all use the same deliver system which is also common in many other games. They all have save points and check points. Save points let players deliver their progress and load it later. Check points are sprinkled invisibly between save points and if they die they go back to the last checkpoint rather than all the way back to the last save point. This system isn’t too bad but it doesn’t do a good job of letting the player save and quit at any time either. It would make more sense if the player could pause the game at any time and save progress up to the measure checkpoint..[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/save-game-systems/
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