Games in General: Save anywhere versus Restricted saves?

[Gambit37]

As a minor OT, I agree Ameena about the 'pikemen' -- my well practiced vaulting no longer works and I keep getting diced. I need to develop a new strategy.

One thing that is strange about POPSOT is that some save points are very close together, and often after very simple puzzles. Then you might go ages trying to complete a large section and when you get to the end on low health you have to fight a massive group of enemies in sight of the save point -- and keep dying. I think that's pretty bizarre, and downright frustrating.

However, if you'Retry' after using all your rewinds, you are placed back to a more recent checkpoint, NOT the last save point. This goes someway to easing the frustration, but means you *have* to make it to the next save spot in the same session if you don't want to keep repeating you last save game.

That's bloody annoying!

[Tom Hatfield]

I think Diablo II and Dungeon Siege II have pretty good save systems.

When you quit the game, it saves automatically.

Diablo II saves periodically while you're playing, and it saves when you quit. In fact, the only way to save manually is to quit the game. No matter where you saved, you restart in the town corresponding to the current Act, with all your equipment and experience. If you died and hadn't recovered your corpse, your corpse spawns next to you --- sans any money and potions that may have fallen on the ground before you quit.

In Dungeon Siege II, you can save anytime you want, and you're even prompted to save any time you complete a primary quest. No matter where you saved, you restart back in the last town you visited, with all your equipment and experience (but not summoned creatures; they must be re-summoned any time you zone). If you died and failed to recover your corpses, the necromancer automatically summons them for you, taking 25 percent of your gold as payment.

Diablo II has experience death penalties. As far as I know, Dungeon Siege II does not. (I hate any kind of experience penalties, but I believe there should be some drawback to dying or the game simply isn't challenging.) This system worked extremely well for these games because of their style, but it wouldn't work at all for a game like Dungeon Master or Gothic II.

Just an example for you to digest.

By the way, I think the best way to tell when a game is really good is that you simply forget to save, and then you lose hours of progress when something bad happens. This is why I believe every game needs an auto-save feature.

[Mindstone]

Restricted saves are irritating and can make a game tedious unless their well placed, like in Halo 2 for example when you can respawn at a checkpoint. But what about games with no saves at all! Im talking about the infamous original Prince of Persia game, which you only have 60 minutes to win and is virtually unwinnable anyway because the dungeons are so damn hard. After playing POP I haven't complained about restricted saves since, and probably never will.

[zoom]

In WOW you cannot save at all.
To my shock I felt the urge to save - and could not.

Makes you think on how much you really save in games.
Anyway.
What is the point in saving a game in the first place?

I would say if you need to go away from the computer
(not much time in general, or short intermissions/-ruptions)
a saving feature at all times is practical and good.

being allowed to save only on certain points in the game makes saving
really unnecessary - if you have to go away from the game you do not really loose much (5 to 8 mins).
on the other hand your progress, as said, can be severly hampered. You maybe lose some "touch" to/with it.

And you are likely to come to a passage that is just not fair.
Due to a designer´s (on purpose-) or bad design.

I do not know if i am still on topic, but "I save" because:

want to keep what I got, want to protect myself from sudden
surprises( damage to your characters); so to relieve yourself of pressure.
Can obviously make the game less thrilling and boring.

with an rpg, I tend to save many times;

i do not want to overwrite a saved game so i save on a new slot, with an apropriate description
like "uuuaah","therewasI" or just "yoxdiuflakj" you get the idea..

I end up having 10+ saving slots and sometimes search my most recent saved game by date!
a self-made chaos really..

(somehow I also like keeping all that items with charges you find and never ever use )


a word on old games, esp. highly difficult jump´n´runs or parallax shooters:

you really had to memorise (enemy formations, traps..) in order to stand a chance.

If played over and over again, you would have learnt it eventually -or not..
There you liked to cheat sometimes..*chorus of whistles*

on contrary to these, rpgs need to have a save game slot, better more, that´s clear. [-your characters die, evil prevails; not good, world is done.]

I remember my brother (and partly me) playing an rpg where the saving feature was completely broken; We just did not switch the amiga off for three days. He managed to beat it but the power supply unit frizzled.

dying and having forgot to save in an rpg can make you very upset etc. (seriously!)
because he kept forgetting to save, a friend of mine wrote S.A.V.E in big black letters on his monitor.
(and Trantor, the german DSA game was really fustrating; if I remember correctly, it was so "difficult" and long winding[fights and leveling] , you got two bonus levels right after your very first encounter by
godly intervention!! - do not know whether you had to give them "back" later - Btw, the DSA pen and paper version was my first contact with roleplaying.)
-----------------------------------
Conclusion:
I like to save but i am not very good at it.
I save more often than i have to (it´s an reflex)

No saving option or special point saving only in linear gametypes or linear gameplay.

++A save game slot limit is a compromise.++

[Ameena]

Another reason for saving is if for some reason the game bombs/freezes, your comp fooks up, or there's a power cut or something.

[Tom Hatfield]

Yeah, not so much an issue with console games because the platform is stable, but crashing is a very serious (and pretty much unavoidable) issue with PC games. No matter how stable your code is, someone somewhere has a system configuration that can crash it.

[Mindstone]

Thing is Apple Mac's never crash! This is not speculation, my cousins Apple Mac which hasn't crashed once. I've had my new PC since february and god knows how many times i've shouted at it, bashed it's worthless hide in frustration and turned it off from the mains as punishment for freezing! Next computer I get is gonna be a Mac, it's just a shame that A) Their so expensive, and B) There haven't got any games on them.

[linflas]

C) they crash too.

working 6 months on a cluster made of 22 apple xservers : hundreds of crashes, network neighbourood overloaded all the time.

macosx is a still very young system, xp and linux aren't.