Saving... Please acknowledge lack of skills.

Just as gaming has evolved, so has the whole ideology behind game saving... Fragmaster takes a look at the negative aspects of the "save anywhere" scenario and how game makers can make the situation better.

A Little Bit of History...

In the early days of videogaming, you deposited your quarter in a coin-op and played until the game was over. Sometimes your game lasted less than a minute, sometimes you could play for a half hour or so, and if you got really good at a particular game you could literally play all day. The great Defender players of the day could play the game for over 16 hours on one quarter. If they needed to go to the bathroom, they would have to run quick and be prepared to sacrifice some valuable extra lives. If they got hungry, they would have a friend hold pizza in front of their face so they could continue playing.

When home videogame consoles became common in family living rooms across the country a few years later, things still stayed pretty much the same.

If you wanted to get that high score on Asteroids or stomp your way through Super Mario Brothers, you would have to have a couple of free hours and be sure that none of your siblings or parental units needed to use the TV, causing you to lose your hard-fought progress.

Fortunately, some console games had batteries that allowed you to save your game. These were mostly used in large adventures and RPG's, though, so fans of side-scrolling action games were out of luck. Eventually, batteries were abandoned and games were saved to special RAM chips inside the cartridge. And then the Playstation and its memory cards came along.

Things were much better on the home computer side of things, since nearly all home computers of the mid-80's had some sort of easy to use way to storing data, usually on some sort of floppy disk or small hard drive. Not all games allowed you to save your progress, of course, but most games that would require such a feature, like a long adventure game, did. Today, most computers ship with more storage capacity than any normal person would ever possibly need. Space is no longer an object, and nearly all games that ship these days, outside of maybe card games or puzzle games like Tetris, come with some sort of save state feature.

And that's where the problems begin. Well, for some people, that is. Having the ability to save and reload your games wherever and whenever you want is great for some people, especially those with busy schedules or short attention spans, but I think having the ability to save anywhere is, in many cases, a bad thing.

Let's take your typical first person shooter for a minute. You can save and reload whenever and whenever you want, which leads to the all-so-very common practice of repeatedly saving and reloading in order to conserve ammo, avoid dying, or circumvent having to trudge through the same boring area yet again. Now I'm not saying that we should abandon the save game system all together and solve these games in one marathon thirty hour sitting, but doesn't constantly saving and reloading your game cheapen your gaming experience? It certainly isn't as big of a challenge. Furthermore, couldn't saving and reloading frequently be considered, well, cheating?

Unfortunately, I don't think the situation will be changing anytime soon. Critics and gamers alike panned Aliens vs. Predator's original save game system because you could only save at the end of each level. While this may be a bit extreme, considering the size and difficulty of some of the later levels (or so I've heard, I've only played the game multiplayer), I think AvP's designers had the right idea. Allowing the player to save wherever he or she wants kind of ruins a lot of the suspense and makes the game a lot less difficult, don't you think?

Some gamers will argue that the current save system for most first person shooters is fine, and if you don't like the idea of saving and reloading constantly then you should only save at intervals that you believe are fair, like the end of every unit or something. That's true, but some of us don't possess that kind of willpower and when given the ability to save anywhere, we will. We'll abuse the power and quick-save every five seconds.

Wouldn't first person shooters in particular be better games if they had some sort of "checkpoint" saving system? In which your game would only be saved at certain defined checkpoints, much like the system used in games like Sonic the Hedgehog?

To use an example of why I think this would be a good idea, let's say you're playing a first person shooter, your character is low on health, and a small army of enemies is just around the next corner. Using your typical save game system, you would probably tap the save game button and attempt to blow away the entire army of enemies without getting hit.

If you died, you'd just reload your game and try again. If you made a couple of good shots and killed a few enemies without getting hurt at all, you may fall back a few steps and save again. If you ran out of ammo, you'd reload your game and try again. Basically, you'd save and reload until you got through. Where's the challenge in that?

How screwy would it be if we could use that kind of save game system in real life? Imagine being able to save your life as a four year old, and be able to load up and relive that portion of your life any time you want. Imagine being able to "save" your life whenever you wanted, enabling you to spare yourself a lot of embarrassment and failure. Fall down the stairs and break your leg? No problem, just reload your life from earlier that morning and avoid tripping on junior's stupid skateboard. Want to beat your boss to a bloody pulp? Go ahead. And if you get fired, just reload your life from sometime before you stuck your fist in the boss's mouth and go on about your business. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. And I'm sure you're thinking of a whole bunch of perverted things you could do if you had the ability to live your life like an old Sierra adventure game.

Of course, time-stream difficulties aside, having a system like the one described above is completely impossible. Which is what I don't understand. Why do so many games that strive for "realism" in other aspects of gameplay use such an unrealistic save game system?

Checkpoint saving would at least be a little more realistic. Let's go back to that other example again: this time, the shooter you're playing uses checkpoint saving. You're low on health, there's a bunch of enemies around the corner, and the next save checkpoint is just beyond (at least, you hope it is).

The situation in both scenarios are essentially the same, but now that the save game system is different the way you approach the battle will probably be very different. If you die, you'll have to go back to the last checkpoint and do it all over again. You probably don't particularly want to do that, so the battle will be a lot more interesting and meaningful. And since you can't save the game every few seconds, you won't be able to reload your game if you waste ammo or make a couple bad shots. So ultimately, you'll have to be a better player to fight through this situation than you would have to be if you were using a traditional save game system.

I don't know about you, but I'd get a lot bigger sense of accomplishment and satisfaction if I passed that situation without saving every five seconds. Sure, if I died and had to re-do a couple of things I had to do before, perhaps multiple times until I got it right, I may get a bit frustrated, but I think the tradeoff would be worth it.

Since different players have different styles and abilities, I can understand why the current save game systems exist. People like to be able to choose when and how they do things, like save games or fight enemies, but a game that gave the player complete control over every aspect of the game would obviously suck. There are some things game designers should control or at least restrict, and I don't think many of them pay munch attention to save game systems, especially designers of first person shooters.

Yes, where and when you save depends a lot on the difficulty, length, style of play, and type of game, but I think some thought should go into the improvement and design of save game systems across the board, especially in the realm of first person shooters. While it is important that save game systems do not hinder or frustrate the player, it is equally important to design a save state system that allows the game to be enjoyed at its fullest potential.