Saving revisited

Generally, the amount of saving you allow a player is a trade off between challenge and catering to the player's need to be able to leave the game without losing progress at any time. I'm generally for anything that allow the player to play on his or her own terms, rather than being artificially constrained in how he or she enjoys the game by the game's interface. However, I've noticed in games that have quick saving and loading at any point in the game, that I tend to rely on this feature more and more as the difficulty ramps up, rather than improving my skill at the game (for instance using the dodge move against the tougher opponents). This is particularly common in PC FPS and RTS games. I have a hard time not to, even though I know that this will reduce the enjoyment of the game. The solution to this have been using save points, places in the levels where the player can catch a breather, and also save his or her progress. As I've discussed earlier, the problem with these save points is that there may not be one available when the player needs one. And the player may need one at any point in the game as the player may have other, higher prioritised, things that he or she has to attend to (like going to work, take care of the children, do the dishes). If the game does not allow the player to combine these things with a meaningful experience in the game, the game is not going to get played. And this is something that is just gets more and more important as the games' audience grow older.

The problem is not easy, and one that I had not managed to come up with a good solution for until I read David Sirlin's article in the September 2007 issue of Game Developer on saving in games. There are two things in this article that I found to be brilliant (and that I ask myself why I haven't come up with something similar myself).

The first thing regards hard and soft save points (called save points and check points respectively in the article). At the hard save points, the player can save his or her progress to disk, and at the soft save points, he or she can save the progress to memory. The problem with the latter is that that progress is lost as soon as the player quits the game. Sirlin questions the point of the soft save points all together. He argues that it is better to always let the player save his or her progress, though he theorizes that the existence of soft save points has to do with the long save times on older consoles (the ones without a hard drive). I would suggest that if a game has this system, and if save times are a concern, allow the player to save at any save point as an menu option or similar, and prompt him or her to save or do it automatically, when he or she quits the game.

The second thing is nothing short of brilliant. It is the save system of Mario 64 (which I haven't played). The game has save points at which the player can save his or her progress, but it also has something called a save token. A player can create a save token at any point in the game, even in the middle of a heated battle. The save token can then later be used to resume the game with the exact state as when the token was created. However a save token is not a save game. First of all, the player can only have one save token, but more importantly, whenever a save game or the save token is used for loading, the save token is destroyed. This has the effect that the player may quit the game at any time without losing progress (by creating a save token), but will still be equally challenged to make it to the next save point since the save token is destroyed as soon as the player loads it, and he or she will be forced to start over at the last save point again to continue if there is a serious failure. Unfortunately, saving is difficult, and this solution may not be for every game due to technical limitations, but at least, make it possible to save every soft save point!