Saving

Saving has always been an infected issue in game design. I used to believe that not allowing the player to save the game whenever he or she wanted was a serious mistake. I have since come to realize that having fixed save points that you need to reach adds an additional excitement and challenge to a game and stops you from slowing down your progress by saving all the time.

Now, having said that, there are numerous ways to use save points in a bad way. As an example, I'll use "Prince of Persia, Two Thrones" (XBox version if there is any difference). In Thrones, you have two kinds of save points, the hard save point (my terminology) that allows you to save the game to disc, and the soft save point (my termonology again), which allows you to restart from that point if you die as long as you don't turn off the console. I love the new Prince of Persia games, especially "Sands of Time" was brilliant, yet they are far from free from serious flaws.

I got stuck in Thrones and have quit playing it, and I think it is very sad, because I enjoyed that game a lot. So what happened was that I reached this hard save point and consequently saved the game. First thing after that save point is a long chariot race. Chariot races are a minigame in Thrones that has little to do with the actual game. This, the second one in the game, is particular long and difficult, and there are a lot of opportunities for fatal mistakes. I've manage to complete the chariot race twice, and I've tried many more times than that. You reach a a soft save point once you finished the chariot race. Then, immediately, there's a boss fight, and a difficult one at that.

The problem here is that whenever a player have managed to get by a particularly difficult part of the game, he or she should be allowed to save. They should also be allowed to save right before a difficult part. This is because losing progress is not entertaining, and doing things over and over again isn't either. These are strong arguments that there should be a hard save point between the chariot race and the boss fight.

Now, suppose that a casual gamer's gaming sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes. This means that if your game should be easily enjoyable by casual gamers, then they should be able to make significant progress in those 30 to 60 minutes, progress that will not be lost to the next gaming session. Considering that most gaming sessions probably aren't exactly 30 or 60 minutes in time, but vary from 10-15 minutes to a couple of hours, the rule of thumb should be probably be that you should be able to make significant progress in 10-15 minutes and that this progress should be possible to save. Also note that this isn't 10-15 minutes if perfect play and continuous progress, but that the player might well fail a couple of time in the process.

Given this, is it reasonable that it took me about two hours of frustration to succeed with the chariot race in Thrones the first time I tried it? How many other players got stuck there?