Renzatic on 20/4/2013 at 19:22
Quote Posted by Brethren
Checkpoints are just another form of hand holding in games, for the Y gen that just wants to run straight forward fast and shoot everything in sight. We don't want to give them too much to think about, like you know, saving the game or anything! Why do checkpoints even exist in games? They're designed for people who just play brainlessly and don't think things through.
Depends on how they're done. I'll give you an example of checkpoints done well by bringing up that game no one ever talks about, especially me: Dark Souls.
You never save in that game. In fact, it saves for you ever 5-10 seconds or so. The checkpoints in the game are the bonfires spread out across the world. I like this setup because it takes away the safety net quicksaves give you. There are no take-backsies. If you're standing over mysterious hole that leads to god knows where, you actually have to weigh the pros vs. the cons of jumping into it. I mean you've got this nice collection of souls, and you fought through hell to get as far as you are now. Do you risk it all and forge forward, possibly dying and losing everything you've earned up to that point, or do you play it safe, and maybe miss out on something great? You have to think about what you're about to do, because the game doesn't allow you to take back a mistake.
These are checkpoints and autosaves done well. They take away the gamier parts of the game, and allow you to focus on the world. It allows for greater immersion because you're not thinking "oh well, if I mess up, I can just reload and try it again". Your thinking about the consequences of your decisions.
Course the flipside of this is a system that makes the game too easy. Bioshock is the one game that always comes to mind when I think of checkpoints done wrong. It's even more spawn happy than quicksaves and quickloads. There are no risks to your decisions. You kill a couple of guys, die, reload, kill a couple more, die, reload, kill a couple more...wash and repeat until you're won the game and saved the day. That takes away risk altogether. At least with quickloads you have to start from scratch every time you mess up (unless you find a safe spot to save in the middle of a firefight).
So it's not that checkpoints are an easy hand holding replacement for people who don't want to think too much. It's more about how they're designed. It can either make the game more easy and gamey, or increase the challenge and immersion without ever taking you out of the game itself. Some developers do it better than others.
Lady Rowena on 20/4/2013 at 22:47
By the Builder! You must be quite masochistic to enjoy the kind of game you have described. I would never, never play it! :D
Renzatic on 21/4/2013 at 00:47
Masochist? Yeah, pretty much. :P
...but it gives you a good kinda hurting, you know? One that shows it cares.
demagogue on 21/4/2013 at 02:52
I guess Stockholm Syndrome can apply to games too.
Judith on 21/4/2013 at 21:28
I was away for a few days and I see I missed quite a bit :)
Quote:
But, at the same time, they give us ridiculous regenerating health, regenerating chambers, and so on. As if "just dying" was too distressful for modern players. It's quite self-contradictory IMHO.
That was for quite a bit different reasons. AFAIK the shield regen was made famous by first Halo, where there was a lot of enemies and their accuracy was pretty high, so the player could feel like a legendary hero constantly being under siege without dying every 5 seconds. Then the Call of Duty used it for the same purpose. It's a cheap trick but it added more tension (to the point of over-stimulation these days) and level designers didn't have to think about spots to pack with health kits.
henke on 22/4/2013 at 06:35
Quote Posted by Brethren
Checkpoints are just another form of hand holding in games, for the Y gen that just wants to run straight forward fast and shoot everything in sight. We don't want to give them too much to think about, like you know, saving the game or anything! Why do checkpoints even exist in games? They're designed for people who just play brainlessly and don't think things through.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. But in case you're not: have you actually
played any games with health regen and checkpoints? In most games with health regen you defenitely need to use cover. Just rushing in isn't viable. And there are plenty of games with checkpoints where a quicksave function would make things a lot easier, instead of having to replay the same 5-10 minutes over and over until you get it
just right.
Checkpoints work well for linear games I'd say, but for a Thief game I'd defenitely want quicksave/load. Having well-placed checkpoints in a relatively non-linear level would be difficult, if not impossible. And also quicksave/load encourages experimentation more when you don't have to worry about re-doing the last 10 minutes if you mess something up.
Chade on 22/4/2013 at 08:13
There's a lot of other possible solutions to the question "where would I like to start playing from if I died?" though. A good time to autosave in thief might be "the guards are patrolling normally, I'm not detectable from their normal patrol routes if I stay still, and I'm a fair distance from my last save point". A separate "unsafe" autosave slot could kick in if the game hadn't been able to autosave under those criteria for a while.
I can't see how auto-saving could be designed to play well with experimentation, though.
Myth on 22/4/2013 at 09:44
How I play Thief games: manual saving (menus and all). I never even used quick save. I save all the time, and I keep previous saves until I overwrite the oldest one. I never save on the last slot, I developed this superstition only for Thief games and no others :cheeky:
How frustrating auto checkpoints can get: I like to play on the highest possible difficulty right from the start. Such was the case with Knights of the Temple 1. But on the highest level that game becomes an absurdity. I had to play trough 1/2 of the level to again and again try and beat the first boss (an executioner fellow with a red hot branding iron). He two shotted me so many times that I eventually gave up, not because I couldn't find the gimmick the developers wanted me to use to beat that otherwise broken boss who reached across hot braziers and had reduced collision size so I couldn't get him stuck or anything... but because finding that one abuse/gimmick to beat the boss on the highest difficulty required me to also plow trough 15 minutes worth of mooks and generic enemies and THAT annoyed the taff out of me.
So what if I save after successfully sneaking trough a difficult guard position with overlapping fields of vision and random turning? That's the whole point of the game isn't it? I don't need a checkpoint when I first enter Bafford's Manor Inside at last.... I need it when I sneak crouched trough a marble floor with haunts going around in random patterns. :thumb:
Renault on 22/4/2013 at 19:51
Quote Posted by henke
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. But in case you're not: have you actually
played any games with health regen and checkpoints? In most games with health regen you defenitely need to use cover. Just rushing in isn't viable.
Tbh, haven't played games like that in a while, I was referring more to the linear gameplay style- move into one dangerous area, shoot and kill, move in to safer area, checkpoint. Repeat ad naseum. I'm sure some of them are cover-based while others are not, that's not really what I was referring to.
