Wolfenstein: The New Order - from the makers of Riddick: Butcher Bay & The Darkness 1 - by EvaUnit02
GodzillaX8 on 26/5/2014 at 17:04
I don't really care what type of save system a game uses, but if it uses auto-save/checkpoints I hope that it does it relatively regularly. If I lose more than 30 minutes of progress I usually end up quitting the game for a substantial period of time out of frustration.
Bjossi on 26/5/2014 at 17:24
Don't know about Wolfy NO since it sounds like a fairly straight-forward shooter but in games like Metro 2033 it was very easy to lose 30+ minutes of progress due to inconsistent checkpoint frequency and some levels being quite open and full of little detours with goodies.
WingedKagouti on 26/5/2014 at 17:25
Quote Posted by Bjossi
I just don't get it, what's the incentive for that design principle?
Checkpoints makes saving and loading simpler for the developer to handle, as they don't have to check for enemy or player placement, and in some cases pickups can be omitted as well (usually for a point-of-no-return checkpoint).
When a player saves at a checkpoint, the developer can be certain that several conditions are have a preset value, such as player location, what enemies are alive/dead, which doors are locked and so on. Mostly a console concern for older generations, but less stuff to save means less storage space used. Less stuff to load means less stuff that can go wrong in loading, if it's properly implemented.
For a level designer, checkpoint saving means a simpler time at implementing a linear experience and pace it. If they do it well, they use the checkpoints to make sure that the gameplay is balanced between action and non-action. Used well, checkpoints also ensure that the player won't have to spend too much time to get back to where they were if they fail a segment.
june gloom on 26/5/2014 at 17:26
TNO's checkpoints are a bit strange. They barely trigger at all during the home base sequences but go off at least every 2nd or 3rd room or so during main gameplay.
EvaUnit02 on 26/5/2014 at 20:35
What was the last AAA shooter that did allow saving anywhere? After FEAR in 2005, I draw a blank. EDIT: Just remembered the Stalker series and Bioshock 1 & 2, but I've got nothing after that.
Bjossi on 26/5/2014 at 21:20
They're not really AAA games but Serious Sam 3 and (I read) Shadow Warrior got manual saving. It just so happens Serious Sam 3 is the most recently released game I have played to date, and it turns 3 years old next November.
Despite my bad eyesight I could always enjoy games in the past thanks to being able to save my progress, because I tend to die more than others. In modern games with their fancy, complicated graphics I need this kind of hand holding more than ever before, and that is when these bastards take away the possibility. I could probably still play many of these games but I just don't feel like going through all the needless frustration of repeatedly dying/failing before making it to the next checkpoint until I have brute force memorized the situation to the point of looking like an aimbot.
EDIT
HL2 Ep1 (2006) and Ep2 (2007) (Has it really been 7 years since the last HL? Fucking hell.) both have manual saving. Same for Crysis (2007). Dead Space 1 (2008) and 2 (2011) kind of have manual saving, you can save at each terminal as often as you like.
icemann on 27/5/2014 at 04:19
Just sounds like lazy programming to me. Sure you'd have to put together a function to save the current state + location of all enemies, npcs, items that way, but it's not rocket science.
Bjossi on 27/5/2014 at 05:31
Regardless of the savegame type, you want a consistent state save / load. You don't want the likes of Dead Space where dead bodies are reset to their original locations upon reloading a save, or the likes of STALKER SoC where reloading a savegame alarms nearby enemies and even tells them your location. That sort of thing goes against the very reason why we save our games: to store the state the world is in at the time.
The only difference between manual saving and checkpoints should be the trigger, the procedure that follows should be identical. Of course you could optimize checkpoints based on knowledge of the level to limit the amount of state that gets stored, but that is actually a lot more work than setting up a generic, all-inclusive save / load system and the savings are quite unimportant on modern systems.
Pyrian on 27/5/2014 at 12:47
Managers deciding what features to spend programmer time on is not laziness on the part of said programmers. Even if they're the same people.
WingedKagouti on 27/5/2014 at 14:06
Quote Posted by Bjossi
Regardless of the savegame type, you want a consistent state save / load. You don't want the likes of Dead Space where dead bodies are reset to their original locations upon reloading a save, or the likes of STALKER SoC where reloading a savegame alarms nearby enemies and even tells them your location. That sort of thing goes against the very reason why we save our games: to store the state the world is in at the time.
The only difference between manual saving and checkpoints should be the trigger, the procedure that follows should be identical. Of course you could optimize checkpoints based on knowledge of the level to limit the amount of state that gets stored, but that is actually a lot more work than setting up a generic, all-inclusive save / load system and the savings are quite unimportant on modern systems.
You could always just do a memory dump if you wanted to, but that's not time or space efficient (and stuff can go wrong while doing so).
With a manual save you need the complete state of every object whether active or not, unless you're happy with dead enemies reappearing at their spawn location instead of where they died and so on. For a npc this should include a full AI state (path finding, combat state, etc.), which can go horribly wrong if one variable doesn't get saved/loaded/reinitialized properly. While testing is (should be) part of development, most non-simple systems have corner cases you can't easily test for. With more complex systems you get more of these corner cases and you get a higher risk of a corner case causing a critical error. With enough time you can eliminate many of them, but you still have to pay wages for that time spent.
If they're owned by a publisher, a developer would likely have gotten a "You have {x amount of time}, you have to implement {features}, it needs to run on {system}"-message when asked/told to do a project. If they're independent it's more likely to be a case of "We have {x amount of money}, we need to include what we can afford". Checkpoint saving is fairly easy to implement and fairly low risk compared to a manual save. You basically just need to save player state (including any story choices) in many cases, as opposed to player + object & npc states for the entire level.
If you want a shiny new graphics engine with lots of fancy new buzzword stuff, you may not have the resources to also include a manual save option. Unless you're basically just doing a "save player location + inventory/level + mission progress"-only kind of save as is common in open world sandbox games (they often seem to spawn you in a predetermined safe spot too, regardless of where you actually were when you saved). And that's basically a checkpoint save anyway.
