How Do Save Systems Shape Games?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ค. 2024
- Go to buyraycon.com/designdoc for 15% off your order! Brought to you by Raycon.
Save systems shape way more of a game than you might think. No matter the type - from passwords, manual saves, autosaves, checkpoints, or games with no save system to speak of - saves can dictate what a game encourages, what it values, and even what the game can be at all. Some combos of saves and game types lead to entirely new subgenres. Get it wrong, though, and you might undercut the very thing the game wants to highlight. Let's talk about saves, how they impact game design, and some things to watch out for if you're making your own game.
Support Design Doc on Patreon: / designdoc
Design Doc on Twitter: / warbot400
#shovelknight #undertale #gamedesign - เกม
The fact that real life doesn't have any save system, combined with permadeath and the insane difficulty really can't be described as anything but a grave oversight by the devs.
*Tier Zoo theme*
"grave oversight" nice pun. An average playtime (in 1st world countries) of 80 years is way lower risk of death than games have. Although yes life is difficult despite the low chance of death
@@SkySpiral7_Lets_play Real life used to be much more difficult centuries ago. I like that they lowered the chance of death rates now.
@@Vik1919 Nah, that made the game far too casual. You just need to git gud....
Are you not getting save options?
Being able to quit without saving bamboozled me several times.
I still don't trust it.
Quit without saving is needed for save-scumming. (Easy save-scumming anyway)
And not all save-scumming is bad and cheaty, sometimes you just need to test something without screwing up your profile you have heavily invested in.
@@jasonreed7522 Or just because you want to see all reactions for choices in dialogue or events, or something like that.
@@jasonreed7522 some more recent games have been designed with save scumming in mind. Desperados and Weird West come to mind
@@harrylane4 the borderlands series... Oh my god I grinded guns for hours and probably have a couple hundred hours in it. That said bosses respawn in that game and saving/quitting is what causes that to happen. I question if this is good game design or bad game design because it means with enough hours of grinding you can get whatever you want. Not to mention farming bosses in borderlands isn't fun.
I remember an old RPG maker game where a villain that is cowardly and fights dirty actually camps and ambushes you on the "save point before a boss fight".
That sounds hilarious. I wonder how hard the fight itself is though.
Something like this happens in Final Fantasy ig (not sure which one) where a crystal designed for savestates and healing turns out to be an enemy. (You can save after defeating it tho)
Another one is Undertale. Savepoint is actually a disguised enemy
Oh my god that's actually genius
In one of Chrono Trigger's dungeons, there are monsters that respond to noise, and there are many things in the area that produce sound. Including a save point. I think one of the save points somewhere else in the game is a monster itself.
@@MightyAnik I know final fantasy 12 does it.
Just yesterday I was thinking about how the Yakuza series went from fixed phonebooths to saving anywhere on your smartphone. Not a huge game changer besides being more convenient, but interesting in how it ties in with the world changing as the years pass between games.
Earthbound (Also known as Mother 2), a SNES rpg, has you save by calling the main character’s father. Calling on a house phone or black street phones are free, but green pay phones cost a dollar. Not that it matters, even just 30 minutes in the game and you’ll already have a 100 bucks or more, but it does make the game feel just a bit more real and interesting.
As for the other 2 games in the series, Earthbound Beginnings (Mother 1) and Mother 3, Beginnings is the exact same system, while Mother 3 uses green frogs instead (this makes way more sense given the context of the game).
@@RiskierGoose340 even without the context of the game, common sense dictates that it makes more sense to call your father using a green frog.
A more significant game changer is the legend difficulty, which removes all checkpoints and has you relying on phone booth saves only. I really like the contrast of having a pretty chill time with relatively little pressure while in Kamurocho, and then sitting the fuck up and going full serious mode whenever you do out on one of those linear levels knowing that you'll get kicked all the way back to town if you fail. Actually kinda stops you from getting stuck bashing your head at a wall on some boss you're not ready for yet, too. You lose once, and it's back to the chill time at Kamurocho doing some more cool sub-stories and getting a bit stronger before taking a deep breath and trying again.
I like how you can even excuse later games in the series for still having you save at phone booths even though smart phones are plentiful by the year they're set, because you're playing as characters who all have an excuse to not have smart phones. Kiryu and Saejima spent years in prison and are clueless about all this new fangled technology. Akiyama was homeless for a while and now would rather take a nap while Hana deals with technology. Shinada lives paycheck to paycheck and can't afford a fancy phone. I guess Kiryu figured out phones by Yakuza 6, but for Yakuza 7 they take saving out of the phone and put it into the menu because Ichiban doesn't know about smartphones either and has to make a new friend on the street to teach him how to call or text. But saving is still in the smartphone in the Judgment games because Yagami's a young guy who's up to date on all the latest technology.
Heck, they could have even gotten away with going back to phone booths for Yakuza 7 if they wanted to, because fixed save points around the map would be another perfect RPG thing for Ichiban to fantasize about.
The relationship between save points and unskippable cutscenes might be worth talking about. Legend has it, thousands of people never finished their climb up Mount Gagazet after watching the same cutscene two dozen times.
The Seymour fight was a pain. It was the second difficulty spike in the game for me. The first was the Evrae fight.
DAmm, I just wrote a comment about getting stuck right at that mountain and I had forgotten it's name. I had to restart my game at the Seymour battle because I somehow got there to underleveled and couldn't progress.
Or where in smt v that important lore cutscene comes before the boss fight you are most certainly going to die in the first time leaving narrative dissonance as you know something the characters aren't reacting to because you loaded to a previous save
Cutscenes should never ever be unskippable.
Yeah, though I think unskippable cutscenes is the major culprit here and it's why FFX is really not one of my favorites. Unless you really like or don't mind the game's story, it really ruins the replayability of the game.
Save horror story: I was playing FFX and I loved the summoning mechanic so much that I was only using Yuna up until.... she got kidnapped. I didn't think about it and just saved over my last save. Every random encounter was like a hard boss fight after, it took me weeks of grinding after school when I had the will to do so to start being able to progress again.
Ah yes. FF screwing up the player if they don't use their gimmick properly like the sphere grid.
@@ikagura I mean I think it just came down to not levelling any characters but Yuna, I'm not sure the sphere grid did that 😂
@@bikzimusmaximus5250 I got screwed because I didn't know how to properly use the grid and I thought that I should level once I get 5 Sphere levels.
I have that problem in FF6 right now, I didn't level Celes up enough and now I can only use her and keep dying
Yeah, this issue comes from the decision to only give characters experience if they actually take an action in combat, which prompted my tedious playstyle of getting every character to pass once at the start of every fight before then actually fighting the enemies...
I think games like Hades are interesting in how they sort of reset the state of the game with each play session (or multiple times within a play session), but there's additional context that gets updated or maintained as you continue to play. So any saved data has both run-specific save data (e.g. in layer X, room Y, with health Z, etc.) and separate save data for things related to permanent progression.
Roguelites.
I feel like you would have to if you wrote about 30,000 lines of dialogue running though a progressively granular trigger system. :P
@@AngelicDirt Heh, well, more than just that, I think the core premise of rogulelites of having conditional persistence of segregated portions of save data is an interesting concept. I imagine there'd be a lot of unexplored creative space for changing what parts of a given gameplay experience are persisted based on various aspects of the gameplay.
“When was the last time you thought about saves?”
Literally learning how to implement a save system in my game TODAY, so… this video is coming with absolute precision timing.
So many options to choose from, in addition to the content of the video you also have to consider WHAT to save (super mario Sunshine realistically only needs to save collectables gotten and things unlocked since you always load into the game at the same spot. Old school pinball only saves the top X highscores. Compare that to pokemon Emerald and all that it has to save.) And you need to know how many save files to keep, the single file of pokemon is a very different experience to Fallout Vegas having 100 save slots plus an autosave. And in the days of cartridges how many saves per profile, and the number of profiles per cartridge were important.
@@jasonreed7522 yes!! I’m thinking so much about this. Functionally I’m making a metroidvania, so I need to save player state (customization, location, health, etc), inventory (with awareness of *which* collectibles you have), and worldstates (what permanent levers have been flipped? What barriers have been destroyed? What bosses defeated?). I’m sure I’m going to have to revamp several times!
@@LighthoofDryden personal preference from a frequent metroidvania player, I always like it when games like that have hints that a save point is coming (see: bench and stag signs in hollow knight) so that the player never feels stranded and has an idea of the next time they'll have an opportunity to stop, heal, and regroup before moving on. No pressure, axiom verge for example doesn't do that and I still liked it a lot, just thought I'd let you know something I and maybe others like to see in metroidvanias
@@hankboog462 thank you for the tip!! I really like that too-nothing worse than the feeling of picking the wrong branching path (at random) and then learning your save point was *right* there but you walked right past it.
@@LighthoofDryden maybe for some of the collectables, bosses, and interactables, you could add a flag to say that youve got it, and to not spawn it again. although i do NOT know ANYTHING about programming, so i don't know if it'd actually work or not, but sounds like it could work
Ni No Kuni taught me to create multiple save files instead of overwriting the same file over and over. I had gotten about 17 hours into the game before a glitch caused a story cutscene not to trigger. I didn't have an earlier save to rollback to, and my game was stuck with no way to progress. It was painful starting a fresh file after that.
Yeah, having multiple saves is essential in many games. I might've learned that playing Fallout 1, but probably before that. Whenever enough time passes, or you go to a new area or plot event and you can't return, save on a new file.
I had this issue on Final Fantasy 8, with a save at the door of Ultimecia Castle. Glitched my save literally at the last dungeon. Luckly, I had learned to keep multiple save files, so I had a backup save and only had to play again a few hours to get back there.
FF Tactics moment
As someone who grew up on point and click adventures ( _especially_ ones made by Sierra) this is now pretty innate to me 😂.
@@jakerockznoodles Yeah, Police Quest was pretty brutal in how easy it was to get screwed over completely. And I'm not sure it was the worst one either (but the one I have the most experience with).
The first time I realized how important autosaving and checkpoints are was when I played Mass Effect for 2 hours without saving and then dying for a dumb reason... and then doing the exact same thing again, in the same area, effectively wasting 4 hours of my life.
For me its when a game crashes and you have no idea how much time its been since the last save. Fortunately most games today have very regular autosaves (or let you adjust the frequency of them) and the autosaves don't overwrite manual saves. It still sucks even losing 15 min of progress.
@@jasonreed7522 This happened to me with Trails of Cold Steel. I had been so used to autosaves, that this game smacked me a bit. It ended up crashing on me two or three times, which would lose me hours of progress.
@@lugbzurg8987 also, losing progress to a crash and having not saved feels so much worse than if you die like an idiot without saving. Mainly because you aren't at fault for the crash. (Generally, bugs thay cause crashes don't have known repeatable triggers at first. Once the cause is known, its on you to not do that action.)
@@jasonreed7522 The crazy thing is, sometimes it (and the sequel) crashed during CUTSCENES.
They're two of my favorite JRPGs ever, but they were not optimized well on their original hardware! (Can't imagine what the PlayStation Vita versions must've been like.) No idea if the PS4/Steam remasters ran any better, other than the framerate upgrade.
Rule #1 of JRPGs: ALWAYS SAVE.
Seriously, one of the things that I thought was weird in Persona 4 Golden was the removal of the save spot outside the boss room. There was no real reason to remove it, and just ended up needing to either buy (or find, if you're lucky) lots of Goho-Ms, or else conserve just enough SP to use Traesto to get out so you could either leave for the day or recharge your SP via the Fox.
That’s precisely why they removed it. It forced you to actually manage your resources.
@@pn2294 Yeah, you're probably right. Not that it really matters once you figure out that floor 1 of the Castle is easily farmable for SP items and even Goho-Ms... ^_^;
Talking about Persona 4...
Trying to play Persona 4 on Steam was miserable experience without being able to save anytime. I had to cheat 99 Gohomes, and use them every half an hour just to save, because game would crash randomly with no sign as to why
@@raven75257 Yeah, I haven't had that happen at all (and my computer is pretty old) but I have heard it happen to others. Sorry that happened to you, mate... Did you try any of the hotfixes?
@@shinigamimiroku3723 All of the ones I could find.
The funniest part? The one fix that actually helped me, was downloading pirated version with denuvo removed
First time I played Bioshock Infinite there was a bug that softlocked me late into a level, and of course the autosave had happened after the bug. With manual saves not being an option, I had to restart the whole level. Autosaving should never be the only save mechanic.
Man, the difficulty of most JPRGs comes from the time between save points (SMT dungeons spring to mind). Nothing is more precious than time, and having it all vanish due to rolls of the dice is a infuriating & sorrowful feeling. There's a reason players save multiple times, just to be sure. Alongside that, External Hardware: The Memory Card, but more infamously, the corruption of the save file. There is no worse feeling to a player than having a cartridge, disc, or file be unreadable. My worst experience that I can recall was my PS2 memory card being corrupted - hundreds of hours of action games & JRPGs lost to the nebulous void to wherever data goes.
Those PS2 memory cards would get corrupted all the time especially if you bought those off brand ones. The yellow and black ones. They'd fuck up your controllers too.
Yep, my completed GTA: San Andreas save corrupted due to an off-brand memory card was definitely one of my most painful gaming memories. I have no shame in admitting that I used a cheat device to play through the game the second time because I couldn't bear to spend that much time on it again to get back to where I was 😭
JRPG game design can suck at times.
If the difficulty comes from wasting the player’s time, it’s artificial difficulty, and bad design. There are plenty of JRPGs that have balanced their difficulty without wasting the player’s time. Ys and Pokémon both adjust EXP gains when you’re over leveled, specifically to dissuade grinding and adjust the difficulty based on your skill and strategy.
14:35
This sort of fails to mention the most important part of the Steel Battalion permadeath system/save deletion. The controller has a prominent "EJECT" button that when pressed safely aborts the mission allowing for retries so long as you have money. Failing to press it before HP reaches zero will cause the pilot to die erasing the save. This introduces a risk mechanic for fights where damage might come faster than you can react. Leave and retry or press on and risk death.
There's a bit of semantic drift with "softlock". It was originally used to describe game states where you were screwed but a simple reset (either turning off the console or quitting to menu) could let you continue, whereas a hardlock was the file or even whole game was borked. But I guess at some point it changed to "you technically can still play this save file, just won't be able to advance".
That's so interesting!!!
The predetermined dice rolls also have their disadvantages because players can also use this knowledge to reload an older save state and act on behalf of the already determined dice roll.
Which, for example, was a thing with Fire Emblem. Dancing with cursor was called "burning RN" and if you'd reload and danced, you can move chain of numbers and get needed results. And for gba ones, one plugin can even show you mentioned chain.
This can be avoided though by using player input as a part of the random rolls.
If the player does the same thing, the same rolls happen.
If they change their strategy, the rolls change as well.
@@Artemas_16 There is a reason why FE7 and 8 have fanmade patches that burn RNs per frame. They actually force you to play the game instead of turning it into a meme where you are actively playing suboptimally if you don't look up the exact sequences online.
Couple things I wish were addressed in this video.
One being how a save system interacts with player deaths and Game Overs. Obviously a save system can and should be able to save everything up to the use of a save point, but what could be preserved beyond that point if the player dies some time after? Axiom Verge knocks you back to the last save point when you die but it maintains other facets of progress such as items and map completion. It even offers a narrative explanation for how such a thing can occur.
The other thing being if you have the ability to save literally any time anywhere there should still be restrictions. Most Zelda games let you save whenever and wherever, but reloading your save will often stick you at the entrance of a dungeon or whatever area you saved in. Everything else about your progress is maintained, this is more there to stop you from reverting back to the beginning of a fight or dangerous room and forces you to backtrack to such an area. Warp points within dungeons still alleviate the issue, however.
Save point doubling as experience retaining checkpoint has helped me out of a few softlocks.
I was going to bring up the traditional Zelda style. To an extent, it also sidesteps the 'save-point-before-the-Boss' thing but really only works in games that are shaped like Zelda's- an overworld with one-time offshoots that you leave the same way you came in (or at least, nearby) rather than a game where you progress through areas to areas beyond, or keep revisiting them like in a Metroidvania.
Save stations acting less as permanent marks of progress and more as teleporters is pretty great, I loved Aciom Verge, my playthrough of the sequel is on hold rn
I think there's an argument that if the game is doing the modern auto-cartography thing (...And, let's be real, when was the last time anyone hand drew a map themselves when playing a game?) map progression should be maintained even following death because the thing the game is doing as a convenience feature - not requiring you to hand draw your own map - is something that would be maintained even if the game had no save feature if the player was doing it the old fashioned way.
There's an interesting thing for checkpoints and saves that maintain progression - Death warping. You got it with some older Password based games where you got given the password on death rather than when you chose to save - It would maintain all progression you made, but restart you at a specific checkpoint, meaning that you can deliberately die after obtaining some progression on the other side of the map to where you want to be and then be teleported halfway to your next destination because the passwords only store what your last checkpoint was rather than what room you were in. I think you still see this speedrun strat in some Soulslikes, particularly since you can pick where the game checkpoints you by picking what bonfire equivalents you access.
The Fire Emblem series has gone through a long history of trying various save methods, all with their pros and cons, because being able to save mid-battle in a strategy game is not just a convenience/QoL feature but also can make battles significantly easier and can encourage the use of risky strats if you can just reload if it doesn't go your way.
Most games have followed a basic model of allowing you to save between battles (or on the overworld if present), and only "suspend" mid-battle, which was a temporary save that would get overwritten when next you played.
FE4: Genealogy of the Holy War, allowed you to hard save at the start of every turn, so long as you had not consumed any units' actions yet (allowing you to do things like arena fight and save after on the first turn). This created the issue of overwriting whatever save you placed it on, including your main game hard save, thus introducing potential soft-locks.
FE10: Radiant Dawn, allowed you to Battle Save whenever you wanted with a save that did not get overwritten. This feature was replaced with the suspend save on hard mode.
FE11 & 12, Shadow Dragon and New Mystery, had on-map save points that you would need to place a unit on and use up their main action for the turn to create a reloadable battle save. This is beloved by many veteran players as the best balance between convenience and strategic options, as it allowed you to plan out your saves like an extra resource, but was a bit clunky and confusing for new players so it got scrapped.
FE15 and 16, Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses, doesn't technically introduce new save systems, but a rewind system that effectively acts like one; The "Mila's Turnwheel / Divine Pulse" system, where you had a limited number of opportunities to turn back time and try a different strategy. In SoV the Turnwheel uses were gained through side quests and one set of uses lasted an entire dungeon (only really relevant for Thabes' Labyrinth) while in 3H the Divine Pulse uses were increased at certain story moments and after playing certain paralogues. The system is incredible QoL and is almost a requirement to play Maddening, but common criticism is that it makes the game "too easy" because it allows you too much granular freedom in rewinding and the only limit is global number of uses.
There are definitely pros and cons to both system, depending on what type of game FE is supposed to be and what players want to experience. There's a lot of demand for an "ironman" mode like in XCOM, to remove save scumming and restarts entirely, as well as flex difficulties such as removing divine pulse. Such options are definitely not for everyone, but for players of the game who like the challenge and want to actually engage with the permadeath system it would be a nice addition.
I think it's important to note that the granularity of the divine pulse system is purely a QoL feature. Because the RNG only advances when an action is made, whether you allow the player to go back to a specific point in a turn or only to the start of the turn, it's trivial to end up in exactly the same spot. The difference is that if you force the player to rewind to the very start of the turn, they just have to repeat their same series of actions, wasting time. Making the RNG advance at all times would fix this, but have hugely detrimental effects as well, letting you retry the same action over and over until it works, which I'd argue results in worse gameplay than the freedom to rewind to an arbitrary point.
The problem I always had with the divine pulse system was the excessive number of *uses* you get for it as you get further in the game. When it starts at 3 uses, it's a resource that you have to be wary of. But getting up to 12 at endgame gives you more than you could ever possibly need. And endgame maps aren't necessarily any harder than early game maps, since at that point you have many powerful units. Between raw stats and the player's skill increasing over the course of the game, their need for divine pulse goes down, while their number of uses goes up, to the point it becomes not only practical, but *optimal* to use divine pulse to cheese good levelups out of your characters, rather than fix mistakes.
@@caliburnleaf9323 level ups are static though. Once you character levels up it stays like that even if you rewind and kill a different enemy.
@@Luchux177 Correct. Which is why you hold that character back for the rest of the map and don't let them get more kills until the next one. You'd be surprised at how often you can hold one or two units back from getting kills for a map without putting your map position in jeopardy. LTC might not be able to get away with it with nearly the same frequency, but 99% of players aren't playing LTC.
Saves are kinda like game genres: Some people love some kinds of save system, other people prefer others. Personally, when it comes to strategy games, I really dislike save scumming, and use it as an absolute last resort, instead only saving the way the game intends. Playing Fire Emblem on the GBA through an emulator, I only ever used save states if I wanted to more quickly restart a chapter rather than use the in game save/restart feature, but other than that, I was basically playing regularly. On Earthbound, I only used save states if I was forced to stop playing but wasn’t near a save point, and never rewinded back to a save state, only the in game save points.
On the other hand, in games like Punch Out, I didn’t really restrict myself all that much. For example, you normally need to go through 4 already difficult fights before you can then take on Mr. Sandman, but I just slap a save state right before because I didn’t care.
With skill based games, if I’m playing solo, sometimes I just want to feel good winning, and with strategy games, I feel truly rewarded for solving what’s essential a big puzzle with some random chance.
I loved using Divine Pulse FE3H Maddening and ONLY used it when it was really necesary to save a character or Byleth. Using it for other thing rather than saving characters felt like cheating for me.
The saves in Metroid Dread and Metroid Samus Returns are pretty interesting too. You only really get to fully save at the safe rooms (be they save, map, or communication rooms) but it does save you a checkpoint before a tough battle (EMMI zone, Metroid fight or another boss) so in case of death you rewind back to the checkpoint and don't have to do the entire treck back from the save room.
It helps to keep powering through the tough bosses and helped me catch my breath during EMMI segments.
Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making EMMIs non-threatening once you understood how the save system works. The supposedly terrifying enemy that's hunting you down becomes little more than an inconvenience, since you're never at risk of losing any progress to it. It's a great feature for boss fights, though.
@@caliburnleaf9323 I would actually agree with you - I feel like the checkpoint before and after obtaining the hyper beam from the mini-boss is warranted (nothing worse than having to go through everything you just did to get to a boss)- but the checkpoint on emmi zone entry is a bit much
@@caliburnleaf9323 Was hoping they'd release a Dreadful Checkpoints option for difficulty to remove some of the more lenient checkpoints such as those right outside of EMMI doors (and maybe before boss fights).
I feel like the way the earlier Metroids do it is much better but I understand the convenience of it.
@@daniellaniganohara2456 The problem is the convenance of it kills the mood entirely after your second fail - it stops being scary , and starts just being annoying
It's weird that you pointed out how ease of repeatedly saving affects difficulty, and mentioned the roguelike approach to saving, but didn't mention two notable compromise systems where you can save all you want but RELOADING bears a cost. 1) Dying returns you to a checkpoint but costs some resource (be it money, or points, or not getting to see the ending unless you clear it in one continue), and 2) The Dark Souls style "drop all your loot, but you can recover it" corpse run.
the demon wall in ff7 taught me one thing. have 2 saves. one outside the dungeon and one inside the dungeon.
I have a similar story from FF6: In the lategame dungeon of Cyan's tormented soul, somehow I had become utterly depleted of MP by the end of the dungeon and therefore could not defeat the boss. No other way to exit the dungeon, nor do I recall any way nearby to get rest / free healing prior to facing the boss.
Every time I play a jRPG, I'm doing like this.
And then we have those games with static save points that change the rules of the game by disguising an enemy as a save point, causing you to distrust every single save point from then on. Yes, FFXII, I'm looking at you.
I know; it’s awesome.
there was only 3 Crystalbug enemies, and the hardest one was tucked away in an optional zone behind an optional boss.
@@pn2294 Mimics of all kinds are fun enemies.
Chrono Trigger did some save point bait too. Like the tinkling noise that seems purely for the players benefit summoning enemies, or the same sprite being used for a warp spot. I'm not sure if I'm mad because save point baiting is low, or impressed by the creativity.
The fake save room in Symphony of the Night is awesome.
I'm surprised you didn't go into detail about the number of saves at a time.
Clasic pokemon has a single manual save anywhere and if you want a new run you have to delete/overwrite the old run to do it.
Fallout Vegas lets you keep 100 manual save slots plus the autosave, so you could theoretically have a save for each major branch in the story to go back to.
And then Paradox Interactive has "ironman made" where if you want to earn achievements you can only save on exiting the game and it autosaves on exit. This locks you into the consequences of your actions. (Note that on PC you can just use file explorer built into windows to just made a copy of the savefile and manually shuffle them around to bypass this and get branching timelines, also you can task manager kill the game to avoid the autosave on exit but it still autosaves based on real or game time passing.
Yeah the concept of the Quicksave (save anywhere and quit, but it's a temporary save so when you return to the save it deletes the save) might have been an interesting concept if it had more staying power. Would have worked well for the Resident Evil games, among others.
Yeah he really needed to talk about Pokemon's one save thing. Back in Red and Blue I thought it was due to hardware, but to know that it's still like that today there has to be something more to it.
@@s-wo8781 It might have been a slightly sinister way to sell more copies of the game as well. You and your little brother can't share the game if it only has one save file, and he might want blue instead of red anyway...
@@s-wo8781 I suspect it started as hardware, and very well may have remained a hardware thing for a long time, as well, given that pokemon games have a lot of potential data to save, while being a handheld series, and thus having to save onto the cartridge. Tradition and a certain design style that doesn't really expect multiple playthroughs probably arose from this as well. The design in modern Pokemon games absolutely expect you to just have one continuous save file, rather than being a mere adventure that you finish and later replay.
That said, the nature of how saves work on the Switch has actually alleviated the issue, as the Switch saves onto the system instead of the cartridge like the previous handhelds, and handles those saves per profile on the system. You still only get one on the profile, but you can just create additional profiles.
It also has to do with the ability to trade. Got a good pokémon? How about backing it up to another slot and then trading it away without really losing it?
I like to distinguish between three main purposes for saving:
- there's the "extended pause" (or the "doorbell save") that lets you turn off the game without losing all your progress
- there's the "archive" where you preserve a moment to allow you to revisit it later (such as a save before a big cutscene)
- there's the "branchpoint" (or scummy save) where you save before a decision point or a challenge so you can retry it until you get a result you like, or until you've seen every outcome
Any save system should at least allow the extended pause - the freedom from the requirement to leave the game running until you complete it - and the basic goal is that you should be able to save your progress with no more than a few seconds' notice, so you can respond to real life happening.
A couple of examples of interesting twists on saving (both of which other comments have also mentioned) come from the N64 Zelda games:
Ocarina of Time allowed you to save the game any time you could bring up the menu screens (ie, not during cutscenes nor conversations) but, while the save kept your current health and items, and most game progress, it didn't save your location - upon reloading, you'd find yourself just inside the entrance if you saved inside a dungeon, or at Link's house as a child, or at the Temple of Time as an adult. Undoubtedly, this was done to save memory, but it also largely prevented save scumming, since it meant you had to return to where you were before you could continue. The downside was that it also imposed a minimum duration on play sessions - if you spend most of a session getting back to where you were, then it's much less worth playing.
Majora's Mask had two ways to save: you could play the Song of Time pretty much anywhere and anywhen (again, not during cutscenes nor conversations), which would reset the game world and lose all your consumable items, but keep any masks, items, etc that you had collected, and would also save the game. Or you could use one of ten "owl statues" (that also served as fast-travel destinations) to save-and-quit, with the caveat that you could only load that save once, resuming where you left off, at the owl statue you saved at, with the same world state, but that save file reverting to the last Song of Time save if you didn't save again before quitting again.
Both are examples of systems that were probably born from technical limitations, but which did something brilliant for their respective games. Each preserves the desirable quality of allowing saving to happen at short notice (maybe a minute to save in Majora's Mask; maybe 5 seconds in Ocarina) but the ability to abuse the save system to manipulate random chance is limited by their unwieldiness.
Finally, a couple of horror stories:
The original Grand Theft Auto took me months to finish because the game only allowed saving between levels, and the sixth and final level required something like 4-5 hours in a single play session (even the first level, which took about an hour was a significant time investment) - particularly because a friend and I were playing it together, taking turns ("mission or life") so we had to find a time when we were both free.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, at least in the Playstation 2 PAL version, improved on Sands of Time by allowing you to revisit old areas rather than being an entirely one-way trip through the linear narrative. At an abstract level, you had a central hub with a number of paths leading out that looped back to it. One of the paths required you to grab a particular ledge that, due to time-travel shenanigans, gets removed partway through the game, before a cutscene restores it. Except the cutscene only updates the visuals; the actual flag that says there's a ledge there to be grabbed wasn't restored, so, rather than being able to follow that path round back to the central hub, you got stuck. There were two save points on that path before that ledge, at least one of which was past a one-way section, so you could save in an inescapable dead end.
The game had 9 hidden challenges, each of which gave you a bonus for finding and completing them, and getting all 9 was necessary for a final upgrade and the game's true ending, so you were encouraged to explore and revisit old areas if you hadn't found all the hidden paths by the end - but if you did so without knowing about this problem, you could easily be screwed...
"Any save system should at least allow the extended pause - the freedom from the requirement to leave the game running until you complete it"
The PSP go had a system-wide feature where you could save any game at any time, and reload that save once. It was brilliant and I don't understand why no other consoles since have had that feature.
Maybe these kinds of systems aren't perfect, maybe somebody can figure out how to exploit it to save more than expected in some game. I say, who cares? What other people do while playing their games is none of my business and has no impact on me. I just want to make a save and shut a system off if I need to stop playing suddenly.
As a pathological save scummer, I have much appreciation for FE3H's built-in save scumming mechanic. We need more game design like that.
As a kid, I found the saving system of New Super Mario Bros pretty frustrating, because you could pretty much only save when beating a castle or when paying starcoins to open a gate
It's no big deal really, but when I was little, I was always scared of running out of options to save
I've had to walk away from games I've been playing for hours because of poorly implemented autosaves ruining my progression plenty of times. An example that comes to mind is This is the police, which had a nasty surprise on the second half that forced me to either abandon the way I liked to play or restart all the way from the start. Also, XCOM ironman runs have bugged out on me so many times that at this point I fear objectives and events not triggering properly more than I do running out of cover to shoot a 1% chance shot. But it's not like other games with unlimited saves are immune to this. I suffered a lot completing FFXIII, which after some 80 hours made clear I had made suboptimal build choices that would require me to grind for just as long to course correct and ultimately already locked me away from a platinum trophy. Same happened with Kingdom Under Fire Heroes, which after some despicably hard campaigns forcing my hand into whatever clever strategy I could find to get through, at the eleventh hour became unwinnable because the troops I had invested into did not match up with the final levels' intended tactics. I had to reload so far back to get a chance to rebuild into that direction that I might as well have restarted for all the good those saves did.
FF 13 had build options? Didn't all upgrades ultimately lead to the same paths in that game?
Kinda. Characters had multiple trees you could pick, but the ones you were supposed to have them use were cheaper to upgrade. So if you wanted to make Hope a tank, and spent a bunch of xp to do that, you were essentially wasting your time, cause it took 10x more ex for one level there rather than his intended build.
Pretty garbage
Reminds me of my first playthrough of VtM: Bloodlines - had focused my build so heavily on non-combat skills and blood magic, and completely forgone firearms that I had no chance of beating the (semi?) final boss. Had to cheat and godmode that fight.
If the game won’t let you save anywhere, there should at least be a “quicksave” system that lets you quit and reload in the spot you left.
Dragon Quest. You’re looking for some of the Dragon Quest games.
From Software's games do this. The Quit Game option in the menu automatically saves your position and which enemies in the area are already dead, though it resets the broken physics objects and triggered traps (as Woolie and Reggie learned when they played _Demon's Souls_ and used the Save-Reload trick to speed up the crow trades).
I think the Soulsborne games have an interesting save philosophy with the combination of bonfires and autosaves. As you play through Dark Souls or its sequels, the game automatically saves your last *stable* position every few seconds, so that if you quit-out of the game you resume right back where you were. However, there's a few quirks to that system. The stable ground condition means that the game only saves your position when you're standing or moving on static ground, and if you quit-out while falling or on a moving platform, you resume play standing at your last stable position. This means that with fast reflexes, you can avoid death by falling by simply quitting out before hitting the ground/kill plane. Additionally, quit-outs reset enemy aggro and positioning, so if you've back yourself into a corner surrounded by a bunch of angry dudes with pointy sticks, a fast quit-out will reset them so you can escape the situation.
The elephant in the room when discussing Souls saves, of course, is the bonfire system. As most of you likely know, death in a Souls game means you lose all your souls (which act as combined currency/XP) and are warped back to the last bonfire you rested at, with all the enemies respawning at their original positions (with a few exceptions). You do retain all items, however, and any opened doors or activated levers remain in that state. Bonfires are also the only place you can refill your Estus flasks, which are your only significant source of healing and are limited in number. The only way to save your progress is to find a new bonfire, at which point you "save" all the souls you've collected (until you die again, at any rate). Thus, Dark Souls uses the bonfire system to force players to explore and take risks in a very hostile world-- sure, that doorway is guarded by two Very Large Knights, but on the other hand, there could be a bonfire in there, and you quite literally won't get anywhere until you find it. Additionally, as a failsafe against softlocks, Dark Souls gives players the Darksign, an infinite use item that instantly kills the player and warps them back to the last bonfire rested at.
Yep, this is my favorite save system. Because of how it’s handled mechanically and integrated into the lore, it never feels like I actually lose progress when I die, but the tension of losing a big bounty of souls is still present. I prefer how it was handled in later games, like Elden Ring and Bloodborne, where you can still summon co-op after dying (one of the harshest penalties for dying in the earlier Souls games was losing the ability to summon help, which is just a vicious cycle).
I'm surprised you didn't bring up cases of save files being part of the narrative like in Nier or Undertale.
What about Resident Evil?
@@ikagura AGAIK In RE they're integrated in the world, but never actually affect the story.
or the first bioshock, my favourite integration
I remember having to put in one of those long passwords when bringing my Golden Sun save file over to GS2. It's interesting to learn what it actually did now many years later.
Yeah, the gold password is like 255 characters or something ridiculous like that. I tried to do that and entered something wrong and failed. So I just hopped on Ebay and ordered the link cable and did it that way. Had to wait a few extra days, but it was worth it.
I played through the majority of Twilight Princess, then saved in the room where you find the ancient cannon. Booted up my save, and found I couldn’t leave the room! Apparently a notorious soft lock, and I had to start the game over.
You can't teleport out?
@@Game_Hero Nope.
@@Game_Hero Nope. There’s a guy there and Midna won’t let you transform and teleport because he can see you.
@@brebeaa You can't even hide behind the canon or ask him to leave (which does happen), what?
@@Game_Hero Nope, full soft lock in the original version. It totally sucks!
You didn't mention the chariot tarot of Tactics Ogre? It's the gold standard for rewinding in tactics games.
Softlocks are a bigger problem for single slot only saves, rather than autosaves.
I'm a big fan of savestates, incase I want to study a particular technique or rewatch story cutscenes at a good checkpoint. They improvise a lot of features that would take serious coding to implement in the actual game.
Or even rebattle a particularly satisfying boss (in my beloved Golden Sun: The Lost Age, it would most probably be the Star Magician or the Dullahan).
Not gonna lie, I still have the bad habit I did as a kid of mostly saving on a single slot. I usually only use multiple saves if I know there's a major branch or difficulty issue coming up. (Or in the case of modded games whenever there's a potentially game breaking update.) It doesn't help if the save cursor defaults to the top slot instead of the last used, which was very common in older games.
Autosaves usually reduce this by generating a backup for me.
BOTW has what I would consider the perfect autosave feature. it seemingly saves before every activity you do being combat, puzzle, or even a climb. It's great and encourages experimentation since you know you can try again if plans don't work out
If playing Final Fantasy X Remaster, don't rely on the autosave! Be sure to use the manual safe often. There are late game optional super bosses that auto save as you encounter it, so if you aren't prepared to beat it, your game could be soft locked in an unwinnable fight.
Once a look at my mum playing ff 10 for the X time, I told her to save every time she pass a save point, but she ignored me. Then, she died in front of the super strong summon placed in town after you become a criminal. She loads her save file and see Tidus alone in zarnakan, before meeting everyone at the very start of the game.
What about Quick saves like in Majora's Mask or Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories? Temporary saves that you can make anywhere that are deleted once they are loaded, making the "real" designated save points feel more permanent and satisfying (and also causing a lot of frustration for little kids who don't understand why their save data is gone after they reset)
Another thing I think is important with save games is how they can effect a story based game with multiple endings. When I first played Persona 4 Golden, I was unaware the game had multiple endings with a several bad endings and a true ending which isn't exactly clear how to get without a guide to tell you which exact dialogue options to do. The bad endings are incredibly abrupt and anti-climactic and leave a ton of the stories mysteries up in the air while making it feel like you didn't actually fix the conflict (you didn't) The problem then is the fact that Persona 4 is a 60+ hour game. If that had been my only save I would've had to replay that whole game which would've taken weeks even with NG+ My only fortune was that luckily I had accidentally save on a different file 10 hours before meaning I had to replay those 10 hours including grinding for the very difficult boss that comes right before that moment of the ending. Point is, if you're going to make a huge story based game that throws in something that decides the ending at the end of the game, you've gotta do something to make it so you don't have to replay the whole game. Granted, before it happens the game does give something along the lines of "A big story moment is about to happen" but that doesn't really translate to the same thing
I always liked the save system in Majora's Mask.
In college my friends and I had Skyrim running 24/7 and we'd all just play on the same character until we accidently started splitting the save file... We created this entire tree of choices that was possible because of the way Skyrim could keep each "save" as a separate thing to be loaded, even after you'd progressed and saved again later. It was confusing and fun!
One save system I really like is the one in Xenogears. Its dedicated save system doesn't do anything too special but it's revealed later in the story that the save points are actually used to send information to the antagonists. Even though it's not super important to the story, it's still cool to see that they even worked the save systems into it somehow!
Save scumming is totally reasonable when you consider that random chance has nothing to do with your skill, and is mainly there to waste your time. Randomness is great for making things feel dynamic, but when it comes to instant kills or critical moments, it's just not fair to the player.
You all had over 95% chances to hit. How the hell did you all missed?
Risk assessment and mitigation is a skill. I’m not saying those games are perfectly designed, but in a WELL-BALANCED game with RNG elements, how you deal with random chance IS one of the skills being tested.
@@Monocular0 Fair, but that only works when there's actually something you can do about those instant death attacks and such.
One game that deals with saves in an interesting way is Oneshot, where save spots acted as the only spots you could close the game safely. Close it anywhere else and not only would you lose all progress, you weren't allowed to even play the game a second time. The enhanced rerelease did remove both of those aspects, but got up to even more meta shenanigans than the first version.
Wait what do you mean you couldn't play it a second time?
Are you saying a random power outage could permanently lock you out of the game?
@@sanfransiscon in the free version it is something that can totally happened, in the paid version, you can quit the game and still play it
Really loved how NieR Automata implemented saving (and just about everything else, really) diegetically. You’re playing as an android, so whenever you save, what’s happening in-universe is your character is uploading a copy of their memories up-to-date as of that moment to a server. If their body is destroyed (ie. you die) then those memories you uploaded when you saved are then transferred into a new more or less identical freshly manufactured body and the android retains their sense of self, at least up to the point the backup was made.
There are plenty of story implications to this but another cool thing the game does (or super frustrating depending on how you wanna look at it) is the game will completely wipe your save if you manage to attain the final ending. The original NieR Replicant/NieR Gestalt does this as well and, as you might expect, there’s narrative significance to it but it’s also meant to be significant to the player themselves because they’re losing something they’re likely to cherish: their completed play through of an amazing game. Allegedly director Yoko Taro implemented this mechanic because of a poignant childhood memory he has of when one of his game saves became corrupted and he lost all his progress. That feeling of sadness and loss stuck with him and it’s a feeling he wanted his games to be able to illicit from players as well. Too bad you can simply circumvent this by enabling cloud saves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One thing I really loved about the first Dark Souls (and to a lesser extent its sequels) was how you'd get just one or two bonfires for an entire area, but the level design was carefully built so that you'd open up new shortcuts that connected back to the same bonfire as you progressed. So the save points were rare, but as you made progress you'd keep using the same one to go deeper and deeper into the level. Battling through a tough area and kicking down a ladder back to my bonfire, or opening a one-way door, was always such a cool feeling. It made these bonfires feel very important because you'd spend a lot of time with the same one.
Prince of Persia : the Sands of Time has an original save system where each save point also gives you a vision of things to come in the upcoming level, including clues as to how to solve the puzzles or the way you must move in the environement to further progress. It is also great as it gives an in-universe reason for saving to increase immersion.
Hollow Knight can save whenever, but when you load the game, you always appear at your last bench, even though it's saved any items you picked up. Early on in the games life cycle, people found many skips, and any skips that didn't softlock were left in, but there were some that allowed you to get to benches you couldn't get back from, so those had to be patched. I can't remember if they made the skip impossible or if they made getting back possible, probably the later.
Saving in the Metal Gear Solid games through a Codec call is really fun. It's a nice way to get some extra story information, character development, easter eggs, lore, trivia, etc. The ones in Snake Eater are especially fun due to all the movie trivia and references to works Kojima was inspired by. And in 2 they really develop the Rose-Jack drama so many people disliked. Not to mention Mei Ling's quotes from the first game.
Yeah, Mei Ling gave me some unfounded confidence because of her quotes.
One thing I expected to see mentioned was quicksaves, when games want to use save points as their primary save method, but acknowledge that sometimes a player needs to leave unexpectedly. They give you a save that's removed as soon as you load it again, so it's more of an extended pause, and to actually save, you have to get to a save point. The example I most think of is Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia (it might be in the others, but that's the one I played). I find it a decent way to let players leave a game while still using save points to determine the flow of the game
An interesting addition to this discussion is whether you can copy said save files too. For instance, the Luigi’s Mansion series from 2 onwards seems to lack that feature.
There’s also games which mix methods together, like in Mario & Luigi Dream Team where you can save where you like, but the save points still exist to tell you where you probably should save (boss or major event up ahead).
Either way, great video! Always interesting to see how different games handle these things.
The other day I was playing Hylics 1 and I was having trouble finding where to go next, so I decided to comb over the entire map again to see if I missed anything. I played for about an hour and a half and made significant progress to my leveling, money, etc… I even found some rare items. Still being unable to find the next place to progress I tried wandering beyond the borders of the map in the Overworld on the boat, and got soft locked when I went past the water’s edge. It was then that I realized I hadn’t saved at all…
Outer wilds has a really good system in my opinion. The whole game operates on a 22 minute time loop so it can be completed in one sitting, however there is no way you could complete the game in your first time loop as there is a ton of information you need. As you go the game has a log that keeps track of what you have discovered so if you turn the game off and come back the next day you can read your log.
What's fascinating about Outer Wilds is that it's the only game I know of that has a ton of progression and almost no need for a save file. Seriously, the save file is basically only there so that you can skip the tutorial and so that your notes can be in the game instead of (or in addition to) a notebook. All of the progression is just based on knowing things, and usually they aren't even passwords but just ... stuff you can do that you wouldn't think to do until you find out you can do it.
Save horror story. I appreciate the footage of the Holoholo bird from Baten Kaitos Origins while talking about softlocks, because that exact scenario happened to me. I was only keeping one save file for my playthrough, and it had me save to change disks to the second one. There was a save point available after cutscenes as well, but no way to grind and power up until the bird was defeated. You also can't return to previous areas to grind and shop either, so you're stuck with what you have. I wound up replaying the entire game up until that point just to get passed that damn bird.
The kicker is this. After going through everything on a second file and eventually finishing the game, I went back to the softlocked file. It turns out that I just hadn't updated my deck in a while. Since I knew what I was doing by that point, I updated my deck and killed the bird first try. I was just making it harder on myself the whole time.
Experience/Game knowledge is a very powerful resource that follows the rules of human memory not game design.
Hoo, boy I remember this
Ye, it's not too hard to beat if u know what to do (I had watched my brother when he got stuck before I started playing) but the game doesn't really tell you that
The worst soft locks are those that leave you stuck in the final level(s), especially in a final boss fight, and unable to get out, making you unable to replenish your health, money and ammos.
Talking about SAVE systems fills me with determination.
I appreciate that this video does take a nod to this particular game without spoiling WHY it belongs in the video.
I really liked how neir automata incorporated saving into the world building of the game. Saving was backing up your memories to the bunker and was therefore limited to areas that had a strong enough signal to communicate with it.
I love how Alien Isolation's save system adds to the tension of the game with how long and loud saving gets
Final Fantasy Tactics taught me the importance of having multiple save files because of this softlock issues. There are a few "gauntlet" type stages where you can't leave back to the world map until you finish all stages, but it allow you to save between stages. One of them ends with Ramza having to face an enemy solo, and your team join you for the second phase after they power up. Except at the time I was relying on my team to do a lot of the heavy lifting and my Ramza was not that strong individually (I think I set him as my main healer because that's my concept of "commanding unit"). No matter how much I tried to adjust what I could adjust before the fight, I simply couldn't beat that solo fight, nor run back to the map.
That was the first time I experienced the despair of a softlock. Had the restart the game. Then I built Ramza to be a on man army and that specific fight later was a piece of cake.
Anti-savescumming measures are mostly there for RNG reasons, but I think story-driven games saving after every significant decision are worth mentioning. Vampyr made me feel very invested in the story because every choice I made was permanent, with no concept of whether they'd come back to bite me later or not.
That ICO "Heal" song at the end is so pure. Great vid
I remember when forgetting to save actually led to one of the most thrilling boss fights I played. I remember playing SMT 5, and saving before a fairly difficult boss, then doing a bunch of other stuff, then I decided to do a quest that unbeknownst to me, actually had 2 boss fights instead of 1, so I did 3 bosses without saving. The first one I had completed without saving, despite being a little underleveled. Then when I thought I would complete the quest, the game throws ANOTHER boss fight at me. Not only was I really underleveled for the fight, but I also hadn't saved since before the boss fight at the beginning, and I hadn't healed since the 2nd boss fight. But god was I lucky that the enemy liked to use physical attacks, since I had a demon that reflected physical. From there I was anxiously chipping at the boss's health while hoping it didnt spam its magic skills too much. Thats how a girimehkala practically saved like 2 hours of progress.
"Limitless saving can invite a thing called Save Scumming."
*Shows Dishonored.*
Yeah, that hits it on the nail there.
Let us not forget the experience of 99% of Ace Attorney players: "HA TAKE THAaaaaaaa-why isn't the music stopping?" *reloads save*
@@Triforce_of_Doom I let them give me a penalty until I've only one left... most of the time. But that won't happen often if you think it through. You just need patience and wits.
@@Triforce_of_Doom It's cool how the devs were trolling the player one or two times by just not stopping the music on a correct move.
@@lpfan4491 Oh yeah they learned *real* quick
Talking about soft locking a game reminded me of a nightmarish experience I had in Baten Kaitos. It has more to do with its leveling system, but it ties directly into the save system. You need to save at these flowers and you can only level up at the blue version. I got into an enemy ship and saved at a red flower inside, leaving me stuck there unable to level up until I beat a boss fight against 3 strong enemies. While I was able to win and complete the game, that moment left me with some frightening memories when I think of that game.
It's crazy that I still remember the exact boss battle you're talking about. As a kid there were more than a few games that I had to drop just because I got repeatedly whooped by a difficult boss
Those flowers are like Dark Souls' bonfires?
@@ikagura Only if there were bonfires that didn't allow leveling or teleporting.
ib has designated save points in the form of notebooks you can find around the cursed gallery, they aren't limited which was especially helpful during the split where what ib and mary do in their room affects garry's room and vice versa, also since the game has multiple endings it encourages you to use multiple save slots so you won't have to replay the entire game again just to fail the doll room puzzle on your second playthrough with a really high doom counter to get one of the bonus endings
also, slightly unrelated but still about ib, the game also has designated healing points which you can usually find near save points, these healing points are in the form of vases (your health bar in this game is a rose which is linked to your own health, as the rose wilts so do you, ib has a red rose with five petals while garry has a blue rose with ten petals), most of these vases only have one use, however there are two exceptions which have unlimited uses, those being the vase in the room next to the room where you first meet garry and the vase in garry's room during the split
One interesting feature among mixed autosave / hard save games is quitting back to checkpoints. In hollow knight for example, your game is saved when you rest at a bench. Quitting to the menu and reloading the save will respawn you at your last bench, but the autosave lets you keep any progress you made since you last rested. In this way, you can go fight a boss, grind money, or unlock an ability, and then "fast travel" to your set checkpoint by quitting and reloading. Other games might not remember progress after the save, or might simply reload your character in the position they were in when you quit.
Ah, who can forget that one time where Final Fantasy Tactics asks you to save after a boss fight, only to immediately throw you into an even more difficult boss fight? Had to start over from there. The one good thing to come out of it is that on that day, I learned to always have TWO save files and alternate between them when saving progress.
I expected Majora's Mask to be mentioned. The original system (not the 3DS remake) had temporary pauses that made you quit the game if you saved at an owl statue. It only did permanent saves when you travelled back in time. It really fit the pressure of the 3 day to worlds end situation. But it's understandable this was changed for the port to a mobile system.
I especially disliked that system because I had a buggy cartridge. I ended up having to redo a particular dungeon three times because my game kept crashing.
@@WhirligigStudios Oh... That's bad. I really liked that system. It added a little bit of stress but not too much. There were checkpoints and shortcuts that helped a lot. And knowing the reversed song of time you were never even close to the limit.
Technically you can effectively cheese the quick save by copying to your second save file and using that as a backup to copy to the original file, pretty much artificially giving you a way of perms saving. However I don’t think that’s something that I’ll do when I want to play the game authentically
@@callinater6133 That's not really possible on console hardware. Well, at least without using an additional backup device.
Of note being that the original version of MM did not even have the temporary suspends, that is something the localization did.(And the Wiivc had a dumb emulator-bug where it would randomly not save these correctly, losing you progress)
i really like how FF9s save system basically had a side quest attached to it where you could get some more world flavor and get in on the drama of those fuzzy Moogles
I've always found it cute when the game has the character write a diary entry to save the game. Most notable for doing this are usually always farming games like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory.
Save Horror Story: I was playing Legend of Zelda 2 on NES. I had found the perfect setup so the game turns on every time without having to reset or take our and reinsert the cart (do NOT blow on it!). I had gotten through 5 of the game’s 6 dungeon. One day, my brother wants to play Punch-Out and changes the cart. After he’s done, I have to do the entire dance to try and get my LoZ2 cart to boot up the game properly, which involves playing with the cartridge insertion and hard-resetting about 20 times before I see the main menu without some kind of visual glitch. When I do, I see that my save file is missing. Then I realize what had happened. The game warns on boot up that one should “hold the reset button when powering down” or something like that. Apparently that little caveat is the only thing preventing a save file wipe from the cartridge. I had erased it myself at least 20 times. I never picked up the game again after that
Babe wake up, there's a new Design Doc
I'm reminded of the long runs back to boss room in Dark Souls. I never considered cardio to be part of the boss fight and always saw it as the game wasting my time for no reason. As far as git gud is concerned so I don't have to run back, I don't know many experts in their field that mastered the craft on hour one.
0:16 - wow, I had to triple check that footage. I can’t remember the Borderlands skill trees being so simple. They’ve done such a long way since, thank god.
Just to add to this: I feel like Returnal was probably a 10/10 game for me, but the lack of a save system at launch put it down majorly. It’s funny how the absence of a system like that can massively affect how you feel about it.
2Dark has one of the most original examples of a save system that integrates gameplay elements I came across. You can save anytime, which is done by smoking a cigarette. But using the lighter can make enemies to spot you. What's more, if you save/smoke too often you start coughing, not convenient since the game is a survival horror game that requires stealth.
Would love some more videos on the state and evolution of certain RPG mechanics like equipment systems, talent trees, quests etc.
he already done a video on talent trees (it was included inside the video about level ups) go and watch it its really good!
FF9s Moogles and the Mognet side quest was a dope way to deliver lore to those that cared even to read the letters
I think about saves a lot, and one of the most interesting save systems is in the original one shot! There, you die permanently if you close the game, and you can never play the game again on the same device. This makes the narrative extremely interesting, since you can only choose one of the two endings, and never see the other one for yourself. They removed this on the steam version because that one costs actual money, but it's a very fascinating way to tell a story and I vastly prefer the original.
Another interesting thing is games like minecraft. It has auto save, but it is impossible to soft lock yourself (or at least if you dont go out of your way to create a complex redstone kill loop in which case you know what you are doing) since the respawn point is a separate thing from your save point, and you can place your respawn point where ever you want.
I had an autosave on Fallout:New Vegas when I had a grenade under me. My best guess is I killed the last Raider as they were throwing it so that was the queue to save. I could not survive that grenade. I tried reloading and quickly using stat boosting items to survive or run away but it didn't work. I lost many hours of gameplay going back to an old save and replaying that section against my will felt like a real slog.
I think it makes more sense to frame things in terms of checkpoints and discussions of actual save data should more or less be a thing of the past. Dark Souls has shown us that you can have a strict checkpoint system and still make sure the player never has to worry about data because the autosave is so good. Even save states can be framed as previous checkpoints that you can revisit, although I dislike games relying solely on save states as a substitute for proper checkpointing.
Dark Souls (etc.) requires special mention: it auto-saves constantly and disallows manual saving to ensure *every* decision the player makes is *permanent*; meanwhile bonfires are used in lieu of traditional save points to create tension in levels and checkpoint progress.
The last time I thought about saves was actually pretty recently, in the context of being informed by the platform the game is on.
Specifically, I've been playing a lot of handheld games recently, especially GBA and DS. And one thing I've noticed is that saving is handled differently on those platforms.
Handheld games are made to allow for short play sessions where you might have to stop playing at any point. People play handheld games during bus or car rides, in waiting rooms, etc., and handheld games are designed with that in mind.
So, there are two considerations: you need to be able to either save and quit at any time, or be able to quit at any time without losing too much progress.
An interesting thing is how handheld ports of console RPGs, like the GBA Final Fantasy ports, handle this. In the FF NES/SNES games you could save on the world map, but not in towns. This could be a problem if you were deep into, say, the Chaos Shrine in FF1 Dawn of Souls and you, say, reached your bus stop. If the games were unmodified from the originals then you would just shut the system off and restart the entire dungeon when you came back to it.
Enter the Quick Save. A Quick Save allowed you to save and quit without losing progress at any time (usually outside of combat: allowing saves in combat can lead to softlocks.)
The caveat is, when you load the Quick Save later, the Quick Save data is deleted. This preserves the integrity of the game's original save system (preventing save-scumming in dungeons) while letting the player quit and return to the game at any point.
Other handheld games had other, innovative save systems. It's interesting to consider how the DS roguelike Izumi handles saving in relation to how traditional roguelikes operate, for instance.
Anyway, the fact that handheld games had to allow allow for short, rewarding play sessions, and the ability to quit at any time without losing progress, influenced the design of handheld save systems.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I don't know if this already exists, but I recently had the idea of an RPG-style game where you have to save each party member individually at designated save points. If one dies, they respawn at the last point they saved at, away from the rest of the group with whatever stats/items they had when they saved. The idea was that the saving structure would encourage strategic respawning.
Just asking because the idea sounds cool but I’m not really comprehending it, what’s stopping people from Kay saving all of their party members there?
How do you think about games that mix it up?
Final Fantasy has save points in dungeons, but save anywhere on the world map;
Some games do save points but offer temporary saves which can only be reloaded once intended for if you need to turn the game off(low battery/need to do something else);
And I've been playing a lot of Rune Factory 5, it has an autosave which saves whenever you enter/exit the floor to a duneon or use quicktravel, but you're otherwise restricted to savepoints. This means the autosaves are more regular than a normal save at the cost of only having one at any given time(although the game actually has multiple, you can just only load the most recent that isn't corrupted to guard against autosaves being unloadable).
FF13 and 15 also autosaves before each encounter, but those saves can only be accessed if you die in the encounter. FF14 can't have this for obvious reasons though.
Thank you so much for the subtitles; the effort is much appreciated.
This video was quite interesting. I don't think I was ever familiar with save points as a consumable being a thing in some games, so that was definitely interesting to see and also sort of thought provoking. Great video and thank you again for the subtitles.
So fun story: I was playing Zelda Majora's Mask a few years ago, and if there's anything you should know about it, it's that you can only save by resetting the Groundhog Day time loop, and I was going through the Swamp Spider House where you have to kill 30 Gold Skulltulas to get one of the games Masks, and seeing the cursed family in Ocarina of Time as a kid was legit traumatizing, and even now as an adult I still struggle to play those games. Also, due to some weird wiring oversight when my house was built, the power socket my gaming setup is plugged into only gets electricity flowing into it while the light in our spare room is turned on, and my dad was looking for something in there. 27/30 spiders in, my dad finds whatever it was he was looking for and instinctively turns the light switch off, killing the power to my game before I could finish up and save, so I had to do it all over again.
I love Majora's Mask, but when things outside the game like that happen, it really makes you question its save system and contemplate life.
Many FFT saves were lost at hands of Wiegraf, the save destroyer
*raises hand* 😟
I'm designing an RPG with a comprehensive skill tree.
My compromise between "save anywhere" and "designated save points" is that the save points are more common in crossroads and wide-open spaces.
You're still encouraged to explore, but you're also encouraged to stick with the consequences of your actions.
...
_Man,_ I hope it works.
Good luck, my dude! I hope it goes well! Maybe I’ll see your game in a Indie World Showcase or something in the future! -MusicClues
re4 has my absolute favourite save system (who could’ve guessed…) because of the RELIEF that floods me whenever i enter a safe room and hear the ‘serenity’ track, see the typewriter and the merchant. it’s a really great breather and allows me to sort my inventory, take stock of all my resources and figure out a general plan of attack before steeling myself and heading back into the fray. and i don’t mind the space in between save points really because if i die then it’s not that irritating, because a lot of the time my next go around is waayy more efficient resource wise. it allows you to learn the area, enemy behaviours and the resources you can find. i think that’s what’s so nice about limited saves in survival games, because it keeps that really nice tension/relief balance as well as allowing me to learn from my mistakes and do better. it’s not punishing, it’s just the right amount of stressful
One thing that I liked about Va11 Hall-A is that the game doesn't let you save between work, when the history of the chapter you are playing is going on and you can only load a previous save data, so when can you save? When the main character is taking a break from work, like you can also have a break and save the game to go do something else, and it also let you save after you have finished work, which is at the end of that chapter and the main character is at home, resting.
I think my worst case of soft-locking happened the first time I played Metro 2033. Leading up to a heavily irradiated/toxic underground area late in the game, I had the brilliant idea of keeping my gas mask on the entire ride over. This meant that I had no filters left by the time I got there, so I couldn't take more than 10 steps before I died.
That or the time my wife and I sat down to play Fallout 3 together, and I accidentally saved over my old file just seconds after I'd reverse-pickpocketed a grenade into the Sheriff's pocket. Oops.
Fun fact: I actually lost MULTIPLE save files in Fallout 3 to Deathclaws behind Megaton.
Yes. If I had a quarter for every time I softlocked behind Megaton, I would have only two quarters, but Bethesda that it happened twice.
@@WeskAlber That actually reminds me of one more time I got soft locked, also in Megaton ironically. I broke into the little armory, the one with a Mr Handy inside. I picked the lock and killed the robot, but found out that I'd lost the ability to turn around. So I was now effectively stuck staring at the back wall forever.
I remember playing FE: Path of Radiance for the first time and not restarting when someone died. Eventually, I only had mandatory characters left and got completely stuck... Yeah, I switched to restarting every time someone died after that. It's a strong incentive to get good at the game, IMO, because you will be restarting a lot if you don't think things through.
Still haven't played Three Houses yet... Maybe I'll have time one of these days.
Save system is really the difference between me playing a game on normal mode versus trying to its hardest difficulty. Games like Dark Souls feels very daunting because every reload respawns all of the tough as nail enemies you had to fight beforehand but for something like Kh with very generous checkpoint and save system, I can try the game out on Crit mode without any issue.
Great video, i love the topic, also the ICO "save game" theme at the end was a nice touch !
Once when playing Skyrim (actually a few times) the game autosaved while i was either milliseconds from dying or already in the death animation. I woumd up needing to restart from the previous save which set me back to the beginning of dungeons a lot of the time when it happened
Always save manually in Skyrim, and save a lot indeed. Even if autosaves works correctly you might also just encounter a random crash at any time.
Autosaves very rarely create softlocks, they create hardlocks, I find it so sad that softlock is basically always used for hardlocks.
Here's the difference: Softlocks can be solved by exiting the game in some way, via loading a save or going back to the main menu.
Hardlocks can only be solved by restarting the game entirely.
This is why many autosaving games these days make many of them you can go back to, so it's practically impossible for you to get hardlocked.
As I understand it, a softlock is a state that lets the player keep playing, but they can't make any meaningful progress. (e.g. You are stuck in a room you can't get out of, even if you can walk around, use the menu, etc.) A hardlock is a state where the game is unresponsive (i.e. the console must be reset).
Until your save data gets corrupted... If the game relies only on autosaves, then you are doomed
Nier Automata has to be one of the most unique save mechanics I've ever come across. It's built into the game, just like controls and how the character functions, making saving an actual process for the character to back up their data once they die and have to be put in a new shell.
Nier automatas true ending allowing you to delete your save to help another player was really cool to me
There are two games I've always really liked the save system in that weren't mentioned in this video. The first is Dark Souls, and the series through Elden Ring afterwards, that have an autosave system that means you'll rarely lose any progress. That's great for games meant to be as difficult as they are since it ensures something like a crash or power failure won't cost you progress, but at the same time in true Dark Souls fashion even the save system can work against you since it saves right after dying (ensuring you can't quickly quit out to save scum if you mess up). It's a good way to have an autosave system that both prevents save scumming and avoids the issue of soft locks due to the nature of dying in Dark Souls.
The second game is Majora's Mask, specifically the original and not the 3DS remake. The only way you were allowed to permanently save your progress was to restart the 3 day cycle, which in turn meant that in order to save what you had accomplished you had to lose all of the non-permanent progress you made in that current cycle as well (like partially completed quest lines, dungeons, mini-dungeons, etc.). It was a fantastic way to link a gameplay mechanic as universal as saving to the narrative and themes of Majora's Mask, and it being removed and changed in the 3DS version is one of the many changes that made the remake a much worse game in my eyes.
All the same, great video as always!
I absolutely love how old resident evil games limited the amount of time you could save
I know I'm late to the party, but I wanted to pitch in to this conversation because it's a topic I love. Here are my personal four games, in four different genres, with perfect save systems:
- Divinity: Original Sin 2
- Hollow Knight
- Alien Isolation
- Dark Souls
DoS2 is a game with so much volatility and discoverable elements that it'd be a crime if you weren't allowed to save on command. With its ludicrously personalized storylines, weighted decision making, and the ability to do anything you want (as chaotically as you want it), you NEED a save system that lets you experiment at every twist and turn. Its auto-save functionality (which can be disabled in the settings) is also really good at auto saving right before you walk into a combat scenario. So if you die during the scenario, you load up right before it happening and you always have the option to go and do something else first, or start it in a more prepared manner. On another note, its Iron Man Run mode (or Honour Mode) is, in my opinion, flawlessly executed. You get 1 save, and the game AUTO SAVES whenever a member of your party dies. You have to treat your save as an absolutely finite resource and choose when and where you decide to save the game. Every past decision becomes cemented permanently because you simply can't go back. It also makes combat way more tactical and cautious, because one wrong move could mean you're locked into that fight now, and MUST win or escape it to continue your Honour run.
Hollow Knight and Dark Souls, despite being in different genres, have similar save systems that evoke a similar feeling in an otherwise perilous world: Sanctuary. After getting lost, nearly dying at every turn, and running low on resources, that next bench/bonfire is an absolute godsend. And to both games credits, the physical save locations lend themselves exceptionally well to level design, shortcut design, and map familiarity. Because they both have varying degrees of backtracking, they cement themselves in a players mind and help them build a sense of space and navigation in an otherwise maze-like world.
Alien Isolation (god I wish you talked about this one) is meticulously sadistic with its save system. Not only are they sparse and in physical locations, but this is a horror game. This is a game where you play save point to save point, and the thing hunting you is a carefully crafted AI creature designed to LEARN from your decision making. Going between save points changes too because the AI LEARNS between saves, lending itself tremendously well to completely new experiences even upon repeating certain points in the story. And it also lets the developers program dynamic ways to increase or ease off the presence of threats if the game detects you struggling too much or playing too well. And the icing on the cake is that saving the game takes an awkwardly long amount of time. You don't instantly save upon reaching and interacting with a save point, and the game DOES NOT pause while attempting to save. You cram an object into a wall, then you're forced to wait there for a looooong few seconds (with the ability to LOOK AROUND) while the game delays just long enough to make the whole experience anxiety inducing before the save finally gets written. AND YOU CAN DIE WHILE DOING THIS. It's perfect.
The video reminded me of an idea I imagined for an indie video game idea I work on as a side project, which was that in its story mode, there could be an epic final save that would occur after the ending cinematic and before the credits, but while watching the video, I realised that it would be more sensible to put it after the credits to save a flag that would indicate that both the ending cinematic and credits had been viewed.