Saves, the Bookmarks of Games
April 27, 2018
It’s been said if you want to be a writer you have to read. By the same token, if you want to make computer games then you should play computer games. I’ve been playing a few recent adventure games lately – the same style of game as my own Sleuthhounds series – and they’ve left me despairing for the “good old days” of the 1980s and 90s. While there are many differences between games now and games of yesteryear, the one that seems to be increasingly lacking in modern games is the ability to properly save your progress.
Back when game developers like Sierra and LucasArts ruled the roost and adventure games were the AAA titles of the day, you were able to save your game whenever you liked. Moreover you could essentially save as many games as you wanted, disk space willing (technically these developers’ games did cap saves at around thirty and a hundred respectively, but that’s still a very ample number).
Fast forward to today where, since the start of the year, I’ve played games that exhibit the following behaviours:
- No player save ability. A single save is automatically created at the point the player is at when they quit.
- Limited player save ability. The player has a single save game and can choose whether they want to save over it when they quit or not.
- Removed save ability for some sequences. Whether intentional or not, the developer has removed the save ability during specific puzzle sequences (a couple of such games also remove the ability to quit until the sequences are completed, yikes!).
- Checkpoint saves. The player’s progress is automatically saved to a single save game but only at predetermined points during gameplay. If you have not reached such a point, then any progress you’ve made since the last checkpoint is lost.
I can understand how in some types of games it might be an acceptable idea to remove save games. For example, in an action game you could be excused for preventing the player from saving the game while in a state that was guaranteed death, such as leaping across a chasm that they’re actually incapable of leaping. However, barring any such extreme cases in adventure games, there is no reason to hobble the player’s ability to save.
Let’s take the above list and express it in terms of if a player was reading a book instead:
- No player save ability. A person is standing over your shoulder, waiting for you to finish reading for the day to put a bookmark in wherever you’re at. A little annoying perhaps, but you don’t lose your progress.
- Limited player save ability. You only have access to one bookmark but you get to choose when you put it in the book and when you want to move it.
- Removed save ability for some sequences. The person standing over your shoulder has a gun and tells you that you’re not allowed to put a bookmark in and that you’re not even allowed to stop reading until your reach the end of the chapter even if it is thirty pages away.
- Checkpoint saves. You’re free to set the book down at any point but when you do, the person will then show up and move your bookmark back to the start of the last full chapter you read.
I’ve been a bit facetious with the descriptions here to (hopefully) illustrate how ridiculous these cases would be if you were reading a book. However, this all speaks to some very real design issues in adventure games.
Some games allow the player to make choices that have varying degrees of impact on how the rest of the game plays. While I understand that not allowing multiple free saves in such games adds a permanence to player decisions, it also discourages players from going back to see what additional content a developer put into a game. It’s a big ask, even for a short game, to force players to replay the entire game just to see the impact of one late game choice.
Beyond the choice aspect, for games that take the save ability away or that only utilize checkpoint saves there is an even bigger issue. Here the games do not acknowledge that real life interruptions can occur and that it may be necessary to stop the game before the next save point can be reached. It leaves a very sour taste if the player loses their progress in such cases, especially if the quit functionality is taken away so that the player has to resort to more extreme measures to end the game. Developers need to keep in mind that any time a player stops playing a game there is the possibility that they may never come back to it (there are so many things competing for people’s attention these days). Games should not exacerbate this problem by making leaving the game an unpleasant experience.
It is astounding and dismaying to me both as a software developer and as a game player to see so many modern games being built without providing proper save support. Games should use autosaving by all means. It’s an excellent defense against progress loss if the player’s computer suffers a power failure, for example. However, if you can support autosaving anywhere, then please, please go the extra steps to allow the player to freely save as well. And absolutely do not implement games where a player can’t save their current progress, either directly or via autosave. Disk space truly is cheap now. You can let people fully save the state of their game without worrying that you’ll fill up their hard drives. Don’t give players a reason to dislike your game when they have to leave. They may just decide not to come back again.