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Sin And Punishment In Games
Thanks to NTSC-UK for their article discussing how games punish players for dying. The article starts: "Repetition has always been considered to be a pretty basic form of punishment and is still quite commonly used form even today. Fail a task, go back to the start of the level. Fail too many times and you go right back to the start of the game." It goes on to highlight save/restart points as changing this dynamic, saying that "...the most controversial aspect of the save point's growing role in videogames was the confusion between its two roles: acting as a marker which players are taken to when punished, and as a point where players could stop in order to resume play later on." Is there such a thing as being able to save too often?
Where death in games matter most is multi-player FPS titles. It is boring to wait for the next round once you have been killed. On the other hand, the game is pointless when there are immediate respawns. Counterstrike tries to solve this be letting you watch through the other player's eyes. RTCW tries to solve this by respawning in waves. The way I would like to see it done, is once you are killed in the 'real' game, you get transported to some secondary site with the other dead players. That way there is no down time when you get killed.
As a parent of two I know what a burdon a game with not enough save points can be especially when it is time for the other child to play (or time for homework or bed) Games without an easy save system are simply banned.
Quicksave just isn't good enough for me. What happens when I quicksave and am already doomed? I'm STILL doomed, and now also screwed.
I want my game to CONTINUOUSLY save its state. When I arrive at death, I want to press the REWIND button on the game until I come to a place from whence I choose to resume.
Its just too hard to know in advance where that will be.
Power to the Player!!
</troll>
In some games that enforce save points, even having to go back isn't really that bad. Final Fantasy VI returned te player to the previous save point upon death, but let him keep all experience and cash earned. (It made him lose items, however, which makes sense.)
But there is also a strong intuitive basis for save points, akin to not being able to rest just anywhere in a dungeon in a D&D adventure. A save point should be a "safe" location. Being able to put a bookmark in the middle of a series of tough battles breaks them up. If the player can just once get through all the hard parts of such a sequence without taking serious losses, then it's as if they don't exist! The player will then save at that point and not have to worry about going through it ever again. If those obstacles have a strong random (or not obviously deterministic) component, then this can break a level.
Let's say someone's challenged you to a little game -- if you roll a six-sided die ten times and never get a one, he'll give you a lot of money. In a computer game, the player would save after each successful roll and practically ensure an eventual win. Taken as a sequence, such an obstacle is more troublesome than if the player can bookmark after each roll.
Something in me kind of rebels against this question, actually, the assumption of "punishment." This question only makes sense if the listen intuitively accepts that all a "save" does is record the player's location and state, monster locations and states, which items are collected and the state of a few minor puzzles. In a more complex game (such as Black & White, where great portions of the game's environment is editable), you're saving and loading a lot more than just player location, and although B&W did have a quicksave feature, the idea of making a "bookmark" doesn't make as much sense. Although it is long, playing through the whole level each time makes a kind of sense.
Of course, understand that I'm a Nethack fanatic, and games which feature permanent character death appeal to me, so I'm obviously deranged.
But then you come across games with a very nearly impossible segment of the game...it's always nice to be able to get through just that portion with quicksaves, because spending those 3 hours to get to that point just for the slim chance of beating the level... well it sucks.
One game that suffers from this (and doesn't allow saving, either) is Super Monkey Ball 2 on the Gamecube. There are many levels where whether or not you complete the level is based entirely on luck or cheese. For example, there's one flat level where the goal bounces around, much faster than you can move. You basically have to run around and hope that the goal runs into you. Levels like that simply are not fun.
As a solution to the original problem, however, I've seen many games that implemented a "save anywhere" feature, but you immediately quit when you save and you can only restore from a given save one time. This means that you can stop your game and continue it anywhere you want, but if you die, you can't just restore the save again.
As I recall, they dropped the tree-based storyline in later games (WC4?) because players did not like it... Well, I liked the idea, but they received all the feedback about WC, so I guess they had a good reason to abandon the approach.
In Deux Ex there were different ways how to tackle a problem (you know, like Perl, there's more than one way to do it). The storyline did not really chance that much.
Another good example I think is Baldurs Gate, where the main plot progressed, but the sideplots varied with your character and you could also pursue them at your own leisure.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
After playing 9/10 of the way through a particularly long and torturous Halo level, I ended up in a Warthog, sliding sideways of a cliff, exactly when the final monster was killed (triggering the autosave).
This gave me the joy, delight and reward of a hundred or so attempts leaping from the falling warthog and just failing to make it to the top of the cliff.
If developers insist upon disempowering the users, they should at least try to ensure the users are not completely sabotaged.
Personally I have always found that over-use of a quicksave function makes it relatively easy for game designers to create "gotchas" that force users to restart a level (used all ammo, didn't flick the switch, whatever) - so I don't believe it is the game destroying function that other propose.
Q.
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How about this: Make it beneficial to NOT save. Resident Evil and Chromium both have the right idea: In RE, each save used up an item (an otherwise useless Ink Ribbon), which in turn used up an inventory slot. In Chromium, If you bypass a proctective sheild, you get another life. I like a combitation of theese ideas. Perhaps saving the game should require the sacrifice of a particularly powerful item (that may just save your life). This way you are left with two choices: Try to advance with the benifit of the item, or lose the item as an 'insurance fee,' with the benefit of being able to re-play that part.
The I-Ninja demo included in Soul Calibur 2 for the PS2 illustrates a great example of non-silly punishment. On one level you must roll a barrel of gunpowder to a set spot, then detonate it. It's rather like monkey ball, except you control the barrel/ninja rather than the level.
If you fall off or the barrel explodes, it doesn't force you to back track or anything else. The barrel dropper drops another barrel, and I-Ninja hops onto the barrel -- ready for another attempt. It also has a lot of cool moves (ala Jet Set Radio Future). It's quick, neat, and unfrustrating. A pleasant switch from all the linear platformers that stick with the jumping-puzzle-frustraction-factor gameplay.
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There's another solution to the problem. In addition to the "savepoint," there also exists a notion of a continue point. The idea is that if you need to stop playing for a moment, it is simple to save your gamestate, but it retains the element of risk, and avoids the introduction of more loadtimes into the game. Basically, the game allows you to save anywhere and removes your save when you resume. This has existed for a long while in many games. Some of the Dragon Warriors, the Mario sports titles for gameboy, and probably the oldest of titles, nethack.
Of course this does result in some side effects. For starters, the lack of permenant "saves" means that if you die you'll be sent off to the beginning to try again. The Dragon Warrior and Mario games accomodate for this by mixing in save points at places like right before entering a cave, or starting a new tennis match.
What designers need to focus on is what gives the game purpose. As much as I hate those academic cooks who talk about video game narrative, almost every game follows the same structure. Go from level to level, retrying until you find the end of the game. Failure in this situation has nearly zero meaning in this repitition model. I hear the Wing Commander games featured a system like this. Unfortunately, academics never get a warm welcome, in part because they have little experience, in part because they make little attempt to be accessible, and in part because they stray from the people's notion of a game.
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