Topic: The Savegame VS Difficulty dilemma.

[Victor6]

The situation is this;-

I'm mucking about coding a turn-based war game at the moment, and I have some reservations about the save game option. The problem with allowing players to save at any time is that it can mutate into a 'I WIN' button that allows players to avoid the consequences of their actions. This throws a major spanner in the works of the learning \ difficulty curve, and destroys any sense on tension or fear.

So, I'm weighing up how best to discourage it, and the possible options;

1. Enforce Ironman. - The game is automatically saved when you quit, and you only have one save slot. Players can potentially save-scum and ALT-F4 around this.
 
2. Disable saves in battle - On average, a battle should take about 30-45 minutes. It's turn based, and AGS runs in a window so there's no urgency.

3. Charge for it. - The game does have a finance system, so potentially I could charge for each save, unless the player is broke, in which case it's free. Since money is finite (awarded after each battle, used to buy units for the next), this discourages people from saving too often, and kinda rewards players who avoid saving, since they have more money to buy stuff (which in makes life easier for them.)

4. God doesn't play dice. - AKA the Sirtech method. All random rolls are on a base 100 system, so I could script the game to pre-roll 50-100, and call them in order. This way if you have 'bad luck', reloading won't help. The weakness of this is that players can reload, and reorder their actions for the best results (i.e. avoid attacking, so the AI gets the bad dice roll).

5. Turn the difficulty up to 11. - If some people are going to save all the time, make the game so hard that virtually everyone has to. - A little too extreme for me.

6. Count the saves. - Track the number of saves a player makes, and adjust the difficulty of certain situations based on this. This just encourages more save\loads, unless the situation becomes impossible.

7. Give up and let cowards win. - Who am I to judge? It's none of my business how often people use the save option and I should stop being an ass about it.

How do people feel about the various options, or does anyone have a better solution? I don't want to get into the trap of providing people who don't save with quasi-useless bonus content if I can avoid it (I've saved that for the difficulty option).

[nihilyst]

I like 7. If people like a challenge, they'll try without 'save-game-cheating'.

[Armageddon]

#7, don't ever, EVER restrict a player from playing how they want to play. I personally save quite a lot in games where I die a lot, but if it's a good and well balanced game I don't even think about saving, but I also get pissed off when I die that one times and there is no auto-save.

[Nikolas]

Anyway you temper into the save function you kinda enter a 4th wall situation... Games are about entering a world and allowing the player to forget about GUI and other things. A method to control how much a player will save will destroy this immersion in seconds. 

Unless you could find a way to put the save mechanics ingame (like some platformers do, with specific places where you can save and still they are criticized for this, but I don't really mind) it simply won't work so it's 7.

Bow if you could find a way to put into the lore of the game the idea of rewards, and gods attempting to influence the fate of the player or whatever... and use the currency system (3?) then perhaps it would work, but certainly not out of the blue!

[Victor6]

#7, don't ever, EVER restrict a player from playing how they want to play. I personally save quite a lot in games where I die a lot, but if it's a good and well balanced game I don't even think about saving, but I also get pissed off when I die that one times and there is no auto-save.

But are you just pissed of with the game, or also partly with yourself for taking a decision which got you killed?
When faced with a similar situation again, surely you learn from your mistake. In context it's very rare that you insta-lose, it takes time, and a steady stream of bad decisions to get you to that point. In which case, it's probably best to try from the beginning, because if you can't handle this stage of the difficulty curve, you'll spend more and more time on the save\load screen as you progress.

If you know you can't save, you adjust your play-style to match (i.e X-com and the redshirt spotters). If you want to risk playing the long odds, you do so with the knowledge that things could go wrong. - The risk is part of the excitement here. If you keep winning, you end up like the gambler in hell from the outer limits.......that might have been a spoiler.

Anyway you temper into the save function you kinda enter a 4th wall situation... Games are about entering a world and allowing the player to forget about GUI and other things. A method to control how much a player will save will destroy this immersion in seconds.

Surely including a save option at all destroys all immersion though. There's no risk, no tension, no fear of defeat. TBS games without these elements are just long winded grinds.

It's arguably more immersive if the player has to fight they're way out of a corner (which they may have created), without a safety net, than allow the same situation with the player saving the game every 6 seconds.

Save anywhere destroys the skill requirement. If there's no skill requirement, there's no challenge, and everything becomes a hollow victory.

3. I can work into the game as it stands without too much trouble.

Just for arguments sake here, there are already games which feature some of these ideas, and they're not universally hated as a result;-

1. Nethack as standard (although some clones may differ).
2. Jagged alliance (allowed saves between, but not during.) - Arguably Xcom, since it was designed without a load option in battle (didn't stop people.)
3. Ishar (ok, this one did suck, but it wouldn't let you save without money, and had an insane cost.)
4. Wizardry 8 (try pickpocketing), Jagged alliance 2.
5. Any game in which hard difficulty just translates to 'save more'. Games with lots of bad 'roll X not to die' elements like Baldur's gate 2.
6. - Never done that I can remember. Although I did propose making an FPS boss who could save and reload (and was thus unbeatable) for my final year project at uni.
7. The norm.

[miguel]

Hi Victor,

as a gamer I hate not being able to save my game every time I want to. I understand that a real-time battle wouldn't allow it but if it is a turn-based one that allows me to think and plan my moves then it makes no sense not to allow me to save it.

As for the "cheating" issue, it all comes to the type of player, I do reload a lot if playing Icewind Dale for example but never do it if I'm playing a football manager game.

[nihilyst]

I liked Dark Souls, even though, for beginners and in the first half, it was extremely punishing and save spots were rare. In this case, I felt a "save where you want" option would have ruined the experience. So maybe it all boils down to how well you can draw the player into the game; if Dark Souls wouldn't have drawn me in that much, I'd have probably thrown it out the window. Don't know how that kind of save-mechanics yould be implemented in a strategy game.

[InCreator]

I think that if you have to enforce save restrictions to games, you've balanced difficulty wrong.

Just make "easy" easy and hard "hard". And impossible mode with ironman/sirtech roll/whatever
Btw not all JA2 mods had this roll system. Wildfire I think was different.

COUNTED saves are horrible, horrible idea. I always hated this in Hitman and some other games.
But with some games, I love to save and reload to get totally different "history". Europa Universalis, Knights of Honor or Civilization for example. "What if I made peace instead of declaring war instead?"
Sometimes it leads to amazingly different game.

[tzachs]

#7, don't ever, EVER restrict a player from playing how they want to play.

When you create a game, you define a set of rules. Those rules do restrict the player and thus shape the experience that the designer wants to convey. Determining when the save is allowed is just one of those rules.

I like 7. If people like a challenge, they'll try without 'save-game-cheating'.

I don't think that's true.
I think most people will "cheat" if given the option, we are humans after all (and it's not really cheating since it's permitted by the game rules, it's just playing in a way that the game designer did not intend to). A player who wants to succeed will do whatever possible to achieve success, even if it means ruining the fun for himself.
It's up for the designer to do what he can so the experience he aimed for will remain intact.

I've ruined myself plenty of games in the past, most memorable was levelling up too quickly and early in Final Fantasy games, thus making the game very easy and boring.

As for what option is best, if you had unlimited budget I'd say try several options with different play testers and see what works the best...
If I had to choose one of them, I'd go with #2, seems the most reasonable to me.

[WHAM]

I think you should ignore all feedback and answer the question yourself. If YOU were playing this game and it was made by someone else, what would be the highest difficulty level you would feel comfortable and fair with, while remaining challenged and engaged?

I think games nowadays make a huge mistake in asking the players what they want, as everyone wants a different thing and pleasing everyone is impossible. If you start taking feedback on matters like this, you will most likely end up going with the views of the "loud minority" and alienating a lot more potential players than you might have otherwise.

Hope you find this helpful in some way.

(Oh, and I am an "iron man" -mode player all the way myself! )

[blueskirt]

I would go for the iron man method too, you can save between battles, but not during. It will make decisions much more important. You'll just need to design battles so they can be won in less than one hour to keep things fair and playable.

[Andail]

I agree that you should make the game the way you'd like to play it.
Too many aspiring game makers are so conscious about people's opinions they never get around to finish a game. Let alone an original one.

I definitely think there's room for games that you cannot save and load as you please, just to be able to play recklessly. I would enjoy a game that had just one save-slot, or better yet, a constant auto-save system, like modern mmo's. You pick up the game where you left it last time you played, simple as that. That would really force the player to make their choices prudently, and not rush through the game.  

#7, don't ever, EVER restrict a player from playing how they want to play

Sorry, but this is frankly a bit boring advice. The very basic sentiment is ludicrous - you always restrict a player. Unless you're playing some table top RPG. And the dungeon master forgot to create an adventure for you.

I'm not in favour of a system where the game can only be saved at certain instances (rather that it would be constantly saved), but if you went ahead and created such a game, I wouldn't really object. There would be a point in playing it that way, and if a player couldn't cope, there are plenty of other games.

[Stupot+]

I don't play turn-based war games, but how do they usually deal with saving?  The method they use is probably used because they asked the same questions you're asking now and decided that was the best way.

I guess it depends on the format of the game.  If there are clear stages or levels then it is obvious when to give the player a chance to save.  Otherwise, I agree that having a 'save when you like, except during battles' sounds like a nice option.  Or have save points dotted around so that you have to actually 'get' to a save point instead of just doing it from the menu, this way you could work it in as a gameplay element.  How about something like the typewriters in Resi Evil, where you actually had to collect ink ribbons to allow you to save, so that you couldn't just save every two minutes.

[Armageddon]

Maybe I should expand upon what I said. Obviously you have to restrict the player in some ways. I mean, if someone doesn't like saves then they can just play the game without saving, but the feature is there for the people that do save often. I highly doubt a one save slot system would work simply because the player could corner himself and then save and he'll never be able to win from that save point. Save 'stations' like the type writers in Resident Evil work fine, I personally dislike them because they are usually spread out so you can go around 30 minutes to an hour without saving. My personal opinion and experiences, if I die in the game, and I'm thrown more than 5 minutes into the past I rage quit, but that's if the game is already boring or there is only one linear way to play, or if it's too hard. You're game probably ha many different ways to approach a situation. I just don't get why people want to restrict saving, it takes so much more time and resources to stop the player from saving than the system that's commonly used. In the end it's all your choice though. 8)

[Eggie]

Why don't you autosave every turn during battles but not let them start from that point once they die? Then you get the tense feeling of living with fatal choices you want and you don't screw people over who need to turn off their computers to get to work on time.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You could have the save affect gameplay in some way that discourages players from spamming it while allowing them to make strategic use of it.  For example, if there's an active timer running during gameplay, saving could take x seconds that the AI can use to build resources (almost like giving them a turn).  Early on this won't be a problem, but depending on how much time you award the opponent for a save it could make saves drop off in proportion to how hectic events are getting, which I'm guessing is sort of what you're after anyway.  It will make the player feel a bit pressured without saying 'you can't do this at all'.  You could scale this effect by difficulty so at ironman it basically awards your enemy a full turn each time you do it, making it advantageous only to use it when you are either under no threat or at a critical moment before a conflict.

Note that this approach pretty much keeps players from saving mid-battle since at the end of their turn the enemy would have effectively two turns to work them over, so it keeps the action pretty frantic unless the player is just completely trashing the enemy and isn't worried about them at all.

[Laukku]

1. Enforce Ironman. - The game is automatically saved when you quit, and you only have one save slot. Players can potentially save-scum and ALT-F4 around this.

All roguelikes (a subgenre of computer RPGs) have a system almost like this. More specifically, you only have one save slot per started game, and the game quits upon saving. The savegame file is then deleted after loading it. This makes it impossible (unless you cheat by copying savefiles) to go back and retry something, and saving is only used if you want to stop playing for a while. This also makes dying permanent. Roguebasin has an article on this.

[Ali]

All roguelikes (a subgenre of computer RPGs) have a system almost like this. More specifically, you only have one save slot per started game, and the game quits upon saving. The savegame file is then deleted after loading it.

Surely not! What if the game crashes?

[WHAM]

All roguelikes (a subgenre of computer RPGs) have a system almost like this. More specifically, you only have one save slot per started game, and the game quits upon saving. The savegame file is then deleted after loading it.

Surely not! What if the game crashes?

Not an issue, as the games also autosave after every single move.

[Victor6]

Delayed responses here, which are entirely my own fault because I mentioned JA then went and played it all weekend. Thanks to everyone who responded.

Btw not all JA2 mods had this roll system. Wildfire I think was different.

COUNTED saves are horrible, horrible idea. I always hated this in Hitman and some other games.
But with some games, I love to save and reload to get totally different "history". Europa Universalis, Knights of Honor or Civilization for example. "What if I made peace instead of declaring war instead?"
Sometimes it leads to amazingly different game.

Wildfire didn't, however wildfire DID jack up the difficulty to 11 and threw the difficulty curve out the window(it was intended for experienced players).

I don't want to do the X number of saves allowed system. Although you could argue that it does work with something like resident evil. Any game with 'random-death' (i.e. snipers in dense cover with perfect vision, invisible traps, enforced stealth) should avoid this imo.

R.E 4x games, I agree, and I do exactly the same. I'm not so worried about major breakpoint 'what if I didn't declare war' situations, I'm more concerned about someone reloading every time their spearman fails to kill a tank, or Gandhi builds the library first.

@Ali : - Large and imaginative amounts of swearing occur. - I've had games crash \ power cuts during an autosave before, which landed me with a corrupt file.

@Laukku :- Thanks for the link, it sums up the whole situation very nicely. I know some roguelikes don't feature permadeath, and suffer for it (since most roguelike fans won't touch 'em).

@Eggie:- I thought of that, however if the game autosaves every turn, you're just and ALT-F4 and a doubleclick away from reloading. It didn't work in UFO (be honest folks, how often did you dust off and reload?). I might as well just insert a 20 second delay into the loading screen.
I hovered over the idea of autosaving erratically, so the player doesn't actually know when the game was last saved (it could be 1 turn, it could be 7). this kinda avoids the reset button look scenario, since you might lose your progress.
I don't want it to get to the point of punishing people who save for non-game related reasons; say, you have to go to work and turn off the computer. However there's got to be a balance somewhere.

I don't play turn-based war games, but how do they usually deal with saving?  The method they use is probably used because they asked the same questions you're asking now and decided that was the best way.

The TBS genre is a little docile these days. Turning the clock back to the 16-32bit console era, the save option is almost balanced by the lack of slots, and the time taken to save\reload\reset the console. Play these games on an emulator with instant savestates, and it's a completely different scenario. - As computers have become faster, saving has become more convenient, and I suspect, more widespread.
- A lot of Console titles featured a 'suspend' option. Which was really just an 'ironman only in battle' scenario. With the same potential pitfalls. I'm not sure I've even used this option in some cases.

@Armageddon;- Believe me, I do understand that some people want to save all the time. However it's a partly matter of; do they need to? if not, Would they even notice?

For example, you like to be able to save, so surely option 3 (pay, unlimited if broke) is acceptable? Sure, you might have a different experience from WHAM or Blueskirt, who might finish the game with some extra shiny stuff, but you'd still get to play your way to an extent. Or option 6. Which you'd only notice if you tried to abuse the save system.

@WHAM;- I does help. It was actually one of your games that got me thinking along these lines, since the only review it had (at the time, not sure if it's changed since.) complained about the difficulty and lack of saving.

@Nihilist;- I agree with your logic. I've ruined my fair share of games over the years. I didn't when I was younger because it wasn't convenient to save and reload, and it's only when I've gone back to games that flat out restrict saving that I realized how important this factor was to gameplay. Winning teaches a lot less than losing it seems.

@Andail;- Ultimately it will probably end up with me being bull headed about it and sitting on one option. - I started the thread in part because it's a topic which people avoid, but which I feel should be considered in game design. I'm actually impressed that it got this far without anyone resorting the 'You = Elitist. I win' arguments.

If I missed anyone. I'm sorry but this has turned into a mad ramble.

On topic, and just to promote a little more discussion;-
The problem with saving anywhere is that it denies certain options to the designer, because they become game breaking.
For example;-
Stealing and gambling in many games are open to abuse. If you never get caught (because you reload), it's an 'I WIN' situation. You could balance the game around the possibility that the player will steal everything that's not nailed down, however that potentially forces players to steal.

Surprise!;- Yep, that zombie breaking in through the window was scary the first time, but he's not the second time when you know he's coming. Unless the designer randomizes which window he comes through, but then you start saving as you pass each one.....

Victory from the jaws of defeat;- It's hard to do well when defeat is locked behind a massive concrete save-wall. Save-abuse could also lock the player (see below)

I wrote a scenario where after an ambush (in which the enemy keeps spawning), reinforcements only turn up;
A. 3 turns after the ambush - enough time for things to get a little hairy.
and
B. When the player has less than 20 units. - It looks like you're going to lose.
IF you save and reload to avoid loses, you could be here forever. IF I told the player reinforcements would arrive in X turns, it would be far less exciting.