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I don't know if that's just a matter of Vivendi playing hard ball, though, because apparently the Shadowrun guy obtained the rights back to the series which I thought would have been tougher what with it being used by Microsoft recently..

I think Microsoft just stopped paying for the rights, It's not like they did much with them. The MW and MC series ended up with the online communities IIRC.

Regardless of how everything turns out with all the celebrity developers barging out the smaller independents, all this kickstarter nonsense might drag the mainstream industry back to genres that it's long neglected (adventure games being one of many.)

Either that, or walk up and ask for a cigarette, repeat every day, even if he says no (snout-scroungers are persistant). Give it 2 weeks, he'll get pissed about being tapped for smokes everyday and leave.

Has Al Lowe actually bought the rights, or has he just purchased permission to remake an existing game?

If he's got the rights, then surely Codemasters can go f*ck themselves, and Al can make a new game?

fifth.....which means I'm down to 1 more clone!

Time's almost up and I kinda lost interest.



I'm not even going to bother trying to explaining this.....

@Victor - I've all kinds of terrible things about The Room.  I need to see it :-)

It's not 'entertainingly bad' like Showgirls or Red zone Cuba, it's 'Joel-Schumacher-Batman-I-want that-2-hours-of-my-life-back bad'.

The Room?

(I admit this is a really wild guess, but that's the last movie so awful that my brain can't forget it.)

Since the evacuate-alarmâ€"mode is on
...  it maybe unlocked now?

Voice: "Please use the tramway headed for the main facility. If the tramway is inoperable, please enter the submersible bay immediately, and board the emergency submersible.

Depending on how you read the alarm message;- The next step is to use the tramway, IF that's a no-go (i.e. you sealed it on the computer), then it would be the S.bay.

It looks way too high-budget for a boll pic, and there's no orange filter, so Bay is probably right out.

Gigli? Catwoman? I'd be tempted to throw showgirls in here but I know that's set in Nevada.

heh, I was just going to mention Lure of the temptress too, because I once spent 4+ hours looking for a way to start the fire, and the tinderbox had disappeared by that point. I didn't actually find out that it was a dead-end until I re-installed the game 6 months later.

- Unfortunately that sort of thing dumps it in the 'mediocre' camp for me. It's not good or bad, it's a mix of the 2. That makes recommending it, particularly when money is involved, a difficult prospect, even if I personally enjoyed it.

If the good and bad are balanced, it's average\medicore\5/10 stuff. Anything else will come down to personal perspective. You might love it regardless of the flaws, Or you might hate it and wish you'd bought something else.

It's like recommending Marmite to people.

I vote to just pick up where Eric's commands left off;-

>LEAVE

Traditionally this would be the point that dead chick gets up all hungry for hyper-thalamus, although she might wait until you've been into the hallway and run back into the room from the zombies out there.

You know what this entire idea reminds me of;-

Those paragraph books you got with games when they couldn't fit the all text onto a disk \ the system memory. (80's stuff)

Besides the joke paragraphs they included to stop people sneaking a look at the plot, they're more annoying than anything else these days.

Horray for yet another regression of technology.

I'm not sure exaclty what it is, but the art style reminds me of that used by New world computing for HOMM (the original DOS one). It's that mix of character style, detail, and shading.

Some in the industry are probably cheering at the news, however it's going to make the pre-owned situation worse. Without a major games retailer at street level, the indy stories, or places like CEX can do whatever they want.

Until the Origin - Steam juggernaut crushes them and the entire concept of physical ownership.

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)

Spoiler

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.

[close]

Didn't Yahtzee also write something called Poseidon 12?

I remember it being released via his subforum on chefelf.com, sometime between 7days and 1213. Did that reach open-beta then end up in the trash can?

#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.

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).

Er, Ig mate. You might want to contact the author directly, via PM or E-mail for example, rather than just dumping your message in the forums and hoping they see it.

I've tried to play kings quest, but there's something about the horrible sugary-sweet Disney-like tone of it all that drives me away before I can double click the exe.

The most honest thing I can say about sierra adventure games is;- I've played quite a lot of them, paid for none of them, and I don't feel even slightly guilty about it.

They're not bad, they're just mediocre.