Safe And Sound
by sweep
There was a short article written in this months edition of Edge which talks about Saving your games. I found it interesting, because the save system is seldom considered an integral part of a game, more an extension of the menu. The sentence which stood out the most; "Developers are quietly walking away from the concept of the save as a fallback position from failure". When we get crushed, man...
There was a short article written in this months edition of Edge
which talks about Saving your games. I found it interesting, because the save system is seldom considered an integral part of a game, more an extension of the menu. The sentence which stood out the most;"Developers are quietly walking away from the concept of the save as a fallback position from failure".
When we get crushed, mangled, splattered, spiked, disembowelled or fail to protect the presidents daughter we are too often thrown into the savage "Game Over" mentality. A checkpoint can quickly award us revival - but the fluency of the game is lost. The trial and error style of gameplay has long ago become outdated. Some developers seek to distribute checkpoints sparingly, varying the impact of failure on the player. Recently however there has dawned the revelation of allowing revival to grow meaning within the game. Instead of slapping a "Game Over" screen and dumping you back where you were two minutes ago, games are now attempting to involve misguided leaps and attacks with alternative sources of continuation. Braid, Prince Of Persia, and to some extent Super Mario Galaxy - where leaping from one planet will often result in a gleeful bungee around the surface of the globe.
You win again, gravity!FarCry 2 will apparently send a comrade to find you when you drop - allowing for productive story continuation and realism - whilst also punishing the player by dragging them back to the beginning of their mission. Bioshock revives you almost instantly, with hardly any punishment other than a brief period of disorientation as you try to remember where that damn Big Daddy lumbered off to.
For me, that sort of cramped my enjoyment of Bioshock. The initial surge of fear and bewilderment at my enlightening trawl through Rapture was somewhat cushioned by the understanding that the concept of failure had been removed. The splicers suddenly weren't so scary, the Big Daddies more a case of "Do I have enough ammo?" than "Do I have enough skill?".
Edge goes on to point out
"These solutions are geared towards making the player content with the results of their actions, regardless of their original intent. But is it possible to have the player accept distinctly unhappy consequences too?"Taking it to the extreme are titles like Heavy Rain - which promise to continue the story despite the death and removal of the protagonist. It removes the safety net of having multiple save files to which the player can leap if they decide the course they chose was not so acceptable - which I think would prove more engrossing in the progression of the story - and make the player more inclined to experiment.
By contrast there are games such as Animal Crossing - which thrive off a sense of continuation. Anyone who turned off their DS without saving will now know and fear that bastard of a mole Mr Risetti.
Why does Frank have a really small head?So at the other end of the spectrum are games like Mass Effect and Dead Rising - which save progress painfully infrequently and can cause insane frustration as a consequence. But in retrospect the save system in Dead Rising had been implimented to startlingly successful effect. The Janitor's Office really did become a safe haven. My amble through the mall was gifted a sense of urgency - a heightened sense of self preservation. The lack of compensation for death made every health bar that much more precious, every zombie that much more deadly - and I think the experience gained a heightened level of self preservation as a result, which really complimented the struggle for survival.In Mass Effect I was heartbroken over the death of one of my crew. I wanted to reload the entire level just so I could keep them alive. But I couldn't bring myself to repeat a tedious 2 hour romp through the previous level. I was so invested in the current storyline I was forced to continue. It was a heightened sense of regret that I have never really felt in other games. Arguably that was a result of what initially appeared to be a rubbish save system.
[Edge writing about Far Cry 2] "Their death becomes a consequence you accept before pressing on, your cumulative actions telling a story that is more brutishly apt, given its war-torn setting, than if everything were to go your way"
So that's my post for today. I am feeling really ill so i'm going to go to bed early tonight (too many late nights heheh) but I wanted to post something substantial to make up for my week of absence.
WALL OF TEXT!!
Anyways thanks for reading
Love Sweep