230: Save Our Souls

[pparrish]

Save Our Souls

Save functions triggered a paradigm shift in game design by allowing players to complete games across multiple sittings. But innovation often has a price, and in this case, it's the prospect of losing days of effort due to one costly mistake. Peter Parrish investigates what we put into save files, and what we lose when they're gone.

Read Full Article

 

[Vierran]

I like so many others have lost large amounts of data for saved games through crashes and corruption and i think that because of those event i am even more close to my avatars then i normally would have been.

I will often back up files two or three times if possible just to avoid losing the data, but it always makes me think, what is it i am exactly losing here, just time and effort? or perhaps something more, perhaps after all these years and all this data accumulated it has become apart of me.

I think i may even treat this data as if it were some sort of external memory system that can be retrieved and viewed for not only entertainment purposes but also to reminisce.

Then again it is 12:50am and i am very tired and i could be really over thinking this.

 

[J.McMillen]

My favorite save feature was from the old game Autoduel (1985). While you had a save file, if you died without having purchased an in-game clone, your save file was wiped before the "You have died" message appeared on the screen. When I played it on my old C64, I never figured out how to backup the save file and still restarted and finished the main quest multiple times. I eventually got a copy for the PC and learned how to backup and restore the save file if I died, but I did feel guilty if I had to do it.

 

[ravensshade]

You know i'm one of those people who either abuse the quicksave button or keep only 1 save file and overwrite it everytime (and in some cases both 1 quicksave and a secondary file i save when i exit)

 

[KoDOmega]

I once lost a whole CONSOLE to a lost savegame. Well, a handheld, but still... I had lent my (original, non-clamshell) GBA, along with my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to a friend to let him try it. After all, it's a great game... why not share it? Well, when I got it back, through a bit of confusion on my and his part, it turned out he'd saved over MY save file...

My EIGHTY HOUR save file.

I was so distraught, I slammed my forehead into the screen... and pulled my head back to watch black liquid slowly spiderweb across the screen until it was totally black.

So yeah, save games? Kinda important.

 

[Frybird]

There is a certain truth to "Save abuse" leading to a seemingly less challenging game, but i'd happily refit all of my games with a quicksave function if possible...especially since i can and do afford so many games.

I'm talking about Metroid Prime here. 1 1/2 months in, i haven't even finished the first Game of the Trilogy on the Wii, because on the (very rare) occasions when i actually die, the game sets me back far enough to make me get up and play something else instead.
It's a great game, but seriously, you shouldn't have another games beside if if you want to play it through quickly or throughly (as in "100 %").


But to get closer to the topic:
Surprisingly, when i (freshly) installed Windows 7 at release, my loss of 3 months worth of emails wasn't nearly as frustrating as losing all my Save Data from "Defense Grid: The Awakening", although i was almost back to the most recent state of progress within one day...weird
(Note: Thanks to that i cannot really recommend Acronis Software as a backup solution)

 

[Fat Hippo]

Ughhh, I know exactly what the author is talking about. I nearly screamed when my Gothic save file was corrupted about 2 hours away from the ending. I've beaten it since then, but that nearly turned me away from it forever.

 

[Otterpoet]

Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis goes down in personal history as the game that actually brought me to tears. I'd played for 45+ hours and reached Chapter 7... only to have the save file corrupt itself and wipe out EVERYTHING.

I later found out this is a problem with Gust games. The trick is to have one 'working' save and a back up save. That way, if you corrupt the working save, you're only out an hour or so. Frustrating as hell though.

And never EVAR trust auto-save in Dragon Age: Origins. I wasn't playing attention and thought the auto-save was covering me when I traveled. Nope. I lost something like two hours of game-play when I got jumped by a pack of Dark Spawn...

Words were uttered.

 

[Otterpoet]

I once lost a whole CONSOLE to a lost savegame. Well, a handheld, but still... I had lent my (original, non-clamshell) GBA, along with my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to a friend to let him try it. After all, it's a great game... why not share it? Well, when I got it back, through a bit of confusion on my and his part, it turned out he'd saved over MY save file...

My EIGHTY HOUR save file.

I was so distraught, I slammed my forehead into the screen... and pulled my head back to watch black liquid slowly spiderweb across the screen until it was totally black.

So yeah, save games? Kinda important.

So, just wondering... are you currently in prison? Because if my friend did that to me, there would be blood ;-)

 

[GonzoGamer]

I think it also depends on how good the game is. If you really like it, it might be worth it to start again from the beginning, just for the hell of it even. Then some games just never go back in the machine. Like Burnout Paradise: even after using the backup utility, my BP saves weren't recognized after replacing the hdd in my ps3. If it was Burnout Revenge or anything nearly as good as that, I would've happily started again from the beginning (as I did when the Burnout Revenge data got corrupted on my ps2 a while back), but Burnout Paradise just wasn't worth it. I ended up giving it to another fan of the series who in the end was very happy he didn't have to pay for it.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Heres a thought like a future rich button mapping standard why not have the option to configure saves as a standard. In the option menu you can tell it if you want check points and if you want time based check points(every 10,20,30,60 minutes) and if god forbid you want to quick save becuse you really messed with the AI this go around and you want to save that progression if just to boost your puny ego..... I know I would...because...my ego is puny and all.... god I would even buy these as DLC per game at 2$ a pop or 5$ for all of them in one package......you hear that you wanky suits!!!

 

[geldonyetich]

It's become a common joke of mine that all the heroes in the games I play have the exact same superpower: the ability to go back in time to a previous save game when something goes wrong. Even Gods would inevitably fall before one with such great power at their disposal.

 

[wordsmith]

I know the feeling, I picked up Fifa 09 (despite not having played a fifa game since '98) for my PSP, did all the challenges and then went into manager mode looking for a challenge. Chester were the bottom-division whipping dogs before the mysterious "T. Wordsmith" joined the club. Despite only being 23 years old, Chester progressed immensely through the next three seasons, (9 cups/trophies, 13 games lost over the 3 seasons, including wins over Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea and AC Milan) eventually qualifying for the Premier League. I scheduled training before the Premiership season started, and one sleepy Saturday morning I pulled my PSP out of my jeans to have a match, only to see "File Deleted".

I'd left it unlocked, and an unfortunate series of keypresses had wiped out 3 (real life) months of gaming, more than 200 matches (46 league x 3 seasons = 138, probably more than 62 cup matches) and with it any chance of Chester winning the Premiership.

It was such a weird feeling... It wasn't "work", so I couldn't feel annoyed I'd lost it. After all, I'd played for fun, and hadn't I had fun getting to that point?

 

[carpathic]

I don't tend to save too often. This means I lose a lot of hours, but I am totally okay with that. Games are about the challenge for me anyway.

Btw a thoughtful and interesting article. Thank you!

 

[Shadeovblack]

1 word POWDER

 

[Saris Kai]

I always say to my friends:

"If I was designing a game I would go out of my way to ensure choices at various stages of the game have both long term and short term ramifications, many of which would be either unforeseeable or reflect realistically handling a situation that normally would never happen in a game. That way whenever a player would make these choices the game would autosave over their current state (which they can only have one of) and make it impossible to go back and change their choice if they realized they made a bad one. The crowning moment of awesome would be that it could be entirely possible for a player to make it impossible for them to ever beat them game but it wouldn't become apparent right away."

Then I would say: "and it would be so awesome everyone would hate it and I'd be happy.

 

[KoDOmega]

I once lost a whole CONSOLE to a lost savegame. Well, a handheld, but still... I had lent my (original, non-clamshell) GBA, along with my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to a friend to let him try it. After all, it's a great game... why not share it? Well, when I got it back, through a bit of confusion on my and his part, it turned out he'd saved over MY save file...

My EIGHTY HOUR save file.

I was so distraught, I slammed my forehead into the screen... and pulled my head back to watch black liquid slowly spiderweb across the screen until it was totally black.

So yeah, save games? Kinda important.

So, just wondering... are you currently in prison? Because if my friend did that to me, there would be blood ;-)

Ah, I got confused on where he was keeping the file, and I saved it over mine without thinking. You know how it goes... you've got the motions to save the game so programmed into your fingers, you can execute it without knowing what you've done, so I couldn't blame him.

Now, SUICIDE... that idea got bounced around.

 

[copycatalyst]

My favourite example of saving moments before death came from HL2. On the airboat, with an APC raining down missiles, a bunch of CPs firing SMGs, and a flaming blockade to leap across, I had 1HP left at the save. Of course, HL2 autosaves are frequent enough that going back to the previous one wouldn't have wasted much time. But dammit, I was gonna make it through this blockade with 1 health! It took a few tries, but somehow I snuck through. This was where a bad save actually made things more exciting (for a game I had already beat a few times).

Sometimes the "save anywhere, save anytime" mentality is a hinderance to excitement, though. I remember feeling that Tomb Raider 2 was ruined by removing the save points that the first game had used. It broke up the tension that would be caused by knowing that there's a consequence for failure at each and every trap or juump, and it extends beyond merely repeating that same trap or jump.

 

[AnonymouZero]

I once lost a whole CONSOLE to a lost savegame. Well, a handheld, but still... I had lent my (original, non-clamshell) GBA, along with my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to a friend to let him try it. After all, it's a great game... why not share it? Well, when I got it back, through a bit of confusion on my and his part, it turned out he'd saved over MY save file...

My EIGHTY HOUR save file.

I was so distraught, I slammed my forehead into the screen... and pulled my head back to watch black liquid slowly spiderweb across the screen until it was totally black.

So yeah, save games? Kinda important.

So, just wondering... are you currently in prison? Because if my friend did that to me, there would be blood ;-)

there mite've been blood on HIS forehead. after all screens and foreheads don't mix well.