Why We Have Checkpoint Saves

[Bad Jim]

You're underestimating how small the change needs to be. If you add a single variable to a class, then a general-purpose serialization scheme is going to throw an exception and not give you your object.

You can version the save file and load it with the old code. In that case you just get the old data structures but the new variable is undefined. You may then have to figure out a way to define it, depending on what it does and how it works.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

I never thought that it was a technical issue, but an artistic one. The PC/console discussion would be framed as "PC users like games where they're at the controls of a game world that's theirs, going so far as the keybindings and when they can save (and mods, etc.)" and "console users want to sit on the couch and be given a hand-tailored experience where all the 'behind the scenes' stuff is handled for them". There's obviously exceptions, and for PC minded games moving towards the console, quicksave was replaced by having to press start and hit save in the menu. This discussion we're having recently seems to be from console-minded developers porting to the PC, and keeping the checkpoint system intact.

For Bioshock: Infinite, what that all boils down to is that Irrational wanted more control over the experience. Moving in a more tightly controlled, artistic direction for the series meant that they didn't want the player saving wherever the hell they wanted and messing up the experience (the experience Irrational wanted them to have, not the player's own). You were experiencing their beauty, not taking their beauty and deciding when it was supposed to hit intermission.

I'm merely speculating and could be entirely wrong about all of that, of course.

 

[lacktheknack]

Meeting half-way: No-save zones (such as combat situations where the amount of complexity skyrockets).

 

[Britishfan]

But that still doesn't explain why PC games are famous for having save-anywhere features.

Maybe because save-anywhere features are more common in strategy games than anywhere else, and strategies are more common on PC than console? Just a suggestion.

 

[Bad Jim]

Meeting half-way: No-save zones (such as combat situations where the amount of complexity skyrockets).

That gives you the worst of both worlds. There's little advantage to saving outside combat over regular checkpoints and it won't be much easier to program.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

But that still doesn't explain why PC games are famous for having save-anywhere features. I feel like I'm missing a page.

It's a good question. Making a save on one system shouldn't be any harder than on another, so I'm tempted to assume it's all due to expectations and conventions: PC players expect save-on-demand, and console players are okay without it. So PC devs put in the extra work and console devs sometimes let it slide.

That's just a guess, though.

It's also worth noting that save-on-demand (SOD?) is going away. In fact, when I saw this article title, I figured it was inspired from people noticing how Bioshock: Infinite is pure checkpoints; even on PC. Both Borderlands games are also checkpoint-based, but it's a bit smoother since it'll usually save your data as you quit (and tells you when it won't); though you still load at a checkpoint.

 

[sid]

But that still doesn't explain why PC games are famous for having save-anywhere features. I feel like I'm missing a page.

It's a good question. Making a save on one system shouldn't be any harder than on another, so I'm tempted to assume it's all due to expectations and conventions: PC players expect save-on-demand, and console players are okay without it. So PC devs put in the extra work and console devs sometimes let it slide.

That's just a guess, though.

Now I find myself searching around to see how accurate the assumption even is. I mean, QTE games ala Uncharted are usually meant to be played in chunks, not with the amount of freedom that something like Fallout would warrant. It's understandable from the perspective of God of War or Lara Croft seeing as they're more of a movie than a playground most of the time. Those games are found in Consoles mostly. Games like Starcraft or Sim City, however, would be thrown completely off-balance by an inaccurate save file, and would provoke some pretty heavy sighs if all they had going for them was checkpoints. I guess if you were to point the finger at anyone, it would have to be the Hollywood-esque triple A market that seems to take care of consoles, as they wouldn't have any use for specific saves in the first place.

Either way, I think it's pretty safe to say that checkpoints are only really an issue in games that could really benefit from local saves. Imagine playing Fallout New Vegas, except every load leads directly to the Lucky 38.

 

[Saviordd1]

Anyone else notice the large difference between his profile pic and his updated pic?

Just sayin'

 

[Woodsey]

You could add 10 more paragraphs of stuff that has to be saved and it wouldn't be impressive. It's not like you are manually saving this stuff by writing it down. Gathering information, organizing it into files, and saving it is something that computers are really good at. If the developer goes in with the knowledge that they will need to save this stuff, then it shouldn't be super hard to do so.

And, yes, captcha, fezes ARE cool.

Yeah, that's what I'm not exactly getting. It's a lot of shit when you write it down but it's not like some poor fucker is doing it by hand every time someone saves.

To be honest, I'm fine with save-anywhere outside of a combat scenario, but coming from my position of utter ignorance on the subject, I'm not really buying this. It's not like games have grown an order of magnitude more complex over night.

 

[The Random One]

The obvious way out, of course, is to have both save anywhere and checkpoints, so you can start playing from where you left off but if you fuck up (or the game glitches up) you have the chance of restarting.

The harder, less obvious less out is to have checkpoints plentiful enough that the amount of playtime lost never feels significant.

The Real True One Way Out is to play only roguelikes, forever.

 

[BrotherRool]

You could add 10 more paragraphs of stuff that has to be saved and it wouldn't be impressive. It's not like you are manually saving this stuff by writing it down. Gathering information, organizing it into files, and saving it is something that computers are really good at. If the developer goes in with the knowledge that they will need to save this stuff, then it shouldn't be super hard to do so.

And, yes, captcha, fezes ARE cool.

You are manually writing this stuff down. Someone has to design every bit of code that will make it work and then they have to QA and bug correct that code. They have to make the memory requirements correct, they have to make it functioning within the game systems, they have to keep the saving time down to a reasonable level. And the point is that's a non-trivial amount of time and effort

It's also worth noting that save-on-demand (SOD?) is going away. In fact, when I saw this article title, I figured it was inspired from people noticing how Bioshock: Infinite is pure checkpoints; even on PC. Both Borderlands games are also checkpoint-based, but it's a bit smoother since it'll usually save your data as you quit (and tells you when it won't); though you still load at a checkpoint.

On the latest podcast he was doing someone got onto the subject of (not having)autosaves as a relic of old bad design features and offhandedly called a developer lazy for not having quicksaves in combat if they have them out of combat and I think that's probably what inspired this particular article

This reminds me of the save system in FF 13-2. You could literally save anywhere and it would remember everything exactly the way it was.

It took absolutely forever to create a new save file though. I've never seen a game take so long just to save something in another slot. There was obviously something very complex going on in the background

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Aye, I was rather miffed to have had to pretty much untimely, suddenly, immediately quit playing Bioshock: Infinite three times, without having an option to save my current progress, sending me back between half an hour to almost an hour on my next session. I did not like that.

Funny how Dark Souls, a game that's been considered to be so utterly unfair to the uninitiated, lets you just quit the game and saves everything just nicely, without any punishments or repercussions whatsoever. At first, I was terrified of the Save & Quit option. Remembering what, say, Fallout 3 did to my save games and my data, I was wary, to say the least. But Dark Souls handled it just nicely, even throwing in some surprisingly nice advantages into the mix (Bed of Chaos, anyone?)...

 

[parintachin]

Meh; I simply do not buy it. It's a design flaw, and will remain so.

But if you Have to do checkpoints, have LOTS of them. There is nothing more annoying than to have to battle the same idiots and watch the same cutscenes for 15 minutes before a bossfight, then get killed immediately and have to do it again. And again. And again.

Bioshock Infinite is the one that springs most immediately to mind; there can easily be half an hours playtime between savepoints in that; way, way too long.

 

[rapidoud]

I especially hate when PC games don't allow you to save on demand. Also, if bug-prone shops like Bethesda can pull it off, then there's no excuse!

Difference between possible and unnecessary expenditure when they could fix a few bugs or better balance a section of the game with that budget instead.

Also, some people here stating 'take it back a bit and simplify it' are essentially saying 'checkpoint it!' as that's the last time it was simple, and doing it anywhere near combat gives it the potential to break the game.

I agree too, Bioshock: Infinite's save system is terrible, with 15 minutes between the earlier checkpoints at least.

 

[rodneyy]

i quite liked the way stalker saves worked. im not sure if this was intentional or just an accident.

say you are in a building with 2 doors and a few windows you 4 guys show up and you are a gonner so you reload and crouch down behind some cover waiting for them to burst through the door again, but they dont maybe only one person shows up and the rest come through the other door. there always seemed to be differnt reactions.

i dont know if this was a shortcut in the saving process as all npcs were saved where they were but not what they were doing so had to work out what they needed to do again and didnt carry on the same path as before but it always added a nice random feel to things that even if you did save all the time you didnt really know what was about to happen so a hard area was still hard just in a differnt way.

 

[jklinders]

It's a great argument for disallowing saves in combat. But what about forcing checkpoint saves when not in combat? Many of the games I have disallow saves in the middle of combat for just the very reasons outlined. But then allow them again once combat is resolved. Someone above said that they felt like a page was missing from this piece. I concur.

 

[WarpZone]

EyE: Divine Cybermancy had a weird saved game system. If you die, you lose a life, wait ten seconds, and respawn exactly on top of your old corpse. Lose all of your lives, and you get sent back to the mission hub with a message stating that what you just experienced was actually a prophetic dream.

Another twist would be a mechanical respawn system like in Borderlands or System Shock. Die, and you respawn at the nearest Respawn Machine. But enemies also tend to either respawn or else filter in from other areas. So if we turn the game off, come back to it later, and respawn, it's easy to imagine that some time has passed and the game world's natural respawn has had time to kick in.

Both of these techniques make it unnecessary to show a loading screen every time the player dies, and make it feasible to reload the entire map from scratch when the player first starts playing or enters the area. They can also both sort of be seen largely as multiplayer death systems re-purposed for single-player.

Contrast with a game like Fallout 3, where yes, every single object in the game world (at least in the current area,) is part of the saved game file. Some PC games even use Object Serialization to LITERALLY stuff game objects into the save file, but this is generally regarded as a suboptimal use of disk space, even on PCs.

 

[Robyrt]

Funny how Dark Souls, a game that's been considered to be so utterly unfair to the uninitiated, lets you just quit the game and saves everything just nicely, without any punishments or repercussions whatsoever. At first, I was terrified of the Save & Quit option. Remembering what, say, Fallout 3 did to my save games and my data, I was wary, to say the least. But Dark Souls handled it just nicely, even throwing in some surprisingly nice advantages into the mix (Bed of Chaos, anyone?)...

Dark Souls performs the best kind of trick: it makes you think it is constantly saving everything, when it really isn't saving much of anything except the world state. If you reload your game, the player and enemies will be completely reset except for their last saved position, and you can't reload into a boss battle at all (it will reload you just before the boss door). Careful level design minimizes the number of enemies with canned animations so they don't break the system. For example, the enemy who closes the door on you in the Undead Parish is invincible while he's closing the door, and the door closing triggers an immediate autosave.

 

[RonHiler]

How do you guys feel about a save system where the game is auto-saved whenever something "permanent" happens? I will take, for example, Saints Row 3. There are only a few things that cause permanent changes in that game. Of course, finishing a mission counts. So does picking up a collectable, doing a stunt jump, or a barnstorm, or taking out a gang operation, etc. Basically, any time you do something that permanently affects the state of the game, it is recorded.

When you load, you don't start again where you saved, but at the nearest save point (which would be your closest crib for that game).

What is not saved: Enemy positions, because who cares. They are random spawns anyway, and you aren't going to be going straight back there on load (you go to your crib). Bodies (they disappear after a few seconds anyway). Wanted levels (going into a crib auto-erases all wanted levels, and since you are loading back into the crib, no need to save what they were).

In that game, you can save anywhere at any time (except while doing missions or activities). However, you still load back into your crib. So saving is pretty much just copying the last auto-save really, there isn't much point to it, except to create a slot for that save rather than relying on the auto-save slot.

I was going to use something kinda similar to that, so I wonder how people feel about it. I always thought it was a good solution myself.

 

[Phishfood]

You've clearly never actually tried to write a game-save system.

The current state of any game is represented by a very, very complicated nest of objects each with their own data and linking to each other in complicated ways. In order to save it all, you have to make every object such that all of its data can be accessed. Then you need to send all of that data up through the complicated object structure to a top-level object which can turn it to a serialized game state. Since your object structure isn't a simple branching tree, you need to be able to only save each object once, then recognize when you've already saved an object, and have a way to include that reference as part of another object's data. Then you have to be able to put all of it back together.

But that's only part of the fun: you don't want your save games to become unusable every time the code changes. Meaning that you need to find a way to do all this without tying it too closely to the details of the object structure.

And, no, computers are not "good at organizing information". They need to be told, in excruciating detail, how to organize any information you give them. We've got plenty of general-purpose cases which have already been solved by programmers, so you've never had to worry about it before, but none of those are going to work with the game engine that you just built.

Most of this can be accounted for by planning ahead. Sure, taking an existing game with objects all over and adding a save feature would be terrible. However, if you are starting from scratch it wouldn't be too bad. Assuming that simply dumping the memory associated with states to disk is not an option, there is still plenty to help. Give every object a "saved" boolean. Have an array of pointers to every object. It won't take much memory, then you can just loop through that array or arrays if you want one for npcs, one for physics objects and one for entities like ammo and just dump them to disc in XML. If the code changes you can simply have it ignore variables no-longer needed and automatically generate missing values to defaults. Hell, plenty of games don't transfer saves between versions. Is that really a problem? once a game hits release I wouldn't imagine enough goes on to cause any real issues.

Have a think what you really need to save. IS it vital to save the fact that an npc is 50% of the way through reloading? would anyone notice if you just left him at 0 ammo and had him start reloading again? Maybe I am odd, but when saving a game I generally don't commit the exact state of the game to my memory. I don't generally notice if a body is face up on load while it was face down on save, so long as it hasn't moved across the map or disappeared is perhaps close enough good enough? I know I've seen games where when you load the corpses re-do their ragdoll, this isn't really a problem..

So yeah, creating a save is a problem. It's far from an insurmountable problem, especially when held up to the problems of pathing and AI.