Poll: Saving game - how, when, where, how often?

No what I implied was that they doesn have to care about players. Not that they shouldn’t.

Hi,

I voted for option 2. But what about a special skill like “Respect” or “Aura”. As long as you do not save the skill will grow. With this skill you can receive some goodies like present from folks or cheaper weapons or special clothes…

There is very little difference. :smile:

If they don’t care about our opinion, they could do very badly.

That is a marginal difference.

This can go both ways. If they will care only for our opinion the game could go very badly too.
I am not necessarily taking about saving.Just in general.

Of course to make a big pile of money the developer might want to do everything the customer wants. But some thing just does not work and customer/player almost always knows nothing about game design (again talking in general).
That is why it is best for developer to have a vision of the game, learn how his vision is recieved and then go by it.
Of course developer should laways use his head and when there is a good idea from the ranks of players and it fits his image he should use it.

Now as far as the saving options goes. I would be much happier if no poll was made and we were presented with system Warhorse came up with.
Because this poll simply solves nothing. Only that optional saving systems are preffered.
But for me I would love if there was just one option how to save (being it either of the three), because then there would be a unity of players. They would all encouter similar (if not the same) problems and they could talk about it, curse it, love it.
But when you present several options, then the players will be divided. The hardcore players will despise the casuals and vice-versa.
Well, it might not be that dramatical, but the fact is that while playing the same game, different people would have different impressions of that game.

And so from this point of view I would preffer more drastical saving system (2nd and 3rd option).

I am not sure that recieving goods/gifts from NPCs would be the best way. Because game strives for a lot of immersion and recieving items in game because you did not load does break that.

But anyway. You character has a stat called Charisma. This stat determines how will the people see you and behave around you.
Charisma is mostly determined by how you look.

The difference is, I never even implied that they should just go for our opinions.

My main point is, try to give the players a good game by not putting in features that will piss off your main base.

It is a known fact that most players hate not being able to save when they want.

Then I’m glad you are not making the game. :smile:

Options are a players happy place.

It is a single player game.

What unity? Divided how?

So, your issue is that different players might have different impressions of the game?

Hate to break it to you, but that will happen no matter what. Also, why is that a problem?

It is not an issue or a problem.
As I said, that is just what I would prefer.
Why? Because of unity, I like unity.

Neither did I, that they should not care about our opinions
So there is no (or little) difference between what I and you said.

Agree to disagree. :slight_smile:

At the end of the day for the sake of the games success something along option 1 is likely necessary, as it will probably appeal to the broadest array of players while still providing options for those who care. Wanting to implement anything else would most likely warrant actual market research (even on a small scale) to see how people find it in practice. [As a first title I think game success is especially critical in terms of design choices to ensure further development]

Concepts like option two could work if you could find the right balance, though it could still be risky.

Though if this kind of option was implemented something like a number of saves, or a time restriction on how often you can manually save or where you can save would work better then something that effects gameplay mechanics directly.

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I think the best approach is to allow save everywhere with the option of a hardcore mode because it allows for more people who have different play styles to enjoy themselves. It works to your benefit to allow more options for players to choose the realism/difficulty for themselves. Limiting the game to hardcore only simply limits the number of people you an sell the game to.

On save everywhere + gamification, it’s a smart idea for encouraging long term playability but personally I would prefer not to see such a mechanic in the game. It would cheapen the experience for me because I want to earn every experience point I get, not just manage log off time for the most efficiency.

Thanks for asking for our opinion and keep up the great work!

I have a real problem with autosave-only. The problem is when you hit a difficulty spike (like a particularly tough fight), possibly preceded by an unskippable cutscene (the horror!). You will almost certainly die several times before you learn how to overcome the obstacle - and that means replaying all the stuff between the last autosave and the start of the actual fight over and over again. I inevitably end up zooming through the same content that I’ve already covered 5 minutes earlier, which is a huge immersion-breaker in any game (not to mention, entirely unrealistic). Please give me the option to save right before a fight and spare me the tedium of replaying lengthy sections of the game over and over.

That said, I do like the gamification option, as it gives you some incentive not to load for every minor sub-optimal outcome. I’m sure not everyone would agree, though - some people get quite obsessive about collecting the maximum amount of XP from everything.

for the love of god please put in saves anywhere. i just wasted 4 hours of gaming because my head got cut of cause i never was trained to use a sword. before that i had to restart the game because it froze and i had to replay 2 hours of gameplay. al because of not beeing able to save anywhere ot not enough autosaves! please implent them ASAP, not going to play much more untill that is in. not wasting time because i have to replay the same part over and over because of silly reasons. I know this is an alpha but that is so not needed…

I think why most people dont want autosaves is because how stupidly they are put in videogames. Sometimes it is realy obvious that creators of the game wanted you to play it as long as possible even tho you could sometimes lose your sanity :D. It´s really irritating when you can save only before some long unskippable cutscene or not right after you beat the boss but instead throwing more enemies at you just to mess with you and only AFTER THAT you are able to save. Autosaves should be put in rationaly RIGHT AFTER the cutscenes or some hard part in the game or even during that part. You mentioned you dont want people to take advantage of being able to save anywhere, anytime so there could be some autosave right after you for example break a lockpick or open a chest. Plus autosaving every 5 minutes or so, so you dont have to replay the game very long after some unexpected crash or something. Only autosaves are good thing if you dont want player to abuse the save system but it should be done pretty often and only then i personally wouldnt mind not being able to save. Unfortunately as you stated you have very complicated system of npc daily chores and saving would take a long time so i dont think if such autosaving system is possible in this game.

No, they shouldn’t. It really depends on what you want to achieve. Nothing aggainst casual game experience without immersion but makret is full of it tight now.

It has nothing to do with being casual. It has everything to do with how far you want to force people to backtrack when they make a mistake, want to change something, or lose power. In the console realm, where hardware limitations often made dynamic saving impossible, the checkpoint was born. There is no reason for a PC title to have the same limitations.

To me, this is exactly how casual the game is. Being able to reload if the player wants to change his actions or decisions and so effectively nullified possible penalties. It’s like when World of Warcraft take away the full lot from PvP.

Operation Flashpoint had checkpoints and one quicksave. Vietcong has 3 saves per mission and that definetly weren’t console games. Perhaps technical limitation is the reason why it is in console games often but there is a really good reason to not let player save anytime in games in general.

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I think we have different definitions of what it means to be casual. As far as immersion goes though, what part of repeating the same difficult section over and over is immersive to you? I find it frustrating. Of course if you like doing that, feel free to do a full ironman run with no saving at all, but don’t force everyone else to.

/agree 100%

In a single player game, there is absolutely no reason to limit saves.

Every player can make his own choice as to how often he wants to save.

Yes, we clearly have a different definition. I don’t think that repeating the same section is immersive (it is frustrating). But I do think that the fear of losing some progress makes it much, much more immersive. Restricting saves makes player risk less and think more and that could be used as game mechanism.

Yes, it could be done trough the difficulty and I have no problem with that as with players using cheats. My only point was that it is not clear fact that is not worthy discussion.

Also - I do not force anyone to anything, just saying my option as you do…

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