a flower in hell on 15/8/2008 at 14:11
In role-playing games I believe heavily in the "save anywhere" mantra. I will accept not being able to save in the middle of a fight, or under certain plot circumstances. The Baldur's Gate games are like this, and it works fine.
I do not like "save points" in RPGs at all, and is one of the many things that turns me off of most jRPGs.
Save points have their place though; for instance, survival horror games. The entertainment value of survival horror relies heavily on tension and building up the fear of your imminent death. If you could just save any old place at any old time as many times as you wanted, you'd lose a lot of that tension.
Resident Evil's very restrictive save system just makes the tension and "OHSHIT" factor even heavier, especially if you happened to drop your ink ribbons in a chest to make more room for puzzle items and oh shit there's a pack of hunters and you've only got 3 shotgun shells left!
Though I like how Silent Hill does it better. You can save as often as you like, but the save points are placed in such a way that they're going to be in places where you really need to save. So every time you get a chance to save you have this feeling that something big and nasty is about to come tear-assing down the hallway to rip your guts out. Really effective at playing with your baser emotions. =P
Yakoob on 15/8/2008 at 18:20
Quote Posted by Taffer36
Having to start missions over from the very beginning is utter piss and commonly the reason I stopped playing wasn't because I tired from the game (because it was a fucking awesome roller coaster ride all the way through) but because I became frustrated by having to replay missions from the beginning.
...
You run up and try something, you die, and so you try again. It forces you to try to vary your tactics each time, yet allows you to be creative because the only penalty is that you have to do it again.
Ummm, contradiction?
Quote Posted by a flower in hell
Save points have their place though; for instance, survival horror games. The entertainment value of survival horror relies heavily on tension and building up the fear of your imminent death. If you could just save any old place at any old time as many times as you wanted, you'd lose a lot of that tension.
System Shock 2 begs to differ :D
Taffer36 on 15/8/2008 at 19:09
No contradiction. My point was that checkpoints make you attempt a situation again at little penalty. In GTA IV the penalty is making you do menial tasks all over again. Say a mission had you drive to a place, then drive to another place, then to another place, and then you get in a gunfight. It doesn't make sense to force you to do menial driving tasks as a penalty for dying in the final gun fight. They should just start you back at the section that you died at.
Basically, even a checkpoint system isn't fullproof as poorly-placed checkpoints can still actually add extra penalty, which is the opposite of good.
Aja on 16/8/2008 at 06:54
System Shock 2 almost got it right. I like the way that it allowed you to respawn without resetting events. But when nanites became so scarce, respawning became a potentially game-ending luxury, and nine times out of ten I ended up reloading. Perhaps a seperate currency for the chambers would've helped -- that way I wouldn't have been so reluctant to use the them.
Also, I think Bioshock's system could've worked really well with just a few small tweaks: a) require each chamber to be activated (maybe for a hefty cash fee, since money's a renewable resource), and b) if the chamber in the player's current area isn't activated, then they get remade back at the beginning instead.
Getting dropped back to Medical in the middle of a Big Daddy fight in the Farmer's Market would be a good way to discourage wrenching everything without the irritation of having to reload. And if you DID activate your chamber after losing a fight, you probably wouldn't have enough money to allow to you to just hack away. Or, maybe every chamber (apart from the beginning) could need to be reactivated for each use. Either way, it would hopefully promote a more careful playstyle, without resorting to the rather outdated and immersion-breaking quicksave/quickload system.
ZymeAddict on 16/8/2008 at 07:33
Quote Posted by Taffer36
In GTA IV the penalty is making you do menial tasks all over again. Say a mission had you drive to a place, then drive to another place, then to another place, and then you get in a gunfight. It doesn't make sense to force you to do menial driving tasks as a penalty for dying in the final gun fight. They should just start you back at the section that you died at.
Ah, shit. That was always the main thing I hated about the GTA series, and they STILL haven't changed that for IV? :mad:
