On saving your game
So after being recommended it by a friend a long time ago, and being in a zombie mood, I finally rented Dead Rising last night for my Xbox 360, and while it was a lot of fun, I was really distraught to find that the save system is old school. To save, you had to go to a certain place, and press a button. Die before you saved, and all your progress was lost.
Why was this so shocking to me? For one, I've gotten used to the easy breezy, checkpoint saving system of most games nowadays-- hit a point in progress, and your game automatically saves for you, so that if you lose the game for any reason, you can simply load up the last checkpoint and keep going. But the other factor in my save-system shock was all those MMOs I've played. In persistent world online gaming, there is no longer such a thing as "saving" your game.
Is that good or bad?
In the way I play a game, it's great-- I never have to worry about getting back to a save point, or losing my progress, or having to redo content just because I didn't defeat it. If I earn gold, that gold is mine. If I slay a monster, that monster stays slain whether I've saved or not. Having no save system at all is perfect for a persistent world, because everything that actually happens... has actually happened, believe it or not.
Still, there were reasons older games used a save system (and not just the technical requirement of taking time out to write to a disk, although I'm sure that was a factor). A save system challenges you to determine whether it's OK to go on, or if it's time to save. It brings strategy to the game-- what if World of Warcraft required you to be in an inn before you logged out? And it's a form of upping the difficulty-- if you charge the players something to "save" their game, then they'll be forced to make serious decisions about whether or not saving is worth it right now.
Not to mention the player benefits to a saving system-- if you could save outside of an MMO instance, you'd hit save, go in and wipe, and then reload your last game, bringing back your character unharmed and with all of the potions you used.
A constant save state works for most MMOs, but others have figure out how to tweak it a little bit, too-- EVE asks you to "clone" yourself by paying ingame resources, thus "saving" your character in case of death. Other games include a death mechanic, but let you dodge those penalties by planning ahead or relying on the help of other players (and what is saving but planning ahead that you'll lose the game soon?).
After playing MMOs for a while, going back to a game like Dead Rising just completely turned me off-- forcing me to replay content just because I didn't sit on the ingame couch for a minute was extremely frustrating. While there's no reason to save in MMOs (because the server will always know what your character has and doesn't have), insurance and planning ahead always make for interesting game mechanics. It would be fun to see an MMO that incorporated "saving" even more, if only by enabling benefits for those who made an effort to plan ahead in case of emergency.
