If someday I am standing at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter looks down at the sum total of my life and asks, “You played Civilization 2 once for an entire weekend? Like, 32 out of 48 hours? Seriously?” I will answer him, head held high, “Yes, yes I did. And it was totally awesome.”
It is true that in my younger days, I put in many a marathon session of gaming. Entire nights or weekends could blow by as I sat immersed in whatever game was occupying my attention at the time. An entire Christmas vacation could be lost to Final Fantasy VI, or nights that should have been spent writing history papers were spent tracking down Sectoids in X-Com. Even up to my years in college, I still might put off more pressing concerns to stay up until the wee hours of the morning waiting to see what was coming next in Silent Hill or the like.
These days, however, my time is a more precious commodity. I have a full time job, a commute, a home to take care of, and clever articles about video games to attempt to write. Weekends are times for weddings, family affairs, or just for being social.
In short: video games have some pretty stiff competition for my time.
The thing is, I still want to play games like I used to, I just have to be more picky about when. While I may not be able to dedicate eight hours at a time to a gaming session, finding a half-hour here or an hour there is still very possible on a daily basis.
The question then is: why do games make it so difficult to play them in short chunks of time?
On my daily train commute, my DS is my best friend. The majority of DS games conveniently either allow you to save at any point, be it a regular save or a quicksave/suspend feature. This is incredibly important for a portable system, since as they are meant to be used out and about, a player has to be able to stop playing at a moment or two’s notice. In fact, this ability is so important to me that I have actually stopped playing games that lack a quicksave feature due to the sheer inconvenience of it. Fortunately, these are generally few and far between.
When it comes to home consoles, however, designers seem to have made a conscious decision that players are required to play games until the game is damn well ready to let them stop. For some games, this is no big deal; Punch-Out!! saves after every match, and even if you have to abandon the game in the middle of a round, you really haven’t lost much. In other games (JRPGs in particular), the stretches between opportunities to save seem to grow ever longer. Add to that unskippable cutscenes and various other bits of filler, and sometimes the spans between chances to save can stretch beyond an hour.
When these gaps start growing larger and larger, and the amount of time and effort lost if I have to abandon my game for any reason increases, my pleasure with the game is going to conversely decrease. I choose to play games because I enjoy them; I don’t like it when they make me feel like they are dictating the terms under which I can play them.
PC games have always been much better about this than console games, though I could not tell you why this schism exists (I will assume there were technical reasons back in the day). Almost all PC games, much like portable games, allow the player to save anywhere. Half-Life 2 does not try to tell me where and when I can save, and Empire: Total War doesn’t care if I’m in a battle or tooling around on the campaign map – when I’m ready to leave, I can leave, and no progress will be lost.
Consoles, on the other hand, have remained unwilling to offer this flexibility. If it is a concern over difficulty – that allowing the player to save anywhere allows them too much leeway in dealing with challenging sections of the game – then implement a save/suspend feature instead (ala Castlevania on the DS). More importantly, question what exactly forcing players to repeat large sections of a game is accomplishing from a design standpoint other than padding out your playtime. Half-Life 2, as mentioned above, still manages to be a deep and enjoyable experience no matter how much I use the quicksave/quickload feature. If I’m feeling nervous about a jump and choose to save right beforehand, that’s my business. If I have to reload ten times before I get it right, I consider that a much better learning experience than being forced to redo the entire cavern over and over again.
Now, do not misunderstand: I am not advocating shorter games by any stretch. I still love an epic 60-hour RPG experience as much as ever. What I am asking is that, within that 60 hour experience that I, as the player, be given the opportunity to come and go as I please. The average age of gamers is growing older (as so many statistics tell us), and designers need to make sure they keep this in mind. As gamers age, most of us lose the luxury of huge chunks of time to devote to the games we love, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to play them anymore. Give us the ability to set our own schedules, and I think you will find that a lot of us will still happily part with our hard-earned money just us much as we used to. Honestly, I can think of almost no convincing arguments against improved save features in games, and the benefits many of us would get from them are clear.
The choice seems pretty obvious to me.
Tags: castlevania, civilization, empire: total war, final fantasy, half life 2, save systems, silent hill, x-com
July 15th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
The technical reasons for the historical difference were in the mechanisms present to save the games. PC games didn’t have save anywhere features, either, when computers didn’t commonly have large enough hard drives (or any at all) to accommodate large save files. The games that didn’t have complicated codes you had to write down in the cartridge days had batteries and a small amount of RAM in the cartridge to hold the saved game information, and the more RAM in the cartridge, the more expensive it was to produce, so they naturally limited the amount of information they could store in a save slot (and definitely the number of save slots), which in turn limited what could be saved. They’d save the state of the character(s), and possibly a number indicating which save point you saved the game at, and the more save points, the more RAM the cart would need.
When consoles moved to disc-based systems, they moved the memory to cards that were separate from the games, but each system manufacturer had a standard size that made up a slot on that card. People don’t necessarily like buying a memory card for every game, and few people are willing to include memory cards with their games (and the memory cards were still limited in size to a degree), so the console systems were still limited. This is also when the idea that this was some kind of design decision came about, even though there was still a high degree of technical limitation involved.
Now we have hard drives on the consoles, and the current gen consoles (excepting Nintendo, who was also the last to get rid of the carts) also allow the user (to one degree or another) to upgrade the drives if they need more space. Still, the capacity is not something the developers can plan for, and no one knows how much space the average gamer will eventually actually use on these systems, so they still can’t go wild and just dump the complete game state to the drive without playing with the data and/or compressing it to save space. There are fewer reasons for developers to keep making these decisions, but it will take some time for them to really feel any pressure to make it the norm on home consoles.
On the other hand, the hand-held systems more or less build the capability into the system (close the lid on the DS, flick the on/off slider on the PSP), and the game developers have little real choice in the matter. Maybe Sony and Nintendo should work on porting that functionality to the PS3 and Wii (and Microsoft can mimic it on the 360) and simply allow you to hit the system button and save the game state, dump back to the menu, and pick up from the place you left off later. They already let you quit and go back to the menu in this way.
July 15th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Thanks for the excellent look at things from the technical perspective, Vizeroth. The state of the hardware itself was certainly a big factor, as you point out, in the early design decisions that went into where and when a player could save their game.
With the advanced systems we have now, as you mention, it seems more a matter of developers breaking away from their old habits to allow for expanded flexibility in suspending/saving our games. Hopefully this will come sooner rather than later…