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I Just Wanted To Save My Game - Aftermath
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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I understand both sides. Busy people love to save their game at any point in time, as they might get interrupted. But I also understand the point from the devs and I also like it sometimes when I cannot save constantly. Obviously both sides could now be less stubborn. Busy people can just pause the game and resume later to just exit the junction and the devs could implement a quick save feature.
Dear game designers, how about you let the user decide what they like most, a very easy or hard game? Usually with difficulty settings, only damage/health numbers get modified. But you could also enable quick save in easy mode, and disable it in hard mode. Take a look at the difficulty settings of Grounded. Easy to implement and you automatically reach a bigger user base. And while we are at it, busy people sometimes cannot play games for a longer time, let’s say 4 weeks. After 4 weeks I have forgotten all the controls and game mechanics again. TV shows play a recap if a new season comes out. You should do the same. A super short introduction of what happened story wise and how the controls and game mechanics are working.
There are definitely technical reasons why saving mid-run is a lot more complicated. With Pacific Drive, right now when you save, it'll save:
It makes for a fairly simple, small save file. Being able to save mid-run would add a lot of complexity because it'd need to save a complete map state, including:
And so on. Not only does it massively increase the complexity, it would also increase the size of save files a lot and make saving and loading a lot more cumbersome. And that's just a simplified breakdown; there are definitely other factors that can make it much, much more complicated.
There are definitely some games where "easy mode" save systems could be implemented without much changing on a technical level, but I don't think Pacific Drive is one of them.
Makes a lot of sense, though I'd say that implementing a "save on exit, delete upon resuming" should be a higher priority than it usually is in games that like to restrict saving. Having to stop and do something else might mean a lot of wasted time, and I think that not being able to drop an anchor point to come back to would be a possible dealbreaker for some and really hamper enjoyment of the game for others.
There have been a good few games where I wanted to play them, but didn't because I wasn't sure I had the time to make real progress, or that I'd make real progress, but have to stop just before a save point, and lose it all. It can mean that an otherwise great game gets left on the shelf in favor or something that better respects my time.
Difficult but very doable. I mean this is a solved problem and there are many solutions, very much a huge blunder to not do that from the start.