I wish all games would just let you save whenever you want to! Why is using checkpoints and auto saves so common?
At least add a quit and save option if you want to avoid save scumming.
These days I just want to be able to squeeze in some gaming whenever I can even if it’s just quick sessions. That’s annoyingly hard in games that won’t let you save.
I wonder what the reason for this is?
Game state can be a tricky thing. By saving at certain points you just need to maintain a few things, like player health and inventory and which checkpoint they were at. And it’s only got worse the more things a game has to keep track of.
The solution was used by all last gen and current gen consoles and even the DS and 3DS, which is to suspend the game. This is fine, the Steam Deck can do this too. It’s not perfect. Power loss can lose the data, and some won’t let you play something else while another game is suspended. But for general use over short sessions, it’s alright.
It’s less useful on PC because it probably will crash the game anyway, and normally you’d want to use the PC for other things.
It was tricky when the hard drive space was limited. Now we have basically free SSDs and saving the game is just the nature of serealisation of all the data. You don’t have to write your own solution even, it’s all was figured out decades ago
Sure, but none of it is as simple as just saving what you need to at fixed points, and letting the console handle the suspend function.
Oh, and additionally: what happens when you softlock yourself by saving just as you’re about to die? Is the player to blame? Sure. Will they blame you anyway? You betcha.
You can still have checkpoints and auto saves at intervals. That way you can reload if you save a second before dying or whatever.
Depends on how weird of a bullshit you’re doing and what engine are you using, but sometimes it’s even easier, you just use the readily available module.
As for the second point, you avoid it by giving the user control on when they save, you allow them to save unlimited amount of times, and you do some autosaves here and there. We have this technology since forever, we just never used it on consoles before because hard drives for it were expensive