There are a lot of “powers” in video games we all wish we had in real life:
Indestructible hands! Double jump.
A complete lack of social anxiety.
- Are you guys sailors?
- But for my money, the best power would be the ability to save and reload.
Think about it.
Saving is a “power” in just about every video game, so
we don't really think about it all that much. But developers think about it a lot. Save systems aren’t arbitrary
— they’re part of a game’s design, and the way a game saves can affect everything
from the game's difficulty, to its narrative, to the gameplay itself.
[Robo voice] - And you are truly, TRULY sure about this?
To understand this better, it helps to look at how game-saving became a game save... th...ing.
Back in the age of arcades, the hardware required to save a game was costly and complicated
and gigantic, but it’s not like developers wanted to add the feature anyway. Arcade games
were a quarter-based hustle designed to be inconvenient:
Eyyyyyyyy that’s a nice run you got going there…
...be a shame if you ran out of quarters...
But with the advent of personal computers and home consoles, all of that would change.
Now saving a game needed to be convenient above all. The first console game that allowed
players to save their game was The Legend of Zelda, which actually had to include a
battery inside the cartridge to power the solid state memory chip.
The 90s were an explosion of game saving innovations, which soon made the feature standard. This
left developers with an important decision to make: just how many save points should
their game have? Too few might make the game too difficult. But give the player too much freedom to save and, well,
it's a heck of a lot harder to program.
The creators of the original Resident Evil tackled this problem with a creative solution:
they embedded the game’s save system into the narrative, using “typewriters” as
save points. This not only helpfully restricted for them where and when a player was gonna save their game, but it
also made the act of saving into a limited resource by requiring an ink cartridge for every save.
Dead Rising’s infamous toilet-based save system was similarly cruel… not because
it made you save in restrooms, that part was actually pretty funny and frankly narratively appropriate
given the situation.
No, it was cruel because upon death, players were forced to choose whether they wanted
to keep their skills and XP, or their progress in the story - but never both. Unsurprisingly,
that system was flushed out by the third game. (toilet sfx)
For horror games, you can understand how these types of save systems ratchet up the tension
and make survival even more high stakes.
But also, fuck that.
Luckily, not many games have save systems that punishing anymore. Generous auto saving
is practically the norm these days, and even quick saving is even becoming more common. But
a save system that lets you save anytime, anywhere isn’t just more convenient: it also opens up a lot of
possibilities. Literally.
In the tactical stealth game Desperados 3, it’s possible to get by these guards using
a distraction… but it’s also possible to throw a knife from these bushes… and
it’s just as possible to blast 'em with a revolver. Figuring out which is the best
possible option requires a little trial and error, which is why the game really wants
you to just save and reload all the time.
It tells you as much in the tutorial. It reminds you while you’re playing.
And then it shows you how many times you did it at the end of a mission.
- The thing we really want to encourage, like, save as many times as you want... it's
not required that you do like three actions perfectly in a row or something.
- This is Dominik Abé, the creative director for Desperados 3, talking about that power
I wish I had in real life: SAVE SCUMMING.
- Uhhh, I think it has, like, a bad connotation, (laughs) I guess. I see it differently.
But I think it's very depending on the game and the genre.
- Save scumming is the repeated act of saving and reloading a game in order to avoid any… consequences.
Some frown upon this because it can be used as an exploit — especially
in games that involve a lot of random outcomes.
But Desperados 3 was designed to be predictable. It wants players to have all the information
they need, so they can experiment with different strategies. In that way, it’s not
just a stealth game; it’s also a puzzle game where you need to find out the right solution.
And if something doesn’t work? You just hit F8 and seconds later, you’re right back
at the save point you chose.
- [Dominik] Optimizing my micro-loop around a little puzzle, and experimenting with that, I think
was like always, for me, personally, a core fun of those games.
- [Clayton] Those games he’s talking about are his studio's previous title, Shadow Tactics, and the game
both that and Desperados trace their lineage from: Commandos. They’re part of an entire
mini-genre built around the idea that save scumming isn’t an “exploit” – it’s
a feature.
But not all games are built this way.
Way back when The Elder Scrolls 2 was released, the game’s manual implored players not to
abuse the game's save system or else they might miss out on the entertainment of rolling with their
mistakes. And hey, I can get behind that. Rolling with your goofs can lead to some really rewarding
moments. It’s basically the highlight of any good tabletop campaign.
- [Patrick] That's a critical fail! - [Brian] (YELLING IN AGONY)
But save scumming can also let you experience game storylines you might otherwise miss.
If I hadn’t save scummed a series of assassination and marriage proposals in Crusader Kings III,
I would never have been able to take over all of Europe and make war with the Pope.
Just like Elder Scrolls, this is a game about roleplaying, a game where you craft a story of your wins
and your losses... but maybe I just wanted 100% wins, you're not the boss of me, also
I'm the Pope now.
Save scumming gets a bad rap because it’s a way for players to avoid the FULL-LIFE CONSEQUENCES
of their decisions. It’s why there are long running series of games built around the idea
that it’s quote unquote “FUN” to roll with our failures.
XCOM is one of those games, and its famous consequence is permadeath. If you lose a soldier
in the heat of battle, they’re gone for good, along with all the experience you poured
into them. And let me tell you, it’s a HECK of a lot rougher when you’ve named all your soldiers
after cats you know in real life.
Rest in peace Bobo.
So what’s the payoff for all this suffering?
- “That's where a lot of the fun of XCOM comes from, being able to adapt, and the game's
throwing these wrenches in your plans… that's when you really feel like a tactical genius,
is when the game seems like it's doing everything it can to make you lose, but you still come
out the other side victorious.
- [Clayton] Mark Nauta helped design the last two XCOM games, so he knows from experience that getting
players to roll with the punches is easier said than done. This is where Ironman mode
comes in.
- Ironman mode is, basically, there is no manual saving in the campaign at all in XCOM. We just
maintain an auto save of your last actions you did up to the moment.
So everything that I've done wrong, I have to live with forever.”
("forever" echoes... fades away)
BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD
- Obviously, this makes the game a lot harder – but players still have to opt into that
mode. So for the not-ironmans out there, Nauta and company came up with some other ways to gently
nudge players away from save-scumming-not-that-its-gonna-stop-me.
One of those involves random seeds. Remember those shots that have a percent chance of
succeeding but never seem to go your way? By using a random seed to generate the success
or failure in these situations, the result can be “random” but also fixed.
- So if you would just kind of like, “pure save scum”, which was like save right before
I shoot, and then load and keep retrying the shot, the results wouldn't change. Like if you didn't change
ANYTHING tactically, the result would always be the same
- Look, explaining how random seeds and pseudorandom number generators work is a little… beyond…
my… smarts…. But basically, the result of your shot will be randomly calculated according
to the probability shown the first time, and every time after will roll the exact same result.
For players to get a different random result, they need to change something up: flank right instead
of left, or use a different ability. They can still technically save scum, just try
not to be so boring about it.
- Yeah, I think there is an aspect like, if they want to do it, they can, because I think everyone
has that line of unacceptable consequences. I definitely have one.
- [Clayton] Counter to XCOM’s brutal reputation, the series is actually designed to make the sting of loss
a little less biting, so people won’t be so quick to just reload.
For example, the “fatigue” stat introduced in XCOM 2, prevented players from taking the
exact same squad on missions over and over again. So when things did eventually go pear-shaped,
the player still had some veterans in waiting, instead of fielding a bunch of scrubs fresh
out of scrub school.
- We don't want players feeling like they need to go back and redo stuff... I think
the key is in providing things like, that feel like opportunities, even when bad things happen,
to make sure it’s not just always doom and gloom when things roll bad
- [Clayton] Their solution wasn’t Mario Kart-style rubberbanding, as fun as it would be to chuck a blue shell
at a Chryssalid. Instead, the game provided an “emergency” mission, which is kinda
like a double or nothing gambit where you put all your chips on the table.
- And there are these big, scary missions...
but if you win, you know, you kind of get a reset on a lot of the stuff on the map,
like it has a really good positive effect. So, we give you a chance to catch up through these things that
look like we're being really mean but, you know, I like to think that we're being really nice to the player.
- The glorious feeling of defeating one of these missions is something you’d never get if
you always save scummed, but how much save scumming you do in XCOM is ultimately your choice.
Ironman can take away the temptation, but the developers don’t want to force everyone
to play that way. It’s the same reason Resident Evil 2 Remake brought back inkwell
cartridges, but only in an optional “hardcore” mode.
No matter how creative developers get, convenience is still the number one priority of any save
system. And that convenience can also be for the developer who has to make the dang’d thing.
Most save systems are kind of like a checklist of what the player has accomplished. Keeping
track of quest lines, and items and stats is a little more difficult than simply recording
which chapter the player last completed. Autosaving is especially handy because the developer
controls exactly what state the game is in whenever it saves.
A quick save system on the other hand has to capture all that stuff, plus your location,
plus the enemies location, plus the location of any objects you might’ve moved.
And games with large, destructible environments like Teardown — HOO BOY. They have to use
some wild compression algorithms to package their worlds into easily digestible save files.
Not only that, but since Teardown’s game loop is built around trial and error experimentation,
the developer went to great lengths to make sure all that magic math didn’t keep the
quick save from actually being quick.
Save systems are the reason that we can enjoy playing video games at our leisure, dipping in and
out when we feel like it.
And while it’s for the best that we can’t save scum in real life, it’s a fact of life
in video games. So it’s nice to see that developers are really thinking about how to
incorporate it into their design... or,
(ghostly echo) “Everything that I've done wrong, I have to live with forever.”
gently, pushing us to live with everything we’ve ever done wrong.
… Forever.
(subtle low-fi music, at odds with needing to live with everything we've ever done wrong, forever)