Theory

[zinger]

What first person shooters handle saving and loading well?

The thing that's always bothered me about FPS games, at least subconciously when I was younger, is how saving your game (progress) works for most of the time. Although Unreal and Half Life were very ambitious games in many ways, the quick saving / loading efficiently killed them (you end up not taking anything in the game seriously). Hell, thinking about it, any action game that lets you save anywhere does a grave mistake! Am I wrong?

Judging by the three or so missions I've played so far, this applies to Deus Ex as well, although it's more justified than in most games: the missions are huge (restarting when you're half-way through them because you accidentally fell from a ladder or stepped on your own proximity mine would be too frustrating) and very complex (auto save during missions wouldn't work). But still, it takes away a lot of the excitement.

Again then, what games handle this issue well? Or, if you like, what FPS games are worth playing?

[Jedah]

No matter how well the save system is designed, the repeat of a difficult section is always annoying. The thing is to find a balance so the player cares about the life of the character + dying in a tough spot won't kill his interest about the game. The first Halo achieves a very well made saving system, Black also has well placed save points and... I can't recall anything else. PC games use save states so no matter how well placed the save points are, quick saving deletes any challenge or tactical play from the equation.

Deus Ex is not a shooting game. It has weapons but the very essence is not about blasting all things up.

Recommended titles:

Xbox / 360: Halo series
PC: Half Life I & II, Doom, Quake I & II, Duke Nukem 3D, Halo, Serious Sam
PS2: Black, TimeSplitters

[zinger]

The first Halo achieves a very well made saving system

Interesting. Did this survive the PC conversion?

Deus Ex is not a shooting game. It has weapons but the very essence is not about blasting all things up.

That's true. Still, just as with games with emphasis on gun power and slaughter -- sneaking, sniping and infiltration loses a lot of its tension with a system that allows for unrestricted saving and loading. Compare Golden Eye.

[Udderdude]

From my experience, any FPS that lets you record demos won't let you save/load while recording one, so if you want to play it without dying (and have proof of it, too) you can always record a demo.

[zinger]

Did you even read the first post?

[Qpo]

Hell, thinking about it, any action game that lets you save anywhere does a grave mistake! Am I wrong?

You're completely right.

The further you are from your last save point the higher the sense of danger, something which often happily coincides with where the toughest obstacles are. Save points work basically the same way as "tulle" (Swedish for the place where you are safe in a game of tag), and just like the fast kids will enjoy distance to it, and the slow ones will cling to it, the skilled players will enjoy distance to saves in games.

I think free saving stems from the same unforgivable root as grinding: lack of design effort. In the grinding case it's "Is this boss too hard? Whatever, we don't need to balance that, just let them grind up their stats, and they'll eventually be able to beat it", and in the case of free saving it's "Is getting from here to there too hard? What about from here to there? How should we segment this level? Where should we have saves, if any? Is this part too hard? FUCK IT JUST LET THEM SAVE EVERYWHERE!".

You can of course choose to never save, but as you're probably going to die many times you might be forced to, just like Jedah said, repeat difficult sections which in some cases is annoying. In other cases it is pleasurable. When is it annoying? When the game is bad. When is it pleasurable? When the game is good. Can we draw the conclusion that the better a game is the less we want to save while playing it? With the exceptions of the "load once" type of saves needed for games played over multiple sessions and the checkpoint type saves, like the saves between levels which the game's difficulty might be balanced around, I think yes, since loading is a method to avoid part of a game. Just compare your need for saves in a JRPG, how you wish to find one around every corner, with how little you care about them in an intense FPS that you're completely immersed in. So what if I die and have to start over? I'll just kill 'em all once more.

Yet I find myself ruining games by over-saving when this is possible. Why? Because saving is a very powerful tool (it's fucking time travel which you can use post-mortem!) and I'm not playing games to get a powerful weapon in my inventory and then not use it. If I get a powerful fucking weapon, I'm going to fucking use it. If I have limited ammunition I'll save it for when it is needed, but if I have infinite ammunition of the most powerful weapon in the game, how can it not get boring? Of course I'll start to depend on it. I might be able to refrain from it for a while, but since it is always there, looming over me, as soon as the going gets tough I'll be tempted to pull it out (weak like a pampered child whose mother is never further than a cry away). In the case I don't use it, it'll still take energy to resist my urges to use it (don't underestimate how taxing this can be, just think of Frodo), and the reason I am playing games in the first place is to satisfy my urges. It would be better then if this powerful tool wasn't in my possession, so that I could give it my all without a trace of hesitation instead of having to stop playing due to over-heating from the friction that is created from the two forces pushing in different directions.

Again then, what games handle this issue well? Or, if you like, what FPS games are worth playing?

Unreal Tournament.

[Halzebier]

I think free saving stems from the same unforgivable root as grinding: lack of design effort.

Add life bars to that list, at least in regard to some genres.

As for save systems, I hope that in the future more game developers will have the guts to adopt a Roguelike system (i.e., saved games can only be used to interrupt and later resume a session). In fact, that's one of the reasons I rather enjoyed Heavy Rain.

With online connectivity becoming the norm, the Roguelike approach is more feasible than ever: If one's saved game is on a server, there is no way to cheat by hunting down and copying the saved game file on one's hard disk.

(I still remember being grumpy at a friend who "completed" NetHack that way and only cared to mention this unimportant little fact after bragging about his skills for a week. "I only reloaded twice.", my ass.)

In regard to FPS games, I can only second zinger's own example, GoldenEye.

[Qpo]

I feel like an idiot.

zinger, the reason why I didn't quote the to this thread relevant parts from your Knytt Stories review instead of saying the same things in my own words was because I didn't remember it at the time. Now that I read it again and was reminded that you were the one who wrote it I feel like a moron and want to apologize. If it wasn't written by you it might still have been appropriate to quote from it, but now that it was you I feel like double the fool. Regardless of if I had thought the same thoughts parallel to you or not, the review was published at the time I made my post, and I had read it, so to not even mention it just seems wrong, and since it was right in front of you I must've seemed like the worst kind of pretender; the kind that doesn't stop even when exposed. In short: I am sorry if it seemed like I was pretending your review didn't exist.

[ray]

Left 4 Dead has no saving at all.

[Qpo]

Left 4 Dead has plenty of saving, safe house = save house, there's plenty of checkpoints.

And if you're not good enough, it's game over (back to the beginning of the game, or to an appropriately placed checkpoint, depending on the game's structure).

[...] and the checkpoint type saves, like the saves between levels which the game's difficulty might be balanced around [...]

The checkpoint system is composed of auto-save points placed by the designer and auto-load triggered by your lack of skill.

There are other ways to segment ("create mini-levels") besides checkpoints. A platform that is big, or well placed, can also serve as a safety net (if you fall down between platform 27 and 28 you will land on platform 21 instead of the ground). I can't come up with, or remember, any equally elegant solutions for first person shooters though, and how they are implemented isn't as important as where they are placed, good examples of the latter being what this thread is about.

[ray]

You're right. I was thinking that the campaign ended in a loss when all the survivors died (no excuse for that one, it's happened to me before).

The Hitman series (third person shooters), aside from saving between missions, lets you save at any time during a mission, but rations them based on the difficulty level, with none allowed on the hardest difficulty. It's too generous on the low end (six or seven saves), but gets better on a harder setting with only a few saves allowed during a mission that may have more than a few tricky parts.

Interesting. Did this survive the PC conversion?

Yes.

[zinger]

I think free saving stems from the same unforgivable root as grinding: lack of design effort.

Add life bars to that list, at least in regard to some genres.

As far as I know there's nothing wrong about life bars, unless the designer starts to be careless about the design of his obstacles because of it. Like, for instance, not bothering to properly adjust enemy attacks that are impossible to get through without taking damage. But many of the best action games feature life bars in some form or another (all games with a limited life stock and instant respawn) to give at least a little room for error. So it might be more correct to say that a lot of bad design stems from lifebars, since amateur developers haven't realized that they have to design the obstacles according to it.

But many good games use life bars, this "room for error", to heighten their complexity, something which I guess just isn't possible to do with mechanisms such as quick saving or JRPG "grinding", so there are not many parallells to be drawn here. In Alien Soldier for instance, a central component is constantly trying to build your health back to full power, by evading enemy attacks and blocking enemy bullets (which will turn them in to HP), in order to perform a stronger attack. Another important aspect is that different enemy attacks deal different amounts of damage, which is awesome as long as they are properly balanced, which they are, to heighten the tension when performing dangerous but "lucrative" techniques.

I guess you could even view the Tetris or Puyo Puyo boards as life bars that you have to properly utilize to your advantage, and they provide an exciting "risk against reward" dynamic. Another example is Battle Bakraid in which suiciding (basically sacrificing a portion of your life bar) will prolong the time you have to "connect" enemy kills into chains (for score). The most interesting and above all best chain score system I've ever encountered in a shooter.

Some of the most beautiful nuances in Unreal Tournament also wouldn't be possible without a health bar (the balance of risk and reward in using the shock rifle's combo attack for instance, which demands tremendous skill to pull off in a heated battle, but compensates by dealing massive damage, would be completely eliminated). Hell there'd be almost no need for all of those interesting weapons that it features as it is, and an infinite amount of other cool things that the game has. Same thing with unit types in strategy games. Or even the number of units, a very concrete and detailed representation of your power.

I need to think about this a lot more, but in most games I can think of, the power of your avatar or the units at your disposal is central to consider when making strategical decisions. Is that a bad thing? If not, what genres are you referring to?

This is off-topic though. I was just looking for solid single-player FPS games.

[icycalm]

It's no longer off-topic. I've changed the thread title to that of my forthcoming essay on the subject (the original thread title, for latecomers to this discussion, was "First person shooters and saved games").

[Qpo]

A health bar isn't the same thing as a player's health, there can be other ways for a player to tell his health. An elegant example is Mario's size-difference, but anything is possible; lightning could strike when he reach 5 health, frogs could croak at 4 health, etc. If you say "when your health bar is depleted you die" it makes perfect sense, it's another way of saying "when you are out of health you die", so sometimes this error doesn't cause any confusion, i.e. is harmless. But if you say "the health bar is too big" it can mean at least three things: 1) you have too much health (the game is too easy) 2) the bar itself takes up too much space on the screen (the HUD is annoying) 3) both at the same time. The same is true for lives and life bars. I know that "life bar" and "health bar" are used interchangeably, I think it's bad practice. A mana bar shows mana, a stamina bar shows stamina, 10 health isn't the same as 10 lives, so a bar showing health shouldn't be called life bar.

An example is Project Reality where only medics get health bars, and they only get it on their team mates, and only when they are close and holding their first aid kits (the healing weapon). When guessing their own health the only help they get, like everyone else, is annoying coughing sounds and blurred vision when it's really low.

I screamed for a medic as I had no idea how much life bar I had left. No medic could reach and heal me, but one was close enough to get a life bar, he said "you're fine", but then added that our team only had 6 lives left.

I screamed for a medic as I had no idea how much health I had left. No medic could reach and heal me, but one was close enough to get a health bar, he said "you're fine", but then added that our team only had 6 lives left.

So I'm going to change life bar to what I think is meant in the following quotes, everything edited is in bold, correct me if I'm wrong somewhere. I'm going to call health beyond the first point (without which you would start dead) "extra health" for consistency with "extra lives". It sounds a bit awkward, but maybe it's just like a new shoe that needs to be worn in.

Add extra health to that list, at least in regard to some genres.

As far as I know there's nothing wrong about extra health, unless the designer starts to be careless about the design of his obstacles because of it. Like, for instance, not bothering to properly adjust enemy attacks that are impossible to get through without taking damage. But many of the best action games feature extra health and/or lives (all games with a limited life stock and instant respawn) to give at least a little room for error. So it might be more correct to say that a lot of bad design stems from extra health, since amateur developers haven't realized that they have to design the obstacles according to it.

But many good games use extra health, this "room for error", to heighten their complexity, something which I guess just isn't possible to do with mechanisms such as quick saving or JRPG "grinding", so there are not many parallells to be drawn here. In Alien Soldier for instance, a central component is constantly trying to build your health back to full power, by evading enemy attacks and blocking enemy bullets (which will turn them in to HP), in order to perform a stronger attack. Another important aspect is that different enemy attacks deal different amounts of damage, which is awesome as long as they are properly balanced, which they are, to heighten the tension when performing dangerous but "lucrative" techniques.

I guess you could even view the Tetris or Puyo Puyo boards as health that you have to properly utilize to your advantage, and they provide an exciting "risk against reward" dynamic. Another example is Battle Bakraid in which suiciding (basically sacrificing a portion of your health) will prolong the time you have to "connect" enemy kills into chains (for score). The most interesting and above all best chain score system I've ever encountered in a shooter.

Some of the most beautiful nuances in Unreal Tournament also wouldn't be possible without extra health (the balance of risk and reward in using the shock rifle's combo attack for instance, which demands tremendous skill to pull off in a heated battle, but compensates by dealing massive damage, would be completely eliminated). Hell there'd be almost no need for all of those interesting weapons that it features as it is, and an infinite amount of other cool things that the game has. Same thing with unit types in strategy games. Or even the number of units, a very concrete and detailed representation of your power.

I need to think about this a lot more, but in most games I can think of, the power of your avatar or the units at your disposal is central to consider when making strategical decisions. Is that a bad thing? If not, what genres are you referring to?

This is off-topic though. I was just looking for solid single-player FPS games.

I've never seen a highly varied weaponry work well with one hit kills. The InstaGib mode in UT for example, which works well, replaces all normal weapons with an overcharged Shock Rifle that kills in one shot. In GoldenEye the "License to Kill" mode is the most fun with pistols, which basically are all the same. It's the least fun with explosive weapons, with which a lot of spawns could be blocked simultaneously. With the standard amount of health you just lose some as you spawn, no big deal, but with a single health it means you often die as you respawn, and then often respawn in another explosion, etc. All players respawning and dying multiple times all at once isn't unheard of, lol. As you remove a variable from the weapon balance equation all weapons that excel in that aspect, and have weaknesses to balance those strengths, will become garbage. In the single health case high damage becomes useless (Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher, etc.), and weak but fast and easy to hit (Plasma Rifle secondary fire lol) will reign supreme. As the weapon balance changes so does the map balance, as the previously most powerful weapons are in the hardest to reach positions and now there is barely any incentive to try and reach them. Change one thing and you change everything. To summarize: Weapon variety and player health is intimately related in FPSes, as extra health adds the variable of damage to the equation of weapon balance. (To make the health example generally applicable on all genres, replace "weapons" with "damage sources". Area of effect could be "how big an enemy is", projectile speed "how fast the enemy moves", or whatever other attributes they might have.)

So extra health gives potential for meaningful complexity since it adds a variable to the equation. The scenario of having 100 health however doesn't contain the scenario of 2 health, it isn't necessarily more complex, just because the number is higher; if all damage sources dealt 50 or 100 damage in the former case and 1 or 2 in the latter they would be the same scenario. (From a balancing point of view all numbers should be kept as low as possible, anything else is posturing, which leads to self-confusion, in this case bad design, and ultimately stupidity.)

An example of good extra health: When it allows for the deep satisfaction of landing a one hit kill headshot (which is impossible without the risk for that lingering feeling of self-disgust that comes from killing someone without a headshot), when it's used to increases the distance between the skilled and unskilled players, when it's used to create meaningful complexity.

An example of bad extra health (i.e. too much): When it reduces the power of headshots by being so plentiful that it takes five minutes of constant firing (and maybe reloading) to kill someone during which anyone will manage to deal some damage in return, when the distance to defeat is increased, when it turns aiming into decadent point boxing, when it trades quality for quantity, excitement for mere duration, when it's used to decrease the distance between the skilled and unskilled, when it's used to destroy meaningful complexity.

The good purpose for adding health then is to allow different damage sources to kill things in different amounts of hits, to make them more varied and interesting, more complex, to allow for more ways to win and lose, to allow for more dangers, to create danger. The bad purpose is to add room for error, to reduce danger. It's the same with saves, which add safety where there otherwise would be danger, which if placed everywhere eliminates all of it (See: Braid). It's the same with allowing the player to power up his avatar indefinitely, i.e. grind, which makes all monsters in the world less dangerous. It's true for gold, ammunition, units, space in your inventory, space on the playing field. It's the same with every line of code and every variable that goes into the game.

I said it was a bad thing to add health, or time, or lives, etc., to give room for error, but this isn't always true. The reason some games manage to be great even if you're not always in a life or death moment is because that moment is so scorching hot that we can feel it from a great distance, and we might need to start from a distance, where it's cold, to better appreciate it's heat. The life and death moments of these games are so immersive, so intense, so pure, that we can afford ourselves to stretch them out a bit, to get to experience them longer, to get more. Stretch the moment out too much however, and you'll spoil it.

[Halzebier]

So it might be more correct to say that a lot of bad design stems from lifebars, since amateur developers haven't realized that they have to design the obstacles according to it.

Well put. My statement was too vague and sweeping. I apologize.

I need to think about this a lot more, but in most games I can think of, the power of your avatar or the units at your disposal is central to consider when making strategical decisions. Is that a bad thing? If not, what genres are you referring to?

No, it's not. When I mentioned life bars with distaste I was thinking of run’n’guns such as Turrican 2 (Amiga) and shmups such as Xenon 2 (Amiga). I like both games but I do not care for their life bars which drain as long as one is in contact with enemies or enemy fire. As far as I remember both games have situations where it it impossible to avoid being hit. But I do not want to repeat my mistake and condemn life bars or even this type of implementation in general.

On the topic of saving (and FPS games): In Doom 2 saving is problematic not only for the reasons discussed above but also because it's possible to carry over weapons and ammunition from stage to stage. Doom 2's stages are all balanced to be playable starting with the pistol and 50 bullets. However, if one plays through the game from the beginning (saving as necessary), one eventually acquires a great store of spare ammunition which can be used to easily overcome many otherwise challenging situations. I suppose balancing the placement of ammo crates over 30+ consecutive levels is an almost impossible task (at least without employing 'resets', e.g. capturing and disarming the main character).

I had a lot more fun with Doom 2 when I started playing individual stages and recording runs: no saving, limited starting ammo and a time limit (because my PC would crash when the recording got too long).

[zinger]

Yeah, I know what you mean Halzebier. A lot of european action games from the 90's suffer from that problem with life bars.

A health bar isn't the same thing as a players health, there can be other ways for a player to tell his health. An elegant example is Mario's size-difference, but anything is possible; lightning could strike when he reach 5 health, frogs could croak at 4 health, etc. If you say "when your health bar is depleted you die" it makes perfect sense, it's another way of saying "when you are out of health you die", so sometimes this error doesn't cause any confusion, i.e. is harmless. But if you say "the health bar is too big" it can mean at least three things: 1) you have too much health (the game is too easy) 2) the bar itself takes up too much space on the screen (the HUD is annoying) 3) both at the same time. The same is true for lives and life bars. I know that "life bar" and "health bar" are used interchangeably, I think it's bad practice. A mana bar shows mana, a stamina bar shows stamina, 10 health isn't the same as 10 lives, so a bar showing health shouldn't be called life bar.

This is just a name convention tied up with how many video games work, how they're structured: that we can first endure a couple of hits until our "health bar" is depleted, which causes us to lose a "life" (and are then usually sent back to a check point). You might as well call the "lives" in Super Mario Bros. large portions of the "health bar", and according to Super Mario Bros. rules, losing one of these portions will send you back to the beginning of the stage. When you've lost the entire "health bar", "life bar", "still playing bar" or whatever, it's game over. This point of view allows us to take a step back and take a wider perspective, which is what I was getting at with my post.

Health, lives etc. in whatever form are just resources for you to use in order to keep playing. The graphical represention is only trivial (no graphical representation is even needed!). My definition extends way beyond anything we normally would point to as "health" or "life", as I tried to demonstrate with my Tetris example. I am saying that the status of your actual "health bar" in Unreal Tournament is basically inseparable from the status of your strategical position on the map. Or, the "strategical condition" of your army in Chess. And measurement of all the related factors would give us index of whether you you are closer to winning or to losing. The actual health points (0-199) in Unreal Tournament is just one of the factors, and what you choose to call this indicator, or how you choose to represent it graphically, can vary widely.

This, by the way, also means that "room for error" is not a room for "error" at all, as long as you use the resources (be it health or space on a map) in a way that's more efficient than your adversaries do. For example, in an Unreal Tournament death match, your goal is to reach a certain number of frags before anyone else does (or have more frags than the other players after a certain amount of time). Let's say you see a chance of scoring a Monster Kill, but there's a grenade in your path that you would have to be hit by in order to score those frags, would taking that hit then be to commit an error? In Unreal Tournament, even suiciding can be a favourable strategy, if you take enough of your enemies with you. And who gives a shi- about your health bar or your life as long as you can prevent the enemy from escaping with your flag in a CTF game?

Does this make sense? I'm a bit perplexed myself, but perhaps I've at least hinted at the complexity of the issue?

[icycalm]

Qpo this is your last warning. If you do not know how to use semi-colons, DO NOT FUCKING USE THEM YOU IMBECILE.

[Qpo]

I realize now that you started to talk about resources in general already in the second paragraph in the post I quoted and edited. The reason why I stayed with the health resource so long was partially because I wanted to follow your lead (which turned out to be an hallucination on my part), and partially because it's the best example since it's often the most valuable resource (or at least one of them).

Now that we are talking about "resources" directly however, and not talking about them using health as an example, let's try to define them. (I'll still use Unreal Tournament 1v1 Deatmatch to pick examples.) Resources: a subgroup of your avatars stats, they are the limited supply stats that we "invest" and "trade" for other resources in our quest to reach the target amount of the ultimate resource "progress" (which is "closing in on the win condition"). You could invest some health (let yourself be hit by a rocket) for a return of "more position" (a better position) which allows you to trade ammunition for the "damage dealt to your opponent" resource at a better exchange rate (more efficiently, missing less). The "damage dealt" resource in this example is very valuable because it is directly traded for frags, the score, which together with the time resource decide the winner in a death match. ("Damage dealt" is obviously the opponent's loss of health and not something you gain yourself, but as versus games like this are zero sum games they amount to the same thing, which is putting you ahead of him.)

As we start from frags and time and work our way down the hierarchy we first see health (without which you are dead and he gets a frag), then position (which is spent to get more resources, including health) and then weapons and ammunition (which can become "damage dealt", which can become frags). We can try to rank all resources like this but it quickly gets very complex, and even when we are just one step away from frags and time it already is, as all trades have risk (missing the shot when trading ammo for "damage dealt", etc.), and the value of resources are relative to what positions you and your opponent have (if he is close then flak cannon is better than sniper rifle and vice versa) and what time it is, as whoever is behind in score has to play increasingly more aggressive, care less about health and more about dealing damage, as time runs short. (It's the same in football, hockey, all "gather score until the time is out" games.)

Aren't we creating something out of nothing here though? What are we trading for position, that we need for all other resources, in the first place? Something that isn't unlimited in games with fuel, but here is. We have an unlimited supply of weak trusts (weak acceleration) which we use to walk around, we have a stronger thrust in the dodge and a vertical thrust in the jump. These "unlimited supply resources" must be exempt from my earlier definition then, but it's impossible to separate them from the rest since they are so deeply intertwined. In every trade between resources where you're not standing still you are using movement speed, which you have gained directly from thrust, and this effects the outcome. If you strafe (run sideways) in the same direction the opponent is running when you have him in your cross hairs to make aiming easier, you're using it. If you're moving when someone is shooting at you to avoid getting hit, you're using it. If you have unlimited supply of a resource you will try to always pay with it. (And risk turning into an inverse cripple if it's powerful enough, and a bored self-loathing inverse cripple if using it is boring and makes you feel pathetic.)

But this isn't nearly enough, we also have to consider that each and every human player has different "stats" which changes the success rate of trades. Some are better with the shock rifle than the rocket launcher, some are better at defense than offense, etc., and since resources are more valuable the better someone can make use of them this is a huge factor. Even if a player isn't great with the shock rifle he might prefer to use it, which will affect his decisions, so we will have to account for his taste (or lack thereof) regardless. A player might try to disrupt the other's focus, to "stun" his whole "chain of resource trades", by doing trades that normally are inefficient (maybe even stupid) that he knows his opponent finds annoying (this knowledge is another resource). We first have to consider both the players' stats individually (how good someone is at "investing thrust" dramatically changes their whole "economy") and then relative to one another ("Am I fast enough to get to the shield belt before him from this position?") and then their previous interactions, since if they have met before whoever lost is going to (unless he's retarded or the winner has changed his nickname (his alias, which also is a resource)) remember how, which makes that "first choice strategy" of the winner less efficient since it's expected. (Even outside the battlefield they might be able to tell something about the other's characteristics, his stats.) Everything changes with knowledge. This goes for everything from current health to current position to weapon preferences to bowel movements to if a pet hamster has recently passed away. The knowledge of the opponent's resources are also resources. Great, now we just fucking doubled them, and this in turn means that your knowledge of his knowledge of your resources are also, you guessed it, resources. I could go on, and when we play, we do. Good games are complex as fuck.

If we want to understand how to best manage all these resources and how to most effectively use them to get ahead in frags within the time limit, then analyzing from a distance just isn't going to cut it. For someone to make sense of all of this, to have any idea about what trades to make, how to make them, when to make them, and to understand how the value of the resources fluctuates he has to get in there and play the fuck out of the game. His (hopefully) complex brain will then subconsciously (conscious efforts are only like a short sprint in a long marathon) gather and process a gigantic mountain of data, and when he has gathered and processed enough of it he will be rewarded with intuition, which will guide him. This takes years. Not the kind of "years" that World of Warcraft playtime is measured in (where mere online time counts, mere sitting around chatting, mere chatter), but years of being pushed to your utmost limit, years of blood, sweat and tears, years of ruthless battle. These games, and the opponents you find in them, doesn't give back more than they are given, so it's all on you. It's impossible to understand from the outside, it's too complex. All that can be seen from the outside is "lol big guns pew pew" and "omg this makes me so dizzy". To understand anything we have to get our feet wet, we have to step into the water, we have to play.

Luckily both of us have played enough Unreal Tournament, or Quake (which I feel obligated to mention), or other games like them, to have a general idea (I'm far from an expert) of how it all works, which allows us to use it as example. I'll now take another step backwards to get a wider perspective and compare some of its more important mechanics with another genre (where I'm no expert either). In 2D fighters you get the knowledge of your opponent's current position and health for free, you always have them right there on your screen. Is this a good or a bad thing? Somehow fog of war (which is what you're forced to implement if the player's camera shows the whole battlefield but you don't want him to see everything) and no health bars in a 2D fighters sounds incredibly shitty. If you only can see a short distance ahead of yourself you'll probably slowly walk forward until you make contact, as a tactic might be to stand still and punch in the air in hope of the opponent walking into your fist, so the pace of the game would be greatly reduced. Pre-fire in 2D fighters sounds boring. What about health then? If the players doesn't know their own and their opponent's health they wont know who is ahead in score as the timer runs out, so both might think they are winning, which might lead to both of them just standing at a safe distance from each other until the timer runs out (lol). There might be a little hint of charm in that situation, it's sort of a chicken race and whoever is the better at keeping track of the health will win, but really, it mostly just sounds boring. I mean what the fuck, imagine an intense battle in a final at a grand tournament that ends like that? What an anti-climax! This does take guts and skill, but is this really what anyone wants 2D fighters to be about? If it's not, then let's keep the health bars.

So what do we want them, and other games, to be about? What is the ultimate goal of all mechanics? The whole point of the timer, winning on points and showing the players the score in the first place is to force whoever is behind in score to be aggressive, to make something happen, to create action, to create excitement, to create immersion. It's there for the same reason that you can't back infinitely, it's there for the same reason that there's no healing (or very limited?) in 2D fighters, it's there to force the players to go towards danger (their opponent) to win, not away from it. One might argue that whoever is ahead in points deserves to win since he must have been more aggressive so far since he has dealt more damage, and one would be right, but in the end he will still win by running away. The closer they get to the timer running out, the closer they get to the scorching hot moment of victory or defeat, the more of a little bitch the leading player is forced to become if he wants to maximize his chances of winning. Winning on points isn't worthy of being more than a secondary win condition that forces action towards the primary win condition. What is this win condition then? What is the road to victory that one can be proud of then? What is a glorious victory? A glorious victory is to head straight into danger and conquer it, not poking it with a stick and then running away screaming "lololol I won I won!!!". A real victory is the complete defeat of your opponent, a real victory is attacking until there is nothing left to attack.

Different games and different win conditions require different "trades" that require different "player resources", human qualities, nuances of strength, from the player. I'll go back to the example of UT, and it's a mighty fine example. Its trade system, its economics, its complex mechanics are beautiful and demanding (two not completely unrelated qualities) and gives great gifts in return, though you're never given more in return than you yourself give. A player must be intelligent to understand its complexity, tough to endure its blows, sensitive to understand its nuances, and hone many other qualities to be able to fulfill its demands, to understand how to trade, how to play. But there is one quality that, like in many other games, isn't demand of you. It can tolerate some of it, but too much is a serious problem. It's harshly rebuked when you're shown a road to victory by avoiding danger, by winning on points, by running away, a road to victory that doesn't need you to be brave. Every time you cling to safety by hiding behind your frags as the timer runs out, every time you grind levels instead of venturing onward, every time you set up a safety net by placing a quick save, you become less brave. Every time a game gives you more resources than you need, every time a game gives you room for error, every second you spend in safety that distances you from danger, you become less brave.

So what does one have to do to stay brave when given too much resources? One must throw away everything that isn't needed! And when one has become stronger and braver still? Throw away even more! The reason why regular games are better than sandbox games, and why games that doesn't let us save are better than those that do, is that we are given less things that must be thrown away to start having fun. In a sandbox game you're given so much resources that you're expected to create your own challenge, they are a half-step between games and editors, and in games where you're allowed to save freely you're supposed to create your own mini-levels, but there is no sense of danger in this! Neither is there in grinding until the boss has become suitably easy! Climbing over a hurdle that oneself has created might be challenging, but it can never compare to the real thing. It might be good practice, it might be fun for a while, but to let fighting tame monsters replace fighting wild monsters, and to insist that they are the same thing, one must be a coward.

I will never be seduced by a game that wants me to run from danger. I will never fall for a game that asks me to seek safety. I will only give my heart to a game that not only tolerates, but embraces and demands me to grow more of my finest quality. I will only love a game where the value of bravery doesn't fluctuate.

[icycalm]

So what do we want them, and other games, to be about? What is the ultimate goal of all mechanics? The whole point of the timer, winning on points and showing the players the score in the first place is to force whoever is behind in score to be aggressive, to make something happen, to create action, to create excitement, to create immersion.

Man, what a fucking idiotic train of thought this is. Easily impressionable morons who cling on someone else's buzzword and think that inserting it everywhere will make them look smart. And I barely even skimmed your post.

I've had enough of you, dude. Goodbye.

[icycalm]

Someone who is not stupid please read his vomit and tell me whether there's anything there relevant to this discussion, because I'll be throwing it in the casual forum.

[JoshF]

There's nothing about saving, just simple points about resources made unnecessarily convoluted and wrong.

[Qpo]

I use level to mean "from one save to the next", or, in games where there's extra lives instead of saving, "from one checkpoint to the next". I use checkpoint to mean "where you get to start over from when you've run out of health and trade a life into a full new health bar", so one way to put it is that a game with saving and loading is really just a game with unlimited extra lives. And I use segment as "from one point in the game to another", so levels are segments, but we can also view any part of the game as its own segment, with the smallest possible being a single frame and the biggest possible being the whole game.

http://videospel.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=283#p283

3) And, of course, the game-breaker: quick-saving anywhere. Instead they should've had saves only at campfires and other such locations, and it'd be sweet if you could only save by resting, so that you'd come to a campfire where some dudes are chilling and be like "yo can I rest for a bit here while you keep watch?" and they'd always go "yeah, no probs bro" — but some might kill you in your sleep (there should be hints as to what type of person you've met, so that with experience one could tell the difference). Maybe any location safe to rest at could be used as save, where you could attempt a save anywhere but it'd be like trying to rest in Baldur's Gate in that you might get jumped. This would at the very least effectively remove saving in combat, which is always shit.

As far as I played was quite linear so it just felt like the checkpoints/save-points were missing. You did have side-missions, but those could easily be made into side-levels by having a save as you start it and one as you complete it — or, that's how it'd naturally play out if the place you got the mission at doubled as a save-point.

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=21877#p21877

Shitty design though to have quick-saving, why won't they just copy JRPGs and do something along the lines of "save only at inns"? All you'd need to design difficulty-wise is "how hard is it to get from this save to that save?", and it'd give some real weight to the wilderness.

The more I think about it the better it sounds. Routes between safe points (= places to rest, heal and save) would form levels, and you could add alternatives that suited different type of characters, "faster but riskier" ones to speed things up and keep it interesting later in the game, etc. (Note that this doesn't mean each route has to be a tight corridor.)

http://videospel.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=796#p796

[...] you can really feel the death of each and every one of them, especially when, as often is the case, they would've become veterans this mission if they had survived the battle. So even if the individual missions aren't very difficult, you're still very focused and serious since anyone dying is a tragedy. So far the main-missions have been a lot trickier though — it's actually almost enough for me to feel uncomfortable going into them, since I know there'll be casualties...

Oh, did I mention that there's no saving at all? It could be because I proudly declared that I'm a ~Mighty Hero~ [i.e. picked the hardest difficulty], but the save option in the menu is simply greyed out, so there's no saving beyond the automatic one when you quit the game. In fact, I had some random crash once, and in a moment of weakness thought "that was actually beneficial, since I had died with two whole space marines...", but as I started the game up again it turns out that they were robust enough to save even when the game crashes to desktop.

*smile*

Meaning that I have not spent A SINGLE SECOND inside of this game that is "fake" or can be "redone" at the press of a button: what happens happens and what has happened has happened and that's that.

So the whole game is played in Iron Man mode, i.e. without saving or loading and with limited forces, and is great for it. I'm pretty good at not quick-saving now anyway, but it was the night and day difference of enabling Iron Man for Jagged Alliance 2 that really started to open my eyes.

To summarize:

1. Unless your game is to be played from start to finish in one go, it is up to YOU as the designer to segment it into levels of appropriate difficulty using save-points.

2. These save-points must be integrated beautifully into the gameworld — a fucking "auto-saved" message in the form of HUD isn't good enough, fucker!

3. As we feel more safe the closer to a save we are, and combat is better the higher the sense of danger, saving inside of combat is sacrilege.

[icycalm]

I use level to mean "from one save to the next", or, in games where there's extra lives instead of saving, "from one checkpoint to the next". I use checkpoint to mean "where you get to start over from when you've run out of health and trade a life into a full new health bar", so one way to put it is that a game with saving and loading is really just a game with unlimited extra lives. And I use segment as "from one point in the game to another", so levels are segments, but we can also view any part of the game as its own segment, with the smallest possible being a single frame and the biggest possible being the whole game.

No one gives a shit what new meaning you have given to random words. You will either use these words the way everyone else uses them, or you will be banned.

If you want to create your own language, which you must surely realize no one will ever bother to learn, you might want to start by considering that doing so would defeat the purpose of language, and opt to hang yourself instead for being so stupid.