Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts thinks auto-saving makes “lazy and sloppy” players who don’t fear death
By Tim Colwill on February 8, 2013 at 7:24 pm
Chris Roberts, creator of Wing Commaner and shortly of Star Citizen as well, isn’t a big fan of the way modern gaming molly-coddles you with frequent autosaving. In a big ol’ blogpost, Roberts writes that “I hate the current game trend in single-player games where the game auto-saves every two seconds, and if you die you just start a few steps earlier.”
“This makes you a lazy and sloppy player,” he says. “In Wing Commander or Privateer, you had to complete the mission to move on. There were no mid mission saves. This created a sense of anxiety towards the end of the mission if you were badly damaged and your shields were low, but if you managed to limp home successfully, you felt a sense of accomplishment. Without the risk of losing something you’ve worked hard towards, the sense of achievement is cheap.”
So, what is his ideal solution for Star Citizen? Well, at the moment they’re leaning towards a system where, if you manage to bail out of your downed ship, and nobody blasts your ejected avatar, you’ll end up back on the last planet you docked on with a new ship (minus any cargo or upgrades, unless you insured them). If you don’t eject in time or someone shoots your avatar up, you’ll wake up in a medbay, with scars or even cybernetic limbs depending on where you were hit or how you died. Do this enough times, and your character will permanently die, respawning “attending the funeral of your fallen character from the eyes of the beneficiary you specified when originally creating your character”.
Check out the seriously big blog post and Q&A for yourself over at the official site.
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We do this *because* we fear death. :P
I can see his point, constantly regenerating health, frequent saves etc all make a game feel rather easy at times.
That said a lot of older games had tedious areas that you hated to trek because after an hour of shuffling through constant random encounters in Throtyl, during Champions of Krynn, some hobgoblin killed your barely surviving priest before you could memorise Raise Dead quick enough. Pricks.
It’s not just my bruised e-ego of yore that appreciates quick saves nowdays, it’s all those games where a bug is enough to screw up decent progress that autosaves are a nice fall back feature. That said it is dependant on the game, in an enclosed “mission” style game I tend not to quicksave but I would in a sandbox game, but that’s just me. It’s not just autosave features that are the problem, but unlimited frequent quicksaves etc.. they take the danger element out of the game, but they also take out some of the old gaming frustration elements too.
I frankly loath being forced to repeat 15 minutes of easy stuff just to get to the one bit that was killing me over and over again. Let me focus on that one part where I was dieing rather than making me go through all the easy cr@p I could complete in my sleep that led up to that moment.
It’s why I never finished X-Wing Alliance. There was one mission where at the very end Y-Wings (I think) would attack a droid I was transporting and destroy it, I didn’t much appreciate constantly having to replay 5-10mins of content just to try a different plan of attack in the one part of the mission I was having trouble at.
To a lesser extent it’s also why I never finished Donkey Kong 64. You had to play the original Donkey Kong game but whenever you died you got booted out of the game, you then had to reposition Donkey Kong to reactivate the machine and watch all the intro animations before you could actually attempt the game again.
It also feels really cheap when you die at that last second and lose so much progress and while I sympathize with what he’s trying to say I don’t think that’s a good thing.
Jeez, you know Chris Roberts, you can still make a game without having to slag off everything else which doesn’t have anything to do with your game.
That seems to be the thing to do these days.
I prefer to not rely on Autosaves alone in a game because some games like Far cry 3 that autosave often can have the autosave corrupted if the game crashes during that save. Just like when my power went out a few months back and I lost a couple of hrs of Far cry 3 progress.
I’m a maniacal manual saver:
room full of guns? SAVE
suspicious amount of health lying around? SAVE
want to buy something? SAVE
bought something? SAVE
I just can’t help myself, I don’t so much care about NOT having auto saves… but you need to let players save manually at least. It’s not 1999 any more, I expect games challenging enough that I will die but I also don’t want to spend 4 hours looking for a god damn Macguffin which will let me save my progress.
I distinctly remember one of the later levels in Project IGI was an absolute shocker for the “no saves until you finish the level” style of game, spending 4 hours on one level because there are infinite enemies or some stupid shit like that is just frustrating…. imagine playing STALKER if you could only save back in town or after a quest, we dont need that any more.
The problem is that while it may not have much of an effect on Star Citizen due to their game design, it’s mainly because of their design it doesn’t need it in the first place. That in itself shows a depth of design a lot of games these days lack.
Whether you find it frustrating or annoying having to do a section again, I’ve certainly grown to appreciate the tougher no nonsense gameplay of older games. Some of them were buggy messes which served only to frustrate, however there were a few diamonds in the rough that while making you work for the win, weren’t afraid to beat you over the head a bit.
While autosaving and quicksaving can fix some dev sins, a good design from the off can prevent the need for them in the first place. Which TBH is the main underlying point of his blog post.
Many games have relied on the save/respawn mechanic for way too long. They have forgotten that other ways to make games exist and only need a little bit of serious thought to find a solution.
Auto save is good to “fall back on” but not I would never rely on it. Although when playing SoaSE mp matches the auto saves seem to be the only ones that actually load for me :S
This guys has obviously never played the Souls games where you fear death because of the persistent auto-saving…
Makes a lot of sense considering the online aspect of the game is going to be so in depth. Best we all relearn what it means to play based with real consequences of time-loss.
If you have an insurance system that, if not insured in the online universe of the game you get raided by pirates and you really do lose your ship… tough luck.
Adds to the nature of being a sim too.