This is yet another one of my save & reload topics. Here are some flavors that will help prevent reloading. Add more if you can. Feel free to argue with the ones I have. - No rewind effect of time on 'death'. If skills have advanced during a mission, death does not revert them. If NPCs have grown to hate you, they still hate you. If your weapon exploded, it's still gone. - No instant transportation. If you can get away with it, it's nice to let the player regain his life where he lost it. This could be conditional. Such as having members of his team use stim packs on his corpse. You can still punish the poor bastard for dying by applying some negative effects (a temporary limp, or bad trigger finger), but he is able to jump right back up and go at it again. It doesn't need to rely on a party-member. The player could buy a limited number of auto-injecting stim packs. Or he could muster up enough willpower to keep himself from dying on random occasions. - Random chance of negative consequences. The fact that a random chance exists, even if that random chance is very low, where the player may end up facing negative consequences means that death will want to be avoided. Having to face that random possibility of some type of loss is enough, I think, to scare players into fighting to survive. This means you can give them an easy way out a lot of the time, with little loss in the gaming. - Development. If dying or losing results in something interesting happening, the player will feel more obliged to continue. They will feel more like they are supposed to continue. An example would be a flashback story progressing with each death. You can't see the plot advancement of death 2 if you haven't experienced death 1. It's important to add negative consequences here. You would never want your players killing themselves or not caring about death just to progress this plot. It would be crucial to make this time based and/or unpredictable. Such as dying twice in a few minutes doesn't advance it, but dying once now and anywhere from 1 to 15 hours later will. That's all I've got for now.

Try to play dungeon crawl. It explains it all.

Quote:Original post by Kest
This is yet another one of my save & reload topics.

Here are some flavors that will help prevent reloading.

But why? I like saving and reloading. In fact, if I could tap a rewind button and the game went 15 seconds backwards in realtime (well, accelerated a bit), I'd be stoked.

Quote:Original post by Timus
Make it so in order to save they have to quit, thats the best way to prevent save/reload/save/reload.

What happens if it crashes?

Quote:Original post by spartanx

Quote:Original post by Kest
This is yet another one of my save & reload topics.

Here are some flavors that will help prevent reloading.

But why? I like saving and reloading.

Because I don't.

Quote:In fact, if I could tap a rewind button and the game went 15 seconds backwards in realtime (well, accelerated a bit), I'd be stoked.

That would be totally cool for me as long as it's part of the game world and not the interface. Save & reload is part of the interface. If "Jack" knows I tried again, that's sweet. That sounds interesting. Jack can even make fun of my halfassed attempts. Maybe he could even help me get through it. If I have a super time-rewind ability, I think bad guys should be capable of knowing about it. At the very least, my avatar should know about it.

Quote:Original post by ToohrVyk
Death is not the only reason for reloading. In a game, there are choices. Some choices can be bad. Reloading can be used to revert a bad choice and make a good choice instead. If death is no longer a bad choice, there will probably be other bad choices still available to the player.

It doesn't really matter what makes a player want to reload. My methods for dealing with it were just focused on death. Feel free to add ideas for solutions dealing with other types of reloads.

Death is a different type of reload. When you reload because a decision you've made didn't end well, that's destroying the purpose of the choices being there in the first place. I would completely prevent this type of reloading if it's possible. Decisions are the major part of any game. If bad decisions can be reverted, you might as well not include them. If you're not going to include negative decisions in your game, then you don't have a game at all. If you do include them, along with save & reload support, then what you have is a bunch of what-if scenarios. Save that stuff for a cheat code. Wimpy players will always look for cheat codes before they play anyway. Problem solved.

When you die, you're not making a choice. You're failing to come through with a choice. If that means game-over, the player has no choice but to rewind. And I think this is exactly why the majority of single player games are so leaned over onto the save & reload angle. Because we evolved from game over screens.

Here's another one.

What if you add content for players who never reload? You don't have to tell them what the content is. It could be random. They could be small things or huge things. But only players who stick to their real choices and keep shoving on after dramatic loss would experience the events.

I'm sure a lot of people who enjoy reloading will hate this feature. But I think incentive is the biggest key.

Quote:Original post by Kest
Here's another one.

What if you add content for players who never reload? You don't have to tell them what the content is. It could be random. They could be small things or huge things. But only players who stick to their real choices and keep shoving on after dramatic loss would experience the events.

I'm sure a lot of people who enjoy reloading will hate this feature. But I think incentive is the biggest key.

Yeah, extra content for people willing to sit around playing a game non stop until they beat it on their first try is just what everybody wants. Because remember: taking a break is the same as reloading. That is, after all, half the purpose behind the ability to save and reload in the first place.

If you don't want people repeatedly reloading just to do things perfectly, then don't allow it in the first place. Only allow the game to be saved at certain points, and [if appropriate] do so automatically. There, problem solved.

None of the suggestions provided thus far would prevent me from taking advantage of a game foolish enough to provide saves anywhere.

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- No rewind effect of time on 'death'. If skills have advanced during a mission, death does not revert them. If NPCs have grown to hate you, they still hate you. If your weapon exploded, it's still gone.

I would reload to get my weapon back, even if just for long enough to make it through the encounter that killed me.

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- No instant transportation.

I would reload to save my limited supply of auto-injecting stim packs.

Quote:
- Random chance of negative consequences.

I would reload to avoid the negative concequences. Death should always be avoided, so this is a ridiculous suggestion from the get go.

Quote:
- Development.

I would reload after any death that I felt didn't justify advancing the storyline.

CM