When was the last time you really thought
about saves? Like, REALLY thought about them? Save systems aren't as flashy as skill trees, as
notorious as microtransactions, or as widespread as experience points, but a game's save system is
just as important. Saves are part of the bedrock of a game’s design. They touch on risk tolerance,
experimentation, safety, social factors, quit rates, metagaming, and more, and there are dozens
of different flavors that each shape how a game feels differently. The right save system in the
right game can create an entirely new subgenre, but a wrong combo can collapse the house of cards
just as much as janky combat. Let's talk about different styles of save systems, tradeoffs for
each, and how you determine what's worth saving. Save your ears with today’s episode sponsor
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and I think you will too. Thanks, Raycon! So what's the point of saving? Well, yeah, it's
pretty obvious. Saving your game lets you continue it later. It carries over data from session to
session, so you can leave it and pick up where you left off. But that also implies some things that
are a little more subtle. A world without saving has a pretty severe impact on what a game can even
be. Without saves, a game's length can only last as long as the average person keeps it powered
on. Anything you want the game to be would have to fit in that short amount of time. Story-heavy
games would be incredibly limited. It's hard to tell a lengthy saga if you'd have to keep your
NES running for 40 hours to tell it. Long-term progression of all kinds - mechanical, character
stats, rewards, and unlocks - they're all very tough to incorporate into a game if you can't
carry over your progress to the next session. Of course, that doesn't mean that there
weren't games without saves. They were just designed differently. Arcade games
were designed with short play sessions to get you to pump in quarters and usually
didn't have a way to save your progress. The first home console games carried
over that arcade game design philosophy and were made to be both short in length and
brutal to complete to stretch out their playtime. Games were designed to start you over from the
beginning. Checkpoints were temporary, and lives were limited. Once you got a game over or just had
to end the play session, your progress was gone. If you wanted to finish a single-player game like
Ninja Gaiden, Contra, or Rygar, you had to be patient, start from the beginning, slowly become
an expert at the game's systems, and work your way up to having that perfect run. For those who
get to the end, it can be incredibly satisfying. The road to get there will infuriate people,
though, and has a good chance of alienating anyone who doesn't - or can't - get to the end.
It can be fun, but it won't be for everyone. Some games without saves were designed a little
differently. Sonic 2 can be cleared in about an hour, and the stages are short, sweet,
and filled with multiple paths to keep things fresh during repeat playthroughs.
Super Mario Bros had warp pipes that let you skip to the later stages relatively
quickly if you knew where to find them. But if you tried to just power through a game’s
design without adapting it for a save-less environment, you might run into problems. Micro
Machines for the NES tried to. It’s a super fun 8-bit racing game. I had the Game Boy Color port,
Micro Machines 1 and 2: Twin Turbo, and it was one of my go-to road trip games. There were loads of
inventive tracks, each creatively themed and using totally unique vehicles to race on each one of
them. Go head to head vs several AIs of different skill levels in a progressive structure with a
couple dozen different matchups. Can you get to the end? No, probably not. The game has absolutely
no way to save your progress. No cart save, no level skip, nothing. The game even “””””saves”””””
your fastest lap times - at least until you powered it off. Every time you boot it up, you’re
starting at the bottom of the ladder and seeing how far you get before your batteries run out.
The game uses concepts that really only work if your progression can be resumed and your records
kept, but provides no functionality to do so. But this isn’t a video about not-saving.
So if we’re gonna try to save data, what’s the quickest, fastest, cheapest,
and easiest way to do it? You won’t need a battery in a cart, or a hard drive, or cloud
storage. Just a pen and paper. Passwords. Passwords were very popular ways to save your
progress around the 8-bit era without having to include persistent memory inside a cartridge.
A game save password can do one of two things: it can either be a secret code to unlock a
set of features, or you can use a password to code in specific data, then decode it later
to interpret back out what all that data means. That type lets you store a whole lot more
information, like saving exactly how much money you have, which bad guys you’ve taken care of in
which levels, what exact coins you’ve picked up, and so on. If you see a password like THIS,
you’re probably dealing with that basic level select type of password.
If you see THIS, that usually means there’s a bunch more fine-grained
data being stored inside that password. Passwords are surprisingly convenient for
some things. They’re way more shareable than a cartridge save. A magazine could just print this out and get a final boss warp
out to thousands of people. Hell, the thousands of YOU watching right now can take
this and start up my terrible Kid Icarus save. But passwords can be pretty annoying,
too. You have to manually write it down, and if your handwriting is bad, you’re out of
luck. If you flip letters and numbers around, you’re also out of luck. Wouldn’t it be
easier if you just said when you wanted to save and the machine kept track of it all
for you? Passwords fell out of favor and gave way to hardware saves as the cost of RAM chips
became cheaper. It was a lot more convenient, and hardware saves let some new behaviors appear.
There are many different ways to flavor a hardware save system, but they fall under a couple of broad
categories: freeform and designated save points. Freeform save points let you save just
about anywhere you want. Take a step, save. Take another, save. Use an item, save.
Maybe you can’t save all the time like during combat or against a boss, but everything’s kept on
disk for you to pick back up when you load next. Players get the maximum sense of security that
they won’t lose any progress they’ve made, but there are downsides, too. Freeform saving greatly reduces the tension of
losing progress from dying to something. There are plenty of games where that’s OK. Story-driven
games, for example, don’t usually get their fun from the risk of losing your progress and having
to replay parts of it. But plenty of other games, often more action-focused, use that tension
as part of the internal drama of the game. Freeform saving removes that drama almost
completely, which might play into what the game wants to highlight, but might not. On the flip
side, freeform saving encourages more risk-taking and experimentation. If the downside for
failing is low, why not take more chances? It’s a tradeoff. It also can be an invitation for
players to undermine some of a game’s intentions. Limitless saving can invite a thing called Save
Scumming. Save scumming is a strategy where a player frequently reloads a save to manipulate
what will happen next. If you’re about to go into a fight centered around random chance, and
the devs aren’t careful, save scumming takes the randomness out of an encounter at the cost
of a bunch of repetitive reloading. Take XCOM. XCOM is built around attacks that have a
percent chance to hit. The game has some built-in anti-save scumming features to keep
track of the dice rolls from load to load. If they hadn’t done that, save scumming would let you
keep reloading the same fight until that rare 5% chance to hit actually succeeded. If you’re just
gonna reload a game until it goes your way, that’s not really a random roll of the dice now, is it?
A player might reload a fight repeatedly to get a rare loot drop or get an enemy attack pattern
that’s easier to beat. It’s a strange side effect of the convenience and security of unlimited saves
that creates a tedious optimal strategy for some encounters. This can also apply to emulated
games with save states and rewind features. Developers can work around it by saving a big list
of random dice rolls early on and just reading from the table instead of re-rolling it live on
each reload. Still, it's something they do have to keep in mind, so they don't accidentally
create an experience they didn't want. Or you could go in the total opposite direction
and embrace save scumming. Fire Emblem is a series that uses random rolls for attacks a lot
like XCOM, and permadeath for its characters, which creates a pretty significant incentive
to start over the second something goes wrong. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the newest game in
the series and has a feature called Divine Pulse, which canonizes the save scumming process by
letting you rewind a battle a limited number of times to course correct if you made a fatal
mistake, instead of reloading the whole fight from the start. The feature takes some of
the tedium out of the process of reloading, which makes it a nice quality of life benefit
if the devs are going to tolerate save-scumming as a part of the game. You can’t just do the
same actions and expect different results, though. The random rolls are saved in a
way where repeating the exact same actions will wind up with the same outcome. It’s there
to let you adjust to a new, winning strategy. Other games only let you save at
designated places during play. In Kingdom Hearts, you can only save at
one of these things and nowhere else. Often these save points pull double-duty as safe
havens to heal, restock, strategize and prepare. The placement of save points isn’t usually
random. Especially in games that use them as places to refresh your characters, they tend to
be spaced out evenly, or before major events. In many games, save points were implicit
signals that a boss fight was about to start. Some games gave you a portable designated save
point and let you set it wherever you wanted. Final Fantasy 7 gave you one in the final
dungeon, but only one. Place it too early, and you might have a long gauntlet
to get to the end, wherever that was. It would be a clever way to get around the major
event telegraphing problem that hard save points created, though in this game specifically, it
was pretty obvious where the final boss was. If you want something a little less permanent, the
idea works with checkpoints, too. Demon Turf is a 3D platformer a la Mario 64 where you’re stringing
together your different movement options to bounce and dive all over the place. You’d be surprised
where you can get to, but learning requires a good amount of experimentation and risk-taking.
The game gives you 3 checkpoint flags that you can plant anywhere you want to encourage you
to take chances with where you jump to next. You can’t be completely careless with them,
but you get to choose exactly where you feel like you really need them so you don’t have
to repeat an easy chunk of the level. You can even teleport between the flags, which
can be handy for finding collectibles. If there are only going to be save
points in certain places of the game, the placement of those save points
matters more than you might think. The longer the game goes between
save points, the greater the stakes. Whether you can reuse a save point matters,
too. Unlimited save points, especially ones where you can heal and restock, can act as
a base of operations, letting players brute force grind for experience in an area without
risking much, using the save point as an anchor. The classic Resident Evil games tried to avoid
this problem by making saves a consumable item. There are safe rooms scattered throughout where
you can take a breather, manage resources with the storage box, and save your game. But only if you
have an ink ribbon. Saves themselves are a limited resource, just like healing herbs and ammo. You
can’t just pop in and out of the safe room and save whenever you want. You need to pace yourself
and press your luck a little, either now when you know what you’re facing, or later if you run
out of ink ribbons and have to keep going until you find another one. Resident Evil 4 dropped
the save system as a quality of life feature, but the recent Resident Evil 2 remake brought it
back as part of the hardcore difficulty option and would even take into account how many saves
you used to rank you at the end of the game. Man, all these hardware save types seem like a
pain to sort through. What if we could just get the computer to do it for you? Like automatically.
Auto…. saves. Oh right, yeah, that exists. Autosaving takes all of the work out
of saving, with one horrible cost. If you’re relying on an algorithm to save for you, you need to make sure it can’t soft lock the game.
Soft locking involves creating any situation where the game cannot let you continue. It might be
that the game locks you out of a room, or away from an item you need to progress. It can also be
autosaving you into an unwinnable position, where reloading a save puts you back into a place where
the enemies are too high-leveled and you can’t catch up, or without enough ammo to take on the
next hoard without a way to get more, or in the middle of getting ambushed in a way that you can’t
get away from. Soft locking in an auto-save-only game can be devastating, in the worst case
making the entire save file completely useless. Layering autosaving on top of other
saving techniques and having recent backup save files is practically a necessity to keep
from causing horrific soft lock scenarios. Cool, so those are the basic save
styles, but we can go deeper. Some of the most creative uses of saves have
been when they get treated not just as a utility, but as another game element. What if
saving is just another part of gameplay? Donkey Kong Country 2 would let you save,
but if you wanted to save in the same world a second time, it’d cost you 2 banana coins. The
Japanese version of the game only cost 1 coin for some reason. It’s not hard to collect two coins,
but it does create a fiddly little extra step before saving. It’s, I guess, an attempt to make
collectibles feel more meaningful and less like an anonymous checklist to complete for no rewards,
but this is still a half-baked idea. Luckily, it’s pretty ignorable. The GBA port of the
game cut this out and let you save wherever. Steel Batallion used a save file as a long-term
pause rather than a checkpoint. Even with a saved game, you were under constant threat of losing
it. If you died or ran out of money in-game, your save would blow up alongside your mech.
The setup definitely made you value your life in game more and made you more cautious, but it
did increase stress. It’s an interesting approach for a game that wants to crank up the stakes,
and games with Ironman modes use the same idea, and most Roguelikes are also built around the save
game as more of a pause than a life preserver. Shovel Knight found a way to use the
convenience of frequent checkpoints but with a fun challenge baked in. Shovel Knight uses
these glass orbs as checkpoints, but you don’t have to use them. If you don’t want to save,
you can break most of them for extra cash. If you’re feeling confident, you can spice up
the game’s difficulty to your tolerance level and progress even faster if you make it through.
But if you’re shaky, the same system lets you have the convenience of modern save-happy design.
The game becomes more adaptable to different players and play styles, helping make the
experience more fun for a wider group of people. Save your spot down in the comments where
we’ll talk about some save horror stories, and any game you can think of that treats
saves in a unique way. Save systems are part of the bedrock of game design, and thinking
through the decisions you make here can…. saaaaaaaaaaaaave a game. That was terrible, quick
load. Saves are important, do them good. Flawless. *chill vibes outro from Ico*
