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Many a time have I been saved from a plummet of death or a hidden baddie by quicksave. At the stroke of a button (F5 is usually the culprit) all fears are crushed in gaming.
...But does anyone remember a time before the Quicksave?
The good old days when the slight mistep meant being set back to the beginning of a level or even the game. The fear...the sweat...the reward of beating the big boss just to be confronted with a bigger big boss. Now its dead.
This occured to me when I was playing AVP2. By constant use of a quicksave I had completed it in one weekend. But if I hadn't had quicksave it would have lasted me all week for sure.
Games are now, even the best ones, easy in a sense. Sure theres harder difficulties but wheres the real challenge of completing the level with in a sense something at least close to death in the fear it produces. Every level was painfully saw through.
Games began to use save features, most were crude but soon all games had some save feature which could be activated all the time by getting to the menu. Many games still harken back to the arcade style with saves only halfwaythrough a level or every episode or such.
Has quicksave ruined the passion in many of our games, especially 3D shooters???
Say if you get half way through a big and extremly hard level, and then all of a sudden you get killed, you have to start from scratch. Thats why I'm not totally against saving in games, but I still think if its over used, it can kill the gaming experience.
1. Limited Saving- this is a viable option. To save you from having to do the whole level again the designers add a feature which means you can only save twice (or a low number of times) per level this means that people have to save appropriately and cannot rely on quicksave to get them through levels.
2. autosaving- This means you cannot quicksave and the game saves for you at certain points in each level after a suitable amount of progress.This means less monotomy whilst keeping the skill
3. Time delayed saving- Time delayed saving which is being used in the forth coming Project IGI 2, is where you have to give the game 5 seconds notice before it saves. This means you cannot just save in the middle of a fight but rather you must wait and be in a safe place.
4. Savepoints- Save points are as they sound: you must reach this location to save such as in resident evil with the type writers. This kind of saving is similar to autosaving but can be fairly irritating because you never know how far you must continue before you can discontinue playing.
Overall it think that normal quick saves can reduce the enjoyment and length of games especially with regards to shooters it destroys tension and therefore mades games worse value for money. I think the best solution is limited saving per level as this gives the player a chance to progress whilst still allowing skill and technique to show through.
Many a time have I been saved from a plummet of death or a hidden baddie by quicksave. At the stroke of a button (F5 is usually the culprit) all fears are crushed in gaming.
...But does anyone remember a time before the Quicksave?
The good old days when the slight mistep meant being set back to the beginning of a level or even the game. The fear...the sweat...the reward of beating the big boss just to be confronted with a bigger big boss. Now its dead.
This occured to me when I was playing AVP2. By constant use of a quicksave I had completed it in one weekend. But if I hadn't had quicksave it would have lasted me all week for sure.
Games are now, even the best ones, easy in a sense. Sure theres harder difficulties but wheres the real challenge of completing the level with in a sense something at least close to death in the fear it produces. Every level was painfully saw through.
Games began to use save features, most were crude but soon all games had some save feature which could be activated all the time by getting to the menu. Many games still harken back to the arcade style with saves only halfwaythrough a level or every episode or such.
Has quicksave ruined the passion in many of our games, especially 3D shooters???