I *really* don't like it when the game doesn't allow the player to return to town.


I think it does make sense for some dungeons, in particular the final dungeon, to have boss fights.

On the other hand, not every dungeon needs them. Dragon Quest 2's infamous Cave to Rhone, which is considered one of the most dangerous dungeons in any JRPG, has no boss, yet still it's a *huge* relief once you finally enter the shrine (where you can rest, save, and (unless playing the original JP release) revive the dead for free).

It would also help if the game would give some sort of indication of whether the dungeon has a boss fight beforehand, so the player will know whether resources have to be conserved for the boss at the end, or if the player should feel free to use them to speed up battles or make dangerous random encounters manageable.

In games with XP levels, it's fun to see the character getting a whole bunch of level ups at once, and you don't get that if the new character is the same level as the rest of the party.

Also, if XP is distributed between the party (as opposed to everyone getting the same XP regardless of party size), there's the exploit of solo leveling a character and having newer characters come at very high levels.

(Part of the problem with Orlandu in Final Fantasy Tactics is that he joins at the level of the highest level party member.)

I know auto means automated, but I'd rather have a bit of options for the 'fully restored, enemies respawn' bit. Something like 'no restore/no respawn', '50% restore/50% respawn', 'full restore/full respawn'.

This sounds overly complicated. Modern games should respect people's times by providing freedom to save anywhere and can be challenging.

1. Auto-saves before boss battles and checkpoints with >= 3 save files would be appreciated, but I'd prefer the option to retry the battle (FF13, CSH) instead of seeing a game over screen, return to the title, and reloading. Or checkpoints in modern games.

2. I'm convinced save points are outdated now in favour of saving anytime and anywhere you want except during battles and cutscenes. There is no technical reason today why a game would force you to use save points unless it's for nostalgia's sake.

3. For suspended saves, I think this game mechanic was only used for GBA, PSP, and NDS ports of FF. If the game is meant to be played on PC, there is absolutely no need for these types of saves that a robust normal save system couldn't do. The only reason to add them in is to let players exploit resetting RNG seed for drops, which shouldn't be an issue if drop rates are fair.

4. Assist save sounds like "save anywhere". But I question the purpose of enabling an option to let you do that when you can grant it immediately to the player. If it's the hardcore players who want to play with old school resource management, they can devise their own community rules about when and where saves are allowed for challenge runs.

In addition to all these things, games should also have a soft reset function. I finished CSH on the hardest difficulty and while it was challenging, I wish I could soft reset or pause and retry the battle when my key team members died instead of having to waiting 4 turns for the boss to kill the rest of my party before I could retry the battle again.

I've seen this sort of save back in the Game Boy Color days, where the GBC remakes of Dragon Warrior 1, 2, and 3 all have this save in addition to the traditional hard save at the king. Lufia: The Legend Returns also does this.

Roguelike save systems are often functionally equivalent to suspend saves, except possibly in the case of the program terminating abnormally (either due to a programming bug, a hardware failure, the user deliberately sending SIGKILL (or the Windows equivalent) to the process, or a power outage).

Edit: Also, I note that the GBA version of Final Fantasy 1+2 actually *doesn't* use suspend saves; you can actually hard save anywhere. (Interestingly enough, save anywhere feels right in FF2; maybe that's because that game is an ancestor of the SaGa series, to the point where it could reasonably be called SaGa 0?)

Anyway, the reason behind this save type is that it allows the player to leave the game should something come up (or the player is just getting tired) without it serving as a checkpoint.

The way I see it, by gating it behind a menu option, I make it clear how the game was intended to be played (and, in particular, what the game is balanced around), but still provide save anywhere to those who want/need it. (There's a reason the assist mode menu option would be called "Save Anywhere".)

"Always save anywhere" in this context only works if the game has no resource management elements. Heck, even if the RNG is locked with the save (such as Monster Train), sometimes you'll save-scum to learn the optimum play once you know the set order of the cards in your deck that shuffle. There are indeed reasons to have save limitations for certain challenges... The goal is making sure that people can carry on their life and walk away from the game without a problem... no 2+ hour boss battles

EDIT: Trying to link here, but GOG mangles it in a URL tag. finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Yiazmat_(Final_Fantasy_XII)

Or simply being able to pull up the menu during combat and load a save from there.

Something like Wizardry 7's "Terminate Game" option could work as well, though there should be a confirmation prompt first (I think Wizardry 7 might lack that).

One example of where a game almost gets it right, but not quite, is Might and Magic 3-5. You can access the menu during combat, there's a "Load Game" option, but if you choose that, you get the message "No Loading allowed during combat". That game was *so* close to getting it right, but they had to put in a rule that makes absolutely no sense. (There's a similar rule for saving, which makes more sense than the rule against loading.) So, in order to reload, you have to use Mr. Wizard (which warps you back to the start with a penalty), and *then* you can load your save (which undoes the penalty since it was applied after you saved the game that was just loaded).

Ideal save system:
F6
F9

Trying to kill off manual / quick saves and replace with checkpoint-only system in modern games was far less about lack of technical ability, and far more about cheap artificial game-time padding, ie, a game can be completed in 12hrs with quick / manual saves, can often be made to take 14-15hrs with multiple enforced replays (double bonus points for Ubisoft games like Watch Dogs that place checkpoints immediately before lengthy unskippable cutscenes. They didn't even try to hide the "30hr game with 20hr content" thing there).

Not sure. I'm thinking of e.g. the first Tomb Raider game, and how the console (Playstation) version had save points, while the PC version, while otherwise a seemingly identical game, had save-anywhere.

I would think the difference came more from technical reasons and making the save game system on the console version simpler, rather than trying to make the console version harder and PC version "easier" with a different save game system.

Anyway, I don't think save-anywhere is necessarily needed in all kinds of games. Most people don't seem to have complained that you can't save anywhere in e.g. X-Wing, Wing Commander or racing games. Saving between missions or races seems to be fine enough. Well, maybe there were some missions in e.g. X-Wing where replaying the whole long mission would seem bad if there was the hard part at the very end of the long mission, but even then free ability to save anywhere during a missions might have felt... odd.

Those PC examples might be due to simplicity or "technical reasons" as well. After all, it is far simpler for a save game system to just keep track of what missions the player has finished successfully, rather than saving all the data where every enemy ship is located and doing exactly what at any given point of time.

Also, PC CRPGs quite often also restrict how freely you can save the game, e.g. you can't save at least in a middle of combat (usually?).

This instead feels like 4chan.

Anyway.
I agree with Darvond on "suspend on exit", this should always be an absolute must. Devs can keep saves however they please (although I can't say I'm a fan pf checkpoints and console stuff), but today it is -imo- imperative to provide a solution that can make you quit at any moment without losing your progress.

Example: any roguelike. I might have to quit to do something more more important, and I definitely don't want to lose an hour or more of play time due to that. When I come back the game can kill me off normally and make me start from the beginning, but at least that was due to design.

But your topic seems to be about generic and "ideal" save systems, not something specifically tailored for RPGs or whatever other particular genre you have in mind.

So, the concept of respawn should not be a part of this, unless the game design, on a case-by-case basis, accomodates it

Frankly, the ideal, general purpose, save system shouldn't require any overly complex design....it would be just a combo of:
- a suspend save ("i need to exit the game NOW, please save, no question asked")
- basic autosave at some key point ("crap, I forgot to save... do I have to start over?!?")
- manual save with multiple slots ("ok, let's save RIGHT HERE, and keep some old one just in case")
- No auto load, just let the user choose ("I'm a though s.o.b, let me do my Iron Man")

For me, the best saving system is to allow manual saves anytime anywhere, including dialogues, cut-scenes, combat, etc. It gives you full control over your play-through and provides maximum flexibility.

Dialogues in some games are really long and contain meaningful choices ( Planescape: Torment, Pillars of Eternity ). I tend to read such dialogues slowly, with attention. And think about possible options, when choices are present. It might take a lot of time.

Cut-scenes can be very long as well and take dozens of minutes to watch ( Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 ).

I often don't have extra half an hour to wait until the next possibility to save. And when I'm playing a game for the first time, I have no idea, how long I have to wait. This can be very annoying.

For extra challenge you can apply any self-restrictions you want. There is no need in technical limitations by a game engine. The simpler is the system, the better it works. ;)

If someone wants to save-scum, it's their own choice. Why should we care about cheaters? :)

Saving system in Divinity: Original Sin is close to my taste.

***

As for auto-saves, it always annoys me, when game saves before a long unskippable cut-scene or a dialogue with meaningful choices, and a really hard fight starts afterwards.

I would prefer if there were two auto-saves to different slots: one before a cut-scene or dialogue, and another at the start of the combat.

***

Number of slots for quick and auto-saves should be limited to save disk space and prevent engine from slowing down when processing the list of available saves ( like in the first Witcher game ).

However, there should be at least two slots for quick and for auto-saves, in case save file has become corrupt.

***

I am against any form of check-point system and other excessive restrictions ( Kingdom Come: Deliverance ).

Well, my ideal save system has a pretty simple requirement: I can manually save at absolutely any point, under any circumstances. City, dungeon, wilds, in dialogue, in combat, in cutscene, enemy turn, whatever, pull up menu, save, and know that the exact state of everything at that specific moment is saved and I can continue from it. And infinite slots of course (though I tend to just cycle between 3-5, and change when I consider that something important happened, overwriting regular progress).
As for autosaves, if we're still talking ideal system, they should be configurable, and preferably cycle between a few slots as well. So maybe I'll want autosave before combat or after cutscene (especially between cutscene and combat if they're chained), but let me decide through settings.

Definitely no save points, no restrictions or penalties for saving, no incomplete save states (like the respawning enemies on reload thing)...

In this case, the respawn would be triggered not by the load, but rather by the rest that automatically happens when you use a save point. (Something like the benches in Hollow Knight, but with manual save existing, and without the game overwriting your save to prevent the player from avoiding the penalty for death.)

I really disagree with both:
* the term "save-scum", and its usage, as that implies that doing so is somehow bad
* the accusation that people who do that are "cheaters"; I consider cheating to only involve modifying the game in some way. (Note that this means that using an exploit is not technically "cheating" the way I define it, but using a bugfix mod that removes the exploit might be.)

Edit: In particular, the assist mode menu would not use the term "cheat", even for options that clearly give the player an advantage (like invincibility or double health/damage), and would definitely not use the term "save-scum"; as I said, my proposal would be to call the option "Save Anywhere", which is an accurate description and shouldn't make players feel bad for enabling it.