Save Points, A desperate plea Options

[rewells]

Hey y'all,

I've been meaning to write a post about this for a while, but it keeps slipping my mind until now. I get really annoyed when games do not have save points. The majority of non-RM games I play do have save points, so I am used to relying on them, not having to save just whenever I think about it. I'm glad that RM lets you save anywhere by default, but you could at least put some reminder to save before a boss or after a long cutscene. In most commercial RPGs, save points let me know when the challenge is going to increase (i.e., a boss fight is up ahead) or to let me know that a cutscene is about to happen, so I know if it's a good time to to take a bathroom break or call it quits for the night. They help me pace my the experience, and, most importantly, they remind me to save so I don't have to replay the same 20 minutes of game play!

Thank you

[ZarroTsu]

Save-states seem like a problem with the game. Like you're giving the player the option to waste an infinite number of time to bypass some narrow difficulty or sequence margin, and would rather the player suffer than fix your own mistake.

Save-states are an 'easy way out', not only for the player, but for the person making the game. "Why try balancing something when the player has save-states?" Even if you don't think you'd tell yourself that if it were put in your hands, chances are you'd just fall back on them as an excuse in the end.

Now, in testing the game? Sure. It's much easier to determine, as a game tester, specifically why you fail a challenge as a player of your game, as opposed to shrugging it off since you're not about to replay a large segment of your game over for some 'small' problem.

But in a game itself? Save-states are a double-edged sword. People don't make multiple save files unless they're trying to meet their own personal quota, because I know from experience that I'd have more fun making mistakes and dealing with then in real-time than going back and undoing that mistake. Because of this idea, and save-states posing an "any-time" rehash situation, what one might consider a good chain of events to save onto, might in fact screw them over entirely, either because they lacked the foresight, or the game itself wasn't made for such a situation (and very few, if any, are). And on the other edge, the game becomes challenge-less and forgettable, due to the player having no reason to care about conservation in the slightest, when they can just undo their errors, as opposed to having to prepare for a situation at all.