Consolidated "Saves in Choice of Games and Hosted Games" Thread

^This. I also pressed wrong on my touch screen more than once.

Also I am properly not going not by the next lucid games. I could live with the punishment for not having optimisme stats for lost heir 1 and 2, but after dying three times in a row in lost heir 3 in the final battle and having to restart… all the way from the beginning just to get a different ending, I am just not willing to get invested in another series. It just stopped being fun the third time to have to essentially press almost all the same options once again.

Also because of the lack of a save system I am often afraid of roleplaying, because you get punished for it thanks to stat.

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As everyone has already argued pretty well before me, I do think that game saves would be awesome.

At least on mobile, it’s really easy to accidentally hit a wrong choice, and I get very sad when that happens, because then I have to decide if it’s worth it to restart the entire thing just because my finger slipped. I like the option for checkpoints a lot more too.

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Honestly the number 1 game I’d want a save system for is Samurai of Hyuga… I can’t not try for 100% attunement when I play it and I restart each game probably 10 or so times every time I try to play them.

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For me its the opposite a lack of a save options forces me to think ‘how to win’, because if I don’t I know that nine times out of ten I won’t get an ending I enjoy.

So, I don’t go 'oh… which choice do I like. I go which stat do I like and which RO do I like and then I make sure to never, ever pick anything which could disagree with that. If I pick a choice which lowers my liked stat I restart, because I fear that I will get the ‘sub-par’ ending. (And if I had to restart enough, I stop playing the game)

In game where I can save I experiment. Everyone of my bioware protagonist have sub-par builds because I valued role playing over stats even when I pick skills. In pillar of eternity I stuck with an unwanted outcome on a quest, because I knew that when the game was done, I didn’t have to play the whole game through again. just to see the other option. In choice of games, I would have reloaded immediatly, because it is better to reload half way through the game than having to retrace your steps through the whole game.

So the lack of a save file actually give my choices less weight, because it become more of an ‘what do I think x do’, instead of picking what I want or what’s in character for my character.

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To be fair, if we do not play these fictional pieces for ideal escapism than what else?

It’s also impossible to place an objective measure on concepts such as “interesting” and we would be foolish to assume something enjoyable to one person evokes the same response from another

I’m not sure one would call any way through “wrong” but rather unsatisfactory and I just think we should at least be given a choice whether or not we wish to make a choice which aligns with our desires better. After all, without a save system, you’re effectively forcing players to replay an entire game( including actual replay sessions and not restart to make another choice) when perhaps they just wish to branch off at a very specific point.

If COG was so confident in the superiority of the design then why not just add the function? If their principle was so efficient I’m sure no one would bother to use it

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I wonder if this whole discussion has to do with the way interactive fiction straddles the game/story line. If I read a book, I don’t think about whether I won the book or not–I think about whether it was a compelling narrative. But you bet I think about whether I won a game or not.

This is really interesting. I guess because I am all the way over on the “I experience these gamebooks as books and I think almost solely about the narrative to almost the complete exclusion of the game” side of the spectrum, I am always surprised that people want save games because one doesn’t like the result of a choice.

I don’t know. I have to chew on this some more.

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Do contemplate

For me personally, I regard them much more as games than books. But to each his own

Honestly, it’s not entirely about winning. I recently finished my first playthrough of Tally Ho and although I’m quite sure every ending was technically a “good ending”, eliminating a chance for “losing”, I was still left with a very unsettling discomfort because some the choices were rather confusing and I had to continue reluctantly because I didn’t want to restart a 600k-word game to rectify a few misplaced choices

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I do try to see these games as narratives and this is why I miss my save option. Have you never read a book which narrative took a turn that you find unsatisfying, and ending which just doesn’t fit the rest of the story, a tangent which just doesn’t make sense? Because that is how and ‘wrong’ choice feels to me in these games. + well that plus and uninteresting MC because, as said, I dare not experiment.

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Yeah, but to me that’s a problem with the writing, not with the lack of save system. If you’ve got to restore and save and poke around looking for a good narrative, there’s something deeply and systemically wrong, especially if, as you say, there is an uninteresting main character. I mean, I guess you could salvage your experience with a save system to a certain extent, but there would be a way more significant problem at the heart of that piece of IF. I haven’t had that experience with the pieces I’ve read from CoG so far.

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PM me the confusing choices when/if you get the chance. I’d love to clarify them.

This is the core of my belief that both the mechanical structure and the prose need attention and expansion to properly grow the genre. If you exclude one or the other, there will be problems created by doing so.

I do feel the scripting language itself needs to grow so the mechanical structure can do so. An example of this is the *multiple choice mechanic - a very, very strong mechanic in theory and it should be something embraced by the community.

Because its current implementation and use is somewhat lacking, it is basically ignored. If this mechanic is ever expanded and streamlined, then you’ll see a jump in the game quality and aplication in the CS IF world.

The save/checkpoint mechanism is the same in result ( a bit clunky and not very efficient in its deployment) but its root cause is more based on the game design beliefs and theory accepted here. Still, it really should be something that is worked on to further the CS IF product.

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Only a very, select few can write well enough to avoid that. I can think of one WIP which has succeed in this for me. One. (And none of the published games)

Boring protagonist is a problem of many RPGs and doesn’t stand and fall with the save system, but the lack of it doesn’t help me, because as said, I dare not experiment in cogs and hosted, which mean I can’t do my part in making the protagonist interesting.

But back to the narrative. Let’s take Tally Ho as an example. (And I will just point out that I like Tally Ho, a lot)

In Tally Ho, I took one look at the stats, decided okay I like the intelligence sounding one, and because of the premise of the game and I am going to stick to the employer. And then I made choices for that the rest of the games.

Now there was two areas in which I ‘failed’.

The first one (failing to catch a certain person), I didn’t mind, because what it led to fit neatly into the story, both tonewise and storywise it was still a satisfying arch.

The second one was failing to get a certain invitation. You essentially get an note at the end that said you failed. Now I shouldn’t have gotten that invitation, because I purposefully didn’t interact with much with that specific part of the plot since it looked like it might take time away from the employer’s plot (which I focused on.), but that meant that story line fell flat.

If it had been a real book it could rightfully have been critised for that plotline. The protagonist got an offer, which they then proceeded to ignore and then the offer got taken back - all while the protagonist feels nothing about it. It is an useless storyline.

But Tally Ho is not a book, its an if. As such it is all right - even good - to have mutiple goals for the protagonist. But as a reader/player I still gets a page which basically says here is another goal, you (as a player, because my protagonist didn’t care) failed to meet it. It is never funny to be told you failed.

Without a save point, I am never going to try and reach that goal of an invite. If it had a save point, I would save before the choice where you begin to have to priotize how you spend your time. At least I could then pick up from where the story goes in different direction, as it doesn’t have so, I am properly never going to engage with that part of the plot, no matter how many time I replay.

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What do you mean by this? I can’t find any sort of “*multiple” or “*multiple choice” command. I’d love to check it out.

Yeah i still believe that this can be solved by leaving the usage to the player’s choice.

By giving the option at the start of the game what save methof they prefer they can best decide what they favor.

Either a save anytime, auto save or no saves (a mechanic usually called ironman in games).

Some may argue that saving everytime makes it too easy, but if the player prefers that, it’s on him. I’m not gonna dictate how the player should play my game.

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Rebels is not sub-par. Rather, it is the beginning of an evolutionary path.

Frankly, I find it worrying. I thought the philosophy of Choice of Games is choice, and not including the option to save is taking away from the number of choices the player has. After all, those who wish to play without saving can well ignore the save system but those who wish to go back during their game, can’t. And I’m sure not everyone has the time or attention span to go through a game 1000 times if they don’t click right.
It’s a gameplay issue and it should be fixed, as it’s often complained about.
No matter how great the game is, it can become tiring to go through it dozen of times simply because you don’t like the character you created or you didn’t like how the story went with the choices you made.

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Here is the link to the Wiki - the info is about halfway down the page.

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I just read that a few times, and I can’t make head or tails of the explanation–I also can’t find the place to click “result” on that page to see the example.

Nevertheless, that’s exciting! I will definitely need to learn more about *multiple choice.

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Its very exciting in concept … actually working with it, not so exciting, the more I worked with it.

As to the wiki example(s) - I was working with one of the wiki people on updating one based on my sample but I think they are holding off putting that there until after the contest deadline/

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Here’s a link to a post I made some little time ago with a code sample for multiple choices on one page and the result, if that’s at all helpful.

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