Add a Progress Auto-Save Feature for Single Player

[SharpeXB]

Problem: Flight sims are the only game genre that doesn't have a system of progress saves or checkpoints. This forces the player to repeat entire missions if they fail or simply don't have the time to complete them. It's a chief obstacle to making this type of game appeal to players and hinders the ability to engage in long realistic campaign style missions. The free flowing style of flight sim gameplay doesn't allow for the type of game-save checkpoints that all other scripted type games use today.

 

Solution: Create a save system for Single Player that simply Auto-Saves your progress every 15-20 minutes. Then the player can resume the game just like is possible in every other style of game.

 

When you examine why flight sims aren't a popular genre of game or why single player campaigns aren't used as much by those who do play flight sims. I think this is the reason. So the above is an easy solution to a big problem. It would greatly increase the appeal of this genre to the average player.

[AndyJWest]

...simply Auto-Saves...

In practice, anything but simple. You need to save the complete state of every object in the game. Right down to the last bullet in flight. Clearly not impossible, but likely to involve a great deal of work if the code wasn't written in a manner to facilitate it. And likely to take a significant amount of time. We know how long a mission takes to load - saving the same amount of data isn't going to be any faster.

[SharpeXB]

In practice, anything but simple. You need to save the complete state of every object in the game. Right down to the last bullet in flight. Clearly not impossible, but likely to involve a great deal of work if the code wasn't written in a manner to facilitate it. And likely to take a significant amount of time. We know how long a mission takes to load - saving the same amount of data isn't going to be any faster.

Ok sure, how about it doesn't auto save right in the middle of the action. Yeah maybe there's a reason in the game code for flight sims that makes this impossible. But all flight sims have a track recording ability. Some like DCS even let you take over the action from the replay which is very nearly the same thing as a game save. X-Plane has a save situation function.

 

But when we see the development team reluctant to make a variety of single player campaign options for this game because the statistical reality is that they aren't played very much. This is the chief reason why. Solve this and more players would use campaigns. The solution in the current official campaign is just to create aerial checkpoints for the air start and end points, which actually works fine as well but it has the effect of simplifying the mission design. A more flexible solution would mean more creative missions designs being playable.

[SharpeXB]

Here's an example of the effect of this limitation when it comes to game appeal. Look at racing sims. Why are these so much more popular than flight sims? Project Cars has 220,000 players. Why?

These are also complex sims and require extra controllers like a wheel & pedals and a TrackIR. Why doesn't that hurt their appeal?

 

Because a race session in these games I'll guess isn't an hour long road trip which you can't save. You can probably jump into the game and get a good experience with it in just a short session.

 

Flight sims also have this terrible lack of in depth single player gameplay like campaigns. Why? Because players don't use them. Why don't players use campaigns? Because they can't save their progress!

 

This gameplay flaw is what kills flight sims, it just kills them.

[Sokol1]

 

 

Because a race session in these games I'll guess isn't an hour long road trip which you can't save. You can probably jump into the game and get a good experience with it in just a short session.

 

This game have the short "5 minutes" flight options for please these that want just fast action...

 

Instead "auto save" what can be practical - already used in flight games on the past, eg. CFS-1/2 - is the skip for the next waypoint - or the "action point"  - with auto disable if enemy AI are near.

But this don't combine with the "unlocks" - that don't combine with combine with "flight games".     

Edited September 3, 2015 by Sokol1

[SharpeXB]

This game have the short "5 minutes" flight options for please these that want just fast action...

 

Instead "auto save" what can be practical - already used in flight games on the past, eg. CFS-1/2 - is the skip for the next waypoint - or the "action point"  - with auto disable if enemy AI are near.

But this don't combine with the "unlocks" - that don't combine with combine with "flight games".     

Right. The solution in the official campaign is to have the Start and Exit and Action points. But that has the effect of simplifying the action and can't be used in other campaigns. Unless the mission editor has that feature?

A system like the above suggestion would make more complex action and scenarios usable.

[TG-55Panthercules]

Sharpe - I agree that if the game lacks a save capability for missions in progress then that is a huge short-coming for the SP experience.  HOWEVER, as a primarily SP kinda person I don't really like the idea of any sort of "auto-save" mechanism (if it really could operate in the background without creating any noticeable sort of lag/hitch/stutter while the player was flying I'd be OK with the auto-save idea, but if they can't even get nearby planes/objects to spawn in without a noticeable glitch/stutter I don't have any faith that they could actually do an auto-save without the player noticing).

 

What I think would be a perfectly acceptable solution would be to simply give the player the ability, as an option that pops up after hitting Esc to stop playing the mission, to tell the game to save the mission at that point on its way to closing down and returning to the main menu.  I'm pretty sure that most players would routinely choose to do that during a relatively "quiet moment" in the mission, so the need to have super-high-fidelity saving of "every bullet in flight" really shouldn't be necessary to accomplish the basic goal of letting the player return to essentially the same point in the mission next time they can play again.

[SharpeXB]

Good points. Whatever solution you'd want it to be unobtrusive as possible, definitely not have it lag or pause the game.

Obviously the direct save and load situation feature is easiest for the player. I saw many games have that feature in the past. But today they all seem to have only checkpoint saves. I wonder if the reason is that allowing the player to just "qsave" as it was called meant that they could just cheat their way through the game by saving repeatedly and spoil the challenge. Why that should matter in a sim who can say. An Auto-Save would be similar to checkpoints if that matters.

But some type of system is needed. I get the idea that game design should force a certain amount of challenge on the player. But making them repeat hour long missions is perhaps too much challenge.

The system that's in the official campaign is what it is and actually works well for what it does. A save at will system there for example would just make getting points/unlocks too easy.

 

I'm thinking about a system for other potential content.

Edited September 4, 2015 by SharpeXB

[TG-55Panthercules]

 A save at will system there for example would just make getting points/unlocks too easy.

 

 

Aw, MAN - you didn't actually say that, did you?  Those &@#?!!* unlocks shouldn't be in the game anyway, other than (perhaps, if you really need to cater to the console/Steam crowd) as an OPTION for those players who like them and want to use them - and on that basis, why does it matter how easy it is to get the points/unlocks??

 

I'm resigned to them being there (as long as they are optional) because they do seem to appeal to some part of the target audience the devs are chasing, and I want them to capture as many players as possible so they'll have enough money to keep developing and improving the game.

 

BUT (and don't take this personally - it's not intended that way), it really chaps me big time to see the unlocks used as a rationale for not implementing a much-needed feature that would improve the SP experience way more than the dadgum unlocks ever will.

Edited September 5, 2015 by TG-55Panthercules

[SharpeXB]

Aw, MAN - you didn't actually say that, did you?  Those &@#?!!* unlocks shouldn't be in the game anyway, other than (perhaps, if you really need to cater to the console/Steam crowd) as an OPTION for those players who like them and want to use them - and on that basis, why does it matter how easy it is to get the points/unlocks??

 

I'm resigned to them being there (as long as they are optional) because they do seem to appeal to some part of the target audience the devs are chasing, and I want them to capture as many players as possible so they'll have enough money to keep developing and improving the game.

 

BUT (and don't take this personally - it's not intended that way), it really chaps me big time to see the unlocks used as a rationale for not implementing a much-needed feature that would improve the SP experience way more than the dadgum unlocks ever will.

Well this is really a different subject. But yes, as a game design philosophy I think every game contains a form of "enforced challenge" whatever you want to call it. If a player in BoS doesn't want to play for the unlocks they can bypass them anyways.

 

What I'm saying is such a save feature isn't needed for the official campaign and wouldn't work with how it's designed. It already includes the short mission feature in any case.

 

For an example, the original Crysis had a qsave feature. The trouble is you can advance through tough missions by just saving the game repeatedly, minute by minute, to advance through the game. But it ends up feeling sorta ridiculous robbing yourself of the challenge and actually allows you to spoil the experience. I'm guessing that's why this feature isn't seen, in action games anyways.

 

So in a career mode should a player get to resurrect themselves with a save slot or face virtual death? It could just be left up to mission design. Desasteroft for CoD was quite exciting with its enforced Dead is Dead mode, so a qsave would spoil that too. I was wrong about racing games, I hear they can have 24 hour marathon races which can't even be paused. Having options in the ME would add some creativity in design.

[TG-55Panthercules]

Yeah, but like anything else that is "enforced"/mandatory, an "enforced Dead is Dead mode" would be horrible from my perspective, unless there were an option not to use it (in which case, how "enforced" is it, really?).  When given the option of having a normal/good career mode for SP, I actually play all my careers as "Dead is Dead" - BUT, I would only bother to do that if there were, in fact. a way that it was not "enforced" and I was able to opt out of that under appropriate circumstances.  

 

I've just had too many situations come up where RL factors dictate that I have to quit out of the game unexpectedly (game bugs crashing out my PC, non-game programs I've missed or been unable to de-activate firing up in the background and interfering, power failures, realizing it's gotten to be 2 a.m. on a work night and I'm still miles behind enemy lines, etc.).  There's no way I'd be willing to invest my time in nursing a truly "enforced" DiD career along for weeks or maybe months if it was subject to destruction for such a reason totally unconnected with the whole point of playing the career in the first place.  I'm playing SP to try to simulate/recreate an immersive, historical experience, so I don't have any problem with my virtual pilot "dying" and having to start another career for some sort of historically plausible reason, but not because of the historical equivalent of an alien invasion or divine intervention.  So, inclusion of that sort of mandatory DiD would actually make an SP player like me less likely to buy or play the game.

 

And if some SP player wants to do something as seemingly stupid as saving the game every minute to work their way through a hard level, why the hell should I (or anybody else) care?  It's their game, and it's single player - why not let them play it the way they want?  

 

Frankly, it's the bizarre notion that it needs to matter to the devs or anybody else how some player does in a SP game that seems to be the cause of the craziness of thinking that mandatory unlocks are a good idea - it's that fundamentally flawed premise that takes something that, at most, should be thought of as a marginally desirable option and turns it into something that is considered necessary (and therefore mandatory), and thus anything that gives the player an option to avoid them starts being thought of as a bad thing, and something that shouldn't be done because it might "allow [them] to spoil the experience".  

 

But this really misses the point - why is it necessary to prevent a player from spoiling their own SP experience, if that's what they choose to do?  And where is the sense or utility in spoiling one set of players' experiences because you're fixated on trying to keep some other players from spoiling their own experience?  

 

It's been my experience that most of those people you try to "save from themselves" are not going to thank you for doing that, and the other people you screw over in the process of trying to "save" the first group are certainly not going to thank you for doing that either, so basically any time you head down that path it's going to be a lose-lose proposition.  And that's basically what we saw play out here over the past few months.

 

But, that horse has been beat to death many times so I'll step down off that particular soap box now.

 

I do think your original idea of creating some way for SP players to save career missions in progress is a good one, even if we differ on the details about how that might best be accomplished.  I do hope they consider doing this in some fashion, but I really hope they do it (if at all) in a way that provides the players with the most options and flexibility as to when, whether and how they actually use any mechanism they might come up with.