I was chatting with some friends over at VGEvo.com the other day and one of the hosts of the Playstation Nation Podcast commented that his brother had just overwritten his Lost Odyssey save with about 20 hours of gameplay in it. It sparked a good conversation and immediately reminded me of a similar situation where I wiped out my wife’s Rayman save (the original Rayman, back on the PS1) at about 95% complete. It’s a moment of instant dread (provided you realize what you’ve done). This got me to thinking about how saved games are handled on the current gen systems and to a large degree, they haven’t changed much at all over the years. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve come along some, but not nearly as much as they should have. I think I have an answer to the issue that has sporadically affected a lot of us and frankly, I don’t think it’s too terribly difficult to handle from the platform owners’ perspective.
What I propose is that game saves are implemented in a versioning system of sorts, with a clearly visible history. Take for example the PS3’s Saved Game Utility. Imagine if you navigated to that in the XMB (Xross Media Bar; the PS3’s “dashboard”) and located your saved game. When you clicked on it, you were presented with a list on the XMB of timestamped versions of your saves. At any time, you could navigate your older saves and promote an older one to the top of the stack so it becomes the “current” state. What this would allow us to avoid is a situation like the one I mentioned above where you (or someone else) accidentally overwrites your save… you simply go to the last save before that gaming session and promote it to be the “active” state and when you restart your game, you’re back in business.
For deleted saved games, there would need to be a “Deleted Saves” entry on the XMB where you could enter and browse deleted saves with the option of restoring to undeleted status or promoting a state to the active state of an existing non-deleted version of the save game. In other words, I play COD4, get a consider amount, delete my save game, start a new save then realize I want to renew my old save… I could simply copy the most recent “state” from the deleted save to the “active” state of the save that I didn’t delete… by letting games only see the currently active state, they won’t need to be programmed any differently than they are now. You wouldn’t be able to change states while actively playing a game, but it would in effect give you complete control over your saved games.
Of course a plan like this would need to have some limitations in place (ideally, user-defined limitations) to keep your hard drive from getting clogged with an infinite collection of old saves. My DVR has a function where I can tell it to keep old shows “until space is needed” and that seems reasonable enough here too… If you could set some global history limits to the number of old game saves the system kept, you wouldn’t use up an insane amount of hard drive space. You should also be given the flexibility to mark a particular game’s saves as “keep all iterations”. I would propose each distinct memory card operation from a game would spawn a new “state” in a save that would be viewable by timestamps.
While I’ve provided a rather graphic example of how this could be handled for the PS3, the same could be done for the Xbox 360 and Wii, just with a slightly different user interface. If not touched at all, the default behavior should be to behave exactly as traditional game saves do although tossing in a “5 most recent states” by default could help protect in the event of an occasional disaster. It would just be best to have some conservative size limits be the default for systems like the Wii or 360 Arcade model.
I would love to also see enhanced support for backing up your saved games up in a way that lets you get the saves off your console without resorting to proprietary memory cards like the 360’s. While the PS3 lets you do this, I’d love to see it be more functional. Would it make sense for Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo to offer online backups of your saved games? I haven’t checked the size of many saves of my games but I can’t imagine they’re too terribly large. Keeping in mind that you’re usually tied to a specific user’s profile with your saves, would you find it useful to be able to back them up off site?
So what do you think? Would total control over your save game states be something you’d be interested in? The idea seems like it has merit to me and it’s an area we’ve seen relatively little progress over the years. Have you ever been burned by an accidentally deleted or overwritten game save? Share your story here and let me know if you think these ideas should be implemented?
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16 responses so far ↓
1 Keith K // Mar 4, 2008 at 2:04 pm
A Saved Game system based on Photoshop History lists… I like it! Have it on my desk monday.
2 Frantik // Mar 4, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Wait–the PS3 & 360 profile system keeps each user’s save data seperate from each other. Take for instance my situation, there’s about 5 profiles on my 360 at home (mine, my girlfriend’s, my sister’s & two other friends). My data for something like Gears of War or Halo 3 doesn’t show up when my sister logs in to play Halo 3. The PS3 does this too I think (can’t really say, I’m the only one in the house that plays it).
There shouldn’t be any reason anyone would have to share a profile on the 360. It doesn’t take much memory to create seperate profiles.
3 photomaster94 // Mar 4, 2008 at 2:53 pm
it sounds like you want time machine, the program that macs use to back up memory, on a PS3
4 balaamsafe // Mar 4, 2008 at 3:39 pm
i don’t like having to swithc “port” i always forget to do it whan playing my ps2 games, have to quit them, assign the ports and reopen them
I would love to have my saves accesible on my psn account, so they are backed up by sony and i can use them at friends houses
5 Artemas // Mar 4, 2008 at 3:44 pm
So basicly a recycle bin? Actualy as simple as it is that would be the greatest thing ever. I gerenrally delete my save data if if going to trade in a game but like I did with Orane box, I had second thoughts.
6 ajnokia // Mar 4, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I dont think a feauture like this is really needed. Because when you delete you have to confirm. So if you delete it its your own fault you didnt do it by mistake. Just back them up on a USB drive
7 haydenkayne // Mar 4, 2008 at 4:56 pm
oh ajnokia youre so perfect, heaven forbid someone make a mistake and want to offer a solution. rothbart keep up the good work
8 Sean "rothbart" Workman // Mar 4, 2008 at 5:05 pm
@ajnokia: Clearly it’s not “needed”, but neither are most of the features we enjoy on today’s consoles. This is intended to be one of those features that can save you from tremendous heartache when a very valuable save gets deleted or overwritten. Accidents happen. People that don’t understand profiles do things. Overwriting saves happen.
If I was able to granularly manipulate my save game states and keep a user-defined length history of them, it’d be a pretty nice fature in my opinion. It could certainly default to the “normal” state if people preferred it to.
@Artemas: No, much more than a Recycle Bin. A recycle bin only deals with deletions. What if someone overwrites your save (ie. starts over, saves on top of yours or accidentally completes some level you haven’t played yet)? You could simply roll back to a previous save before that happened and you wouldn’t have to futz with backing up your saves to a USB device all the time… if the mechanism was built in and automatic, it’d be a nice safety net.
@photomaster94: I don’t have/use a Mac, so it’s very possible if it does what I’ve described.
9 ninja9393 // Mar 4, 2008 at 5:26 pm
WOW
That’s what i was always wanting!
it kinda works like Photoshops history!
good idea
10 smon jiff // Mar 4, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Somebody needs to forward this to the guys over at Sony…
11 Maul // Mar 5, 2008 at 12:47 am
ahhh, rayman at 95%.
I know the feeling ¬_¬
Anyway, Pokemon. My brother and sister continually ask if they can play my pokemon ganmes, i allways say “DON’T SAVE!”
and they allways do.
12 Farko // Mar 5, 2008 at 6:08 am
Another nice feature to add to the ps3 gamesaves would be to turn them into little 3D icons or animations, like the ps2 did.
I remember when I went to delete my devil may cry 3 save (witch was a little 3D icon resembling lady) and when I got the “Are you sure you want to delete this data” message, the little lady started crying
It was a nice touch, and it’s also why I couldn’t bring myself to delete that data for a whole year.
13 Frantik // Mar 5, 2008 at 8:18 am
@Farko
It didn’t stop me–heh, heh, heh.
14 Sean "rothbart" Workman // Mar 5, 2008 at 1:11 pm
@balaamsafe: If you’ve already got the virtual PS2 card defined, you don’t have to quit the PS2 game to switch cards, simply push the PS button, go to Assign Slots, and assign a new card to Slot 1 or Slot 2 as needed. Now if you don’t already have a card defined, sure, you have to exit the game… it’d be nice to be able to do that. My advice… always keep a blank virtual memory card ready.
15 dacooksta // Mar 5, 2008 at 3:28 pm
this could make achievements alot easier to get.
this is off topic, but worth mentioning.
Suppose a game has multiple endings.
you could save right before each decision (you kill monster 1 and have ending 1/you add monster 1 to your party and have ending 2)
and then get achievements alot faster by continuing from each decision point instead of restarting the game all over.
I don’t own Bioshock, but I am aware it has multiple endings depending on how many (or whether or not) you save the little sisters.
If you get achievements for getting the different endings, you could save all the little sisters, then save right before you meet the last one. If you save it, then beat the game you get the good ending and an achievement. if you harvest that one sister, you get the evil ending, and another achievement.
remember, i do not own Bioshock, it may not be how it works. But still.
16 Frantik // Mar 5, 2008 at 4:19 pm
@dacooksta
I (accidentally) did that on Kane & Lynch. Near the end of the game, Kane has to make a choice whether or not to save the other “buddies”. I got the achievement “Damned If You Do” but then I died and my previous checkpoint was right before that “decision moment”. I then chose to save the other guys, fought some more, got the “not quite as bad” ending and the “Damned If You Don’t” Achievement.
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