Cronozilla wrote:It is something innocuous, but the way checkpoints work now is significantly better than how they were even 6 years ago. A lot of games, especially FPS on PC would have checkpoints and quick saving. But there was no logic done at either. So the game would literally just write the game class state to disk and be done with it regardless if you were, let's say, dead.
It was such a chronic problem. I experienced this in, Half-Life, Far Cry, all of the Medal of Honors, all the Call of Duty games. It's incredibly aggravating to have a checkpoint death loop where your only option is ... IF the game supported it ... restarting the entire chapter.
This, I believe, has largely been eliminated ... but it might be a byproduct of chucking health bars in general.
I think it's more the advances in level design. Early FPS's would be solid action from level start to level finish, so the only place you could safely auto save would be at level start/end. If they added mid-level saves they tended to be time gated.
Now you have level design that has a larger flow to it, so developers tend to create levels that go through an action section, then a quiet section. Half Life was one of the progenitors of this style. If done properly you can still maintain tension; as long as the quiet sections look like the action sections you don't know if this hallway has monsters in it or is just a path from A-B. But since you have well defined breaks in the action you can set up auto saves at those points.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
