borborygmus
Member
Demon's Souls is now widely cited as an example of great game design. People always talk about the combat system and level and encounter design, and indeed these things really are excellently designed.
But I would argue that Demon's Souls' biggest innovation is actually the autosave system. The fact that every single action is instantly and automatically persisted informs everything in the game. Every single aspect of the game exists in a soft game loop. There is no hard Game Over state after which you have to reload your save. You never have to save and reload at all. You are always in the game world. The entire game design is downstream from the save system and that's what enables the frequently cited good parts (combat, level design, encounter design, lore) to be so good. You can now have difficult combat without losing all your progress. You can have huge levels, but shortcuts are now persistent so the levels are manageable. The lore is ingeniously smuggled into item descriptions, and you don't lose items when you die.
I've come to view save scumming as a severe game design flaw. I used to blame myself for doing it. But I realize now that it was always the game's responsibility to take care of saving, and most games just didn't have the design chops to do it. Most games advise players to save often (sometimes this is a loading screen tip), but if you save too often, you're save scumming, but the alternative is to lose progress or get an undesired outcome that the game didn't communicate clearly (CRPGs are notorious for this).
I recently played through Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it was a painful experience. You're basically forced to save scum and the load times are atrocious even on an SSD. The game would be so much better if it employed soft game systems. When your party dies, your characters should respawn somewhere and get a temporary penalty. You should be able to retry a failed persuasion check in most cases. You should be able to yield in combat (TES did this) and un-aggro factions (a few games with faction reputation do this). Ideally, you should be able to have a great experience without ever having to save and reload. You should be able to make a faux pas in a conversation but still manage to recover. Too many times you select a vague dialogue option and everything goes to hell and there's nothing you can do or say anymore. The designers are OK with it because they know players can just reload.
Soft systems are the way to go, and I would like to see much heavier use of recoverable, soft failure states in other genres like CRPGs and stealth games.
As an aside, Demon's Souls' has solved so many game design problems, the rest of the gaming industry still hasn't caught up yet. Let's add save scumming and save management to the list. I want the future of gaming to have less of the following:
- Quicksave/Quickload and save scumming
- Loss of progress
- Cutscenes with info dumps
- Audio logs
- Junk inventory
But I would argue that Demon's Souls' biggest innovation is actually the autosave system. The fact that every single action is instantly and automatically persisted informs everything in the game. Every single aspect of the game exists in a soft game loop. There is no hard Game Over state after which you have to reload your save. You never have to save and reload at all. You are always in the game world. The entire game design is downstream from the save system and that's what enables the frequently cited good parts (combat, level design, encounter design, lore) to be so good. You can now have difficult combat without losing all your progress. You can have huge levels, but shortcuts are now persistent so the levels are manageable. The lore is ingeniously smuggled into item descriptions, and you don't lose items when you die.
I've come to view save scumming as a severe game design flaw. I used to blame myself for doing it. But I realize now that it was always the game's responsibility to take care of saving, and most games just didn't have the design chops to do it. Most games advise players to save often (sometimes this is a loading screen tip), but if you save too often, you're save scumming, but the alternative is to lose progress or get an undesired outcome that the game didn't communicate clearly (CRPGs are notorious for this).
I recently played through Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it was a painful experience. You're basically forced to save scum and the load times are atrocious even on an SSD. The game would be so much better if it employed soft game systems. When your party dies, your characters should respawn somewhere and get a temporary penalty. You should be able to retry a failed persuasion check in most cases. You should be able to yield in combat (TES did this) and un-aggro factions (a few games with faction reputation do this). Ideally, you should be able to have a great experience without ever having to save and reload. You should be able to make a faux pas in a conversation but still manage to recover. Too many times you select a vague dialogue option and everything goes to hell and there's nothing you can do or say anymore. The designers are OK with it because they know players can just reload.
Soft systems are the way to go, and I would like to see much heavier use of recoverable, soft failure states in other genres like CRPGs and stealth games.
As an aside, Demon's Souls' has solved so many game design problems, the rest of the gaming industry still hasn't caught up yet. Let's add save scumming and save management to the list. I want the future of gaming to have less of the following:
- Quicksave/Quickload and save scumming
- Loss of progress
- Cutscenes with info dumps
- Audio logs
- Junk inventory
Last edited: