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Drozdov

AAAAARGH! Fix the boobytrapped save system!

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I'm furious enough to crush my mouse and chew through my desk, but I'll try and keep this coherent...

I was in the final stage of the Manhattan mission of the campaign - without giving anything away, it's one where you have a million objectives that take hours to complete, especially the first time around when you don't know where to go. I got killed and reverted back to the autosave point just before the final objective... or so I thought, because I managed to click the restart mission save instead. I'd already had to revert multiple times in quick succession, so I wasn't exactly paying attention to the warnings of losing saves and progress etc - that's what it says normally, anyway, and the only difference is it says you're restarting the mission. So, it sent me back to the start... no big deal, I thought, I can just close Arma with Alt+F4 and my old save won't have been touched yet. Hey, wait... it says it's SAVING??? :eek:

......

...

So, after punching the desk and shouting 'FUCK!' extremely loudly at 5 in the morning (while others in the house were sleeping), I relaunched Arma to confirm my fears - I'd irrevocably lost all my progress in that mission. A mission I'd been playing for 5 hours or so. :crazy:

You could say it's my fault for hitting the wrong button, and then doing the wrong thing to fix it... but, fuck me, it's an easy mistake to make, and even if it wasn't, it doesn't excuse the rubbish save system. Why is there only one slot for autosave points, why does restarting the mission have to immediately destroy all previous revert points, and WHY OH WHY does it save the game when you press alt+F4? To avoid losing progress when pressing it by accident I guess, but then why not just a confirm screen? It can only be to prevent cheating... but wait, who would you be cheating? The game itself? It cares that it's being cheated? Come on...

This isn't the only potential save-destroying trap. Just before this happened, the game triggered an autosave while I was in the middle of being fired at by a tank, and with an enemy AT soldier charging at me. If one of those shots was a lethal one only interrupted by the save process, it would have meant I lived about 0.01 seconds every time I loaded. Since every autosave overwrites the last, that would mean I'd have to start the whole mission again (I hadn't used a user save slot so I'd no backup).

All of these boobytraps could be avoided if the save system was improved. For a start, autosaves shouldn't only use 1 slot throughout the campaign. They may not be tiny files, they're about 14mb, but surely almost everyone would prefer to sacrifice a relatively small amount of hard drive space to ensure you're never going to lose much progress if something bad happens to a save. Just make it so each autosave is unique; they can be deleted when the mission is completed. Secondly, restarting a mission shouldn't automatically eradicate all previous saves for that mission, there's no real need for this at least until the first 'checkpoint' is reached. Thirdly, alt+f4 shouldn't force an auto save, there should be a quit confirmation window instead.

I thought patch 1.02 was supposed to support multiple save slots, but I've seen no evidence of this at all. I guess it only means for the unlimited user saves feature, which means it's only useful for regular difficulty and below (why isn't that enabled for higher difficulties as an optional setting?).

Edited by Drozdov

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GREAT WALL OF TEXT

Real life doesn't give you saves or auto saves.

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In real life, the success of major US military operations doesn't hinge on 4 poorly armed men in an average APC either. In real life, you're not the only one who can't see through undergrowth/tree branches. Real life takes more than a bit of coding to make major improvements to. Real life doesn't have a restart mission feature. What exactly is your point? Good luck trying to get through ArmA 2 without saves of any kind.

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and in real life you die if you get killed, luckily this is just a game

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In real life this is still a stupid and frustrating game issue.

A system like Half Life 2's alternating saves would be a massive improvement.

When I balls up a save point, I typically stop playing the game, rather than repeat 5 hours of tedium.

If it is a small mission I may pick it up again another day, if it is a long one, I may abandon it completely. That often includes me abandoning a gametitle completely.

Fighting the game system in ArmA was a far greater challenge than fighting the enemies.

Get 3/4 of the way through a long mission only to find that a trigger has been broken and I can't finish the mission. I can't go far back to find the trigger breaking event because I only have one save point.

So it's a case of redo the whole thing again, not because I died, but because the game is broken.

Some extra saves would go a long way to alleviating the frustration. 2 alternating save positions would be a good start.

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Basically the save system is designed so you can only have 1 save, and every time you revert you cannot undo it (though I'm not sure what doing "end process" (process, not task) on Arma 2 would've done). This obviously sucks (just like COD4 system basically).

They should really do something more like the GRAW 2 system...

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As I said, I've seen no sign of this. All I get is an autosave slot and a user save slot. Do you get 7 slots on Regular difficulty? I'm playing on Veteran.

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so I wasn't exactly paying attention to the warnings of losing saves and progress etc - ).

err. you were not paying attention to what you did and now want to blame?

edit - 7 slots? how?

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Hello all

Firstly Im sorry to hear of your game loss, it happens to the best of us.

Secondly, I found the lack of more than one save is what made ofp so tense and exciting for me, and altered my play style considerably from other fps i was playing at the time.

So, for me saves/respawn are not high on my list of must haves, but for those who have to save it would be nice to have the option turn on and offable.

rgds

LoK

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Hello all

Firstly Im sorry to hear of your game loss, it happens to the best of us.

Secondly, I found the lack of more than one save is what made ofp so tense and exciting for me, and altered my play style considerably from other fps i was playing at the time.

So, for me saves/respawn are not high on my list of must haves, but for those who have to save it would be nice to have the option turn on and offable.

rgds

LoK

My thoughts as well. I'm also on Manhattan and wasted my 1 save on the exact point before '2' gets shot in the head by a tank. So I use the autosave thats about 5 minutes before that moment and actually knowing that I don't have any save makes the game that much more tense and alive for me. Thats why I play on Veteran.

You could always play on the level below Vet. and then adjust it's settings to closely resemble Vet. as well as have your multiple saves.

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Try reading what I actually said, people. I don't want more user save slots (I didn't use a user save point in that mission, it's not necessary because of the number of auto save points), although it'd be nice if the option was there on all difficulty levels; I want autosaves to NOT OVERWRITE THE PREVIOUS ONE, and instead be separate saves so you could go back to an earlier point if something fucks up, and you wouldn't have to redo a whole huge mission. I also don't want restarting to eradicate the other saves, there's no need for it.

err. you were not paying attention to what you did and now want to blame?

Who reads a warning message every time? I'd already reverted normally a few times in a row since a damn BMP kept killing me. It's virtually the same as the normal 'you'll lose progress blah blah' message if you hit the restart mission instead of the autosave in the list, so it's easy to do that by mistake. In no other game I've ever played (except OFP and ArmA 1, of course) would restarting a mission delete all the save points.

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and in real life you die if you get killed

It's true.

In the mean time, why don't you just create a user save point after every autosave (I know it's a tedious, but we can't always be lazy), as I recall reading that in one of the patches the ability to create multiple saves was added. Personally I avoid even using the save points created by the mission (and I just load from user saves) since you can't always predict what's going to happen in OFP/ArmA series games.

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I never use any user saves... But it would be nice if I could go back to ANY of the auto save points without losing all the other auto saves. The fact that autosaves overwrite eachother and restarting mission practically deletes your autosave as well is really anoying. COD4 has this very same system which is anoying there as well, but at least in COD4 there's very little correlation between what you do in one part to what you do in the other.

I wouldn't mind playing with no saves at all if the missions were designed accordingly (that is, that they are realistically long and hard and thus are doable without autosaves - see: SWAT 4).

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Ctrl + Alt + Delete then shutdown arma2.exe would have shut it down without saving. It does support multiple save slots, for when you save manually. Autosave should only use one slot.

Nothing wrong, essentially your fault.

And fyi, 5 hours for that mission is pretty slow.

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ArmA's save system is perfect then? Nothing wrong with having only one autosave slot, which can wreck your game even if you don't do something wrong? What if it autosaves just before you're about to die? It frequently autosaves during combat, and if it does it at the wrong moment, you're fucked. Guess that would be my fault too?

For your information, there's nothing wrong with being slow. I like to go about things realistically and thoroughly, checking every village I go through for something interesting. There's a lot of stuff to do in that mission, and not much useful intel to tell you where several objectives are.

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The autosave system makes no sense. A game like COD4 can get away with it due to little long-term consequences for your actions, though even in COD4 I had some frustrating moments with it, like getting stuck with sniper rifle + pistol after you take the shot with the M82 and are facing dozens of hostiles in the street, when you would've rolled a bit back and picked up a real weapon from one of the earlier parts if you could, but instead you have to either deal with inappropriate weapons or to restart the whole mission.

I wouldn't mind for saves of any kind if the missions were realistically short. IRL you may have no saves, but you also don't get sent to perform a large amount of objectives killing a large amount of hostiles on the way while being expected to take 0 casaulties. The current (official) mission design pretty mcuh requires autosaves to be playable, and having only one autosave can really screw you over.

I've already had once where the autosave saved right as I was getting shot at. Luckily if I spammed my prone button as the save was loading I managed to hit the ground before the bullets killed me, and that mission only had 1 autosave point anyway and wasn't very long, but if this would've happened after a 1 hour mission with no way of getting away from enemy fire, I would've been really angry.

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ArmA's save system is perfect then? Nothing wrong with having only one autosave slot, which can wreck your game even if you don't do something wrong? What if it autosaves just before you're about to die? It frequently autosaves during combat, and if it does it at the wrong moment, you're fucked. Guess that would be my fault too?

For your information, there's nothing wrong with being slow. I like to go about things realistically and thoroughly, checking every village I go through for something interesting. There's a lot of stuff to do in that mission, and not much useful intel to tell you where several objectives are.

I know there are alot of things, completed it myself. Did everything except the smugglers, tried talking to every civilian I passed and such, took me 1 ½ hours to complete the mission. And the autosave is not frequent, it autosaves after something important say a completed objective. Yes I agree that if it saves when an RPG is 2 meters away from you that kinda sucks, but even that happens very rarely and since you can save yourself at anytime during SP that is not really a problem.

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Secondly, I found the lack of more than one save is what made ofp so tense and exciting for me, and altered my play style considerably from other fps i was playing at the time.

I found it really annoying, and ended up alt+tabbing out every time I saved it so I could rename the savegame and thus be able to save again. If I hadn't been able to do that, the frustration would've driven me off and I wouldn't have bought Arma1 or be going to buy Arma2.

I understand the appeal of single-playthrough with no reloading, but it's a game and as such should be able to be experienced in the way that gives the player the most enjoyment. For me, I do like to play it through and try to deal with my mistakes and failures as I go without reverting to a savegame, but I also really like the comfort of knowing the last 30 minutes or hour I spent won't be wasted because of a bit of dodgy AI or because I'm not 100% sure how to operate a particular weapon or vehicle, etc.

More importantly, even if the game does let you save an unlimited number of times, there's no reason you have to take advantage of that. If you want to play through without savepoints (and only save to protect you from system crashes or power failures) then do that. Making extra saves available doesn't hurt your gameplay at all, no matter how hardcore you are. To me it seems a no-brainer.

Regarding the original question; it might help if the "restart" prompt was markedly different to the "reload" prompt - i.e. a different background colour or something. That should be fairly simple to do, and would give the player an extra opportunity to realise they've clicked the wrong button.

But in addition, I don't think it's good to have a significant distinction between autosaves and user saves. It should behave the same regardless of what initiated the save. Consistency is good and helps avoid unpleasant surprises. If that's not possible, disabling autosaves altogether would probably be better. Maybe just pop up a hint suggesting now would be a good time to save the game? It is a bit jarring when everything suddenly stops while it spontaneously saves.

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Hello there,

I understand your point completely, that's why I added that it would be nice to have it turn on and offable so each of us can play in the style to which we were accustomed.

Choice is KEY.

rgds

LoK

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Hello there,

I understand your point completely, that's why I added that it would be nice to have it turn on and offable so each of us can play in the style to which we were accustomed.

Choice is KEY.

rgds

LoK

Keep in mind this isn't about having/not having saves, but rather about not losing your save for something stupid and often unavoidable.

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hello there,

Yes true, sorry i often get wrapped up in me own world.

apologies

LoK

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