 Why do you play games? It seems like an obvious question to us, but the truth is that almost everyone plays games for different reasons. I play games because I like the feeling of getting better at things. I've talked to a bunch of people who play games because they like the more interactive nature of storytelling you find in games, and still others enjoy exploration and getting lost in a virtual world. This diversity of what people look for in games means different people end up gravitating to different genres. But the way our games are designed manages to narrow their audience. The Souls series is almost perfectly designed to be enjoyed by people who are looking mainly for exploration and immersion, but unless they also happen to be someone who plays games because they like challenge, they're excluded. Then a game like Dishonored could be a perfect game for someone who likes challenge, but the way it's difficult to in safe states are designed means ultimately someone like me finds them too easy without setting artificial restrictions to themselves. But this isn't how it has to be. If more games made simple changes to how progression was gated and how checkpoints and safe states were handled, people who don't like hard games could love Demon Souls and people who like hard games could love Dishonored. Today, let's take a few minutes to talk about saves coming, difficulty, accessibility, and how games could be more things to more people by giving more power to shape the experience over to the player. We'll look at a few great games that do saves and difficulty terrible, and a few that do it wonderfully after the logo. Dishonored I first started thinking about this topic a few months ago. After I had finally put down Doom Eternal, I ended up playing the Dishonored series. Now I love almost every game Arcane is made, despite some criticisms I have that apply to all of them. I think Prey is one of the very best games of the last generation, and I think the Dishonored games are both fantastic. On level design and arc direction, Arcane games are a joy. But as I played through Dishonored 1 and 2 and that death of the outsider one, a glaring flaw became apparent to me. The game ends up being entirely too easy, because the ability to save whenever you want makes players like me unwilling to live with the consequences of my mistakes. Because the game so clearly is pushing the player to perfect stealth, failing stealth almost always made me just reload the last save. Dishonored scores a player based upon how many times guards are alerted and how many times an enemy is killed. If you're spotted often and kill lots of guards, the game calls that run high chaos. And while it doesn't call that a low score, it's obvious that the developers consider that the wrong way to play. The best endings are locked behind the least lethal, most stealthy runs. And indeed Dishonored is far more fun when played stealthily, because the difficulty of the game lies in navigating the levels without killing or being seen. Corvo and Emily have so many powers that it's quite trivial to make your way through the game if you're willing to kill everything. So I have no problem with having the best ending locked behind the low chaos run. The problem arises when you mix that design with a quick save system. Dishonored, like most games, has the standard for difficulty levels. These difficulty levels affect enemy health, healing efficiency, enemy reinforcements and enemy perceptiveness. This is actually a pretty good way to balance difficulty in a stealth game. But every single one of those changes is negated by the one thing that's not in the difficulty options. Save states. Because I'm the type of player who's trying to achieve perfection whenever I play a game, I basically cannot stop myself from reloading a save when something goes wrong. This doesn't actually make the game easier, but it does make the game more tedious. In a way, I am repeatedly attempting to beat the level in the most difficult way possible. So when I'm spotted by an enemy, I get pissed off and reload the last save to try and do it perfectly. This robs the game of its tension and consequences of failure. Healing doesn't really matter as a system if I'm going to negate ever being seen by reloading the last save. The simple issue of being able to quick save the game and reload on failure almost ruins the carefully designed difficulty that actually is present in the Dishonored titles. You may not seem like it is, but it's there. Many games have a super hardcore mode that affects saving. Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 both have a hardcore mode that has a binary effect on saves. In all difficulties, you can save at any time. While in the survival mode, you can only save by sleeping in a bed. While the Fallout save system is too rigid and binary, even just that would make Dishonored an immensely better game. But the problem in save states shouldn't need to be packaged with all the other things that fall under the hardest difficulty. Playing on Fallout 4 on the hardest difficulty gives you the very best experience when it comes to save states, but kinda the most miserable when it comes to combat. It's not fun for me to dump a hundred shots into a super mutant. And it's just not fun to like peek out behind a rock over and over and over and have to, you know, go into my menu and heal over and over. It doesn't feel good. Having played Dishonored on both the normal and harder difficulties, I found the hardest one to be annoying. I don't want enemies that can see me through walls. It's too restrictive. Games should have their standard difficulty modes that affect health, damage, unit types, enemy density, and enemy awareness, but they should have a separate setting that specifically deals with save states. Dishonored, for me, would be best if it was played on the hard difficulty, but with the ability to save turned off. But to really allow for the game to be enjoyed by anyone, it should have several save state options in addition to the several difficulty options. Should allow saving at any time. Medium should allow the player to save twice per level. Hard should only allow once per level. And then perma death mode should not allow any saving at all. And these options should only be able to be changed before a mission starts, except for perma death, of course, which should completely disable any changes. And this should be the default for any stealth based game. Prey would have been immensely better if you could only save upon loading into a new area. The reason I loved Prey Moon Crash so much more as a gameplay experience had everything to do with the situation that dynamically emerged in a game that doesn't allow you to save at all. By making this relatively simple design change, the game is now enjoyable for people looking for a deep challenge and for people just looking to explore the systems and the story. Players need to be protected from themselves. But that doesn't mean the developers should decide everything for them. I happen to know that I cannot be trusted with a quick save in Dishonored. But it would be terrible to eliminate the option for players who want to be able to quick save and get through levels perfectly. More options is better. Now, Dishonored is where we started this because it's the one game that best demonstrates problems with how games do difficulty in saving. But there's another game in a totally different genre that's kind of broken by the way it handles death. Borderlands. I think Borderlands 2 and 3 are both wonderful games. 2 has a vastly superior story while 3 has vastly superior gameplay. But both suffer badly from the way saving and checkpoints are handled. Borderlands doesn't have saves or checkpoints. Instead, death simply responds the player and charges them a currency penalty. This system makes the gameplay worse. It allows the developers to be lazy and sloppy in their encounter design and is so kind of catastrophic for the plot that the new U-Stations you respond at are literally not canon. Let's look at how the new U-Stations, just like the Vita chambers from Bioshock, ruin the experience a player like me wants from a shooter. Because dying doesn't even respawn enemies, it allows the developers to throw as many bullet sponge hit scan weapon-wielding mobs as they can into every encounter. Borderlands 2 was a wonky shooter. Held up by its loot, its story, and its charm. But Borderlands 3 is a really great feeling shooter. Held back by its bad respawn system and the cascading effects on enemy and encounter design that follow from that core system. Borderlands 3 in your first playthrough has two difficulty settings. Easy, which makes enemies have low health and damage and is pointlessly easy. And normal, which seems to beef up enemy health. These don't actually end up having too much of an effect on gameplay, though. Difficulty is still just balanced by the number next to your gun. If you're not using guns that are high enough level, eventually the intense sponginess of the enemies becomes so overbearing that you can't kill them without running out of ammo. Borderlands as a shooter can make a ton of lazy design choices because the game has such a simple difficulty system and allows such a generous respawn system. Because of those systems, difficulty isn't carefully designed anywhere except for in boss fights and difficult sections turn into unenjoyable wars of attrition where you kill a ton of enemies, get killed, respawn and finish the arena. For a player like me, death needs to have an actual penalty. If Borderlands respawned all the enemies and restarted the encounter whenever you died, how would the game need to change to keep working? Arenas would need to be far more carefully designed so that dying always felt like the player's fault. Less enemies would have to have hitscan weapons, but for the most part, it wouldn't be changing the core of the game. A change like this would need to be something optional, though, just like it would be in dishonored, because the way the respawn system works in Borderlands makes the game quite a bit easier. And lots of players enjoy Borderlands for farming, not for difficulty. But this system does make the game significantly less fun for someone like me who wants every death to matter and wants to beat encounters without dying, respawning me with half the enemies killed or damaged robs me of the ability to actually beat the encounter. Instead pushes stupid play where nothing I do really matters because sooner or later I will win every war of attrition because I can come back to life and they can't. Let's compare that system with the shooter that best handles difficulty of any game in the genre. Doom Eternal. Eternal has the best suite of difficulty options of any shooter ever and probably any game ever, including Doom 2016. In Doom, there is no save system beyond checkpoints. Every arena must be completed from start to finish to get the next checkpoint. This means that the game is forgiving because you never lose more than one arena of progress, but also challenging because each and every arena must be completed as designed to move forward. The standard difficulties from I'm too young to die to nightmare, change enemy behavior, health and damage to offer a more customized experience that allows every player to find the difficulty that feels best for them. And Doom Eternal allows for the difficulty to be changed at any time. Just this system is already pretty well designed, but the game goes further. There is the Ultra Nightmare Permadeath mode for people that want that. But the addition of the extra life mode is a stroke of genius. It's basically a more forgiving Ultra Nightmare mode, and it's available for all difficulty options. I find Ultra Nightmare too difficult to bother slogging through to finish. I've made it through four levels before dying, and while I'm confident I could probably do it if I was a willing to put in the time, I'm not really driven to do it. However, extra life mode on Nightmare is almost perfectly designed for someone like me. It still requires a bit of mastery and allows for the kind of tension and consequences I'm looking for without being too difficult and punishing. Doom's entire design would be ruined by allowing you to save your way through encounters or by allowing you to die and respawn and like just kind of keep whittling down the enemies. And while I feel the game is almost perfectly balanced on Nightmare difficulty, it didn't decide that because Nightmare is how the developers and FPS veterans play it, that's the only way to play the game. Instead, they offered a wide range of difficulty. The ability to change that difficulty at any time, a permadeath mode and then the extra life mode, which is a forgiving permadeath system. Did this wide variety of difficulty options hurt the game? Do any of them great against the design of the game? No. In fact, the game only benefits from more players being able to engage with it. There's a reason I have played a Turtles campaign for over 250 hours and nearly a dozen playthroughs, because when I feel like just relaxing with a shooter, I will play it on Ultra Violence. And when I want a shooter that engages me, I play it on Nightmare. And when I'm actually going to sit down and play the whole campaign again and I want to challenge, I will play the Nightmare Extra Life mode. No other shooter offers anything like the replayability of Doom Eternal because you can tailor how the game feels and plays simply by picking and choosing the mode and difficulty itself. It's one of the most innovative things the game did. I want this to be a short little video about difficulty in save states. So we're only going to look at one other genre. You can't talk about difficulty and or save states in games without touching on. Souls Likes. No game genre is more of a product of its difficulty and checkpoint system than the Souls-like genre. It also happens to be my favorite genre of games. So I thought quite a bit about the way these games work and how simple tweaks could preserve the core design while expanding the audience. The FromSoft Souls games derive their difficulty from two things. First, the amount of damage and health that enemies have. The extreme danger of almost every encounter means the player needs to develop game knowledge to proceed. You can't spam your way through this guy in the first level. Until you realize when to block, when to dodge, and when to attack, you will die. And the more important thing to balance this difficulty in the Souls games is the checkpoint and save system. A player earns XP by killing enemies, but every time you die or use a checkpoint, the enemies respawn. This means that, like Doom Eternal, but unlike Bioshock or Borderlands, the player can only progress by defeating the entire encounters as designed. You can't kill three enemies and damage a knight only to die and come back and finish the knight off. You need to defeat all three enemies and the knight without dying. This seems like an obvious system until you hold it up against a game like Borderlands to realize that actually much of the Dark Souls design hinges on the way respawning works. The Souls genre is full of games that offer amazing exploration and immersion. The Dark Souls games excel at so much more than simple combat difficulty. A game like Neo has an exceptionally fun combat system that would be a joy to use regardless of how brutally hard it is. Yet the genre is closed to anyone other than the people who play games like I play games. You can only play these games if you enjoy difficult games. But does it really have to be that way? Isn't there some way to make these games work, even if you're not all that good at third person action games? What if you're the kind of person who loves exploring well crafted levels, reading lore and soaking up atmosphere, but you're just not good at twitch combat skills? Why shouldn't you be able to enjoy these games? Changing the health and damage of enemies isn't needed to make a Souls like more enjoyable and changing the checkpoint and safe system would ruin the core of what makes these games so brilliant. So how can we make them more accessible without breaking them? Well, actually, you already can beat almost any Souls like, even if you're not very good at them by gaming the progression system. Almost all Souls like games allow more mistakes, the more you level up. A player who isn't very good at avoiding damage could stay in the first area and kill enemies over and over while leveling up health and damage enough to allow them to make at least a few mistakes without dying. In fact, you will constantly see in Reddit threads that people who are struggling are told to quote unquote work by grinding out levels. So in order to play the game at a difficulty that feels more enjoyable to them, they need to take part in an hour of tedium to better balance the game against their skill. But seeing us out all of these games with one notable exception already allow you to overcome the challenge through leveling. Why do we need to ruin them by forcing people to grind out levels? Dark Souls 3 would be quite a bit less fun if it had required me to farm the high wall of Lothric for an hour before I could comfortably defeat it. What if instead of making the games easier by changing the game, we instead simply had difficulty levels that change the XP economy. So a player who had never played a Souls like and wasn't very good at action games would choose the new player difficulty. This would double all Souls games. Then there would be the normal mode, which kept things as they are, and a hard mode that halved Souls games with finally a mode that turned off Souls altogether. This simple change, which the game already accommodates because NG Plus already changes the soul value of each enemy, would instantly open the game up to significant numbers of players who might be disabled or new or intimidated or just not very good at timing based gameplay. Doubling the amount of Souls would let these players still get a challenge from the game, a new player getting double Souls in Dark Souls 3 is going to have a harder time than I did the first time I played it. The argument against making games easier and more accessible has always relied on a bit of a faulty premise and implies that we're all equally skilled. And therefore everyone is playing the same game. But that's simply not the case. Any Souls like game that comes out is going to be far easier for me than it is for someone who has arthritis in their fingers or carpal tunnel syndrome or just doesn't play these games. And for as much as the difficulty of the experience drives how much I love these games, there are other people who could fall in love with all the other things that makes them so enjoyable if they were simply given more agency to tailor the experience to their own skill, desire and ambition. I find that a game not being difficult enough or being sloppy and unoriginal in the way it implements difficulty is usually what makes me put it down. I don't like easy games, but I'm positive that there are thousands and thousands of people who love games for different reasons that put games down for the precise opposite reason I do. How many people put games down because they're too hard? There are simple and easy solutions to these issues. I would enjoy Dishonored so much more if I can make the game harder by preventing saves and I would enjoy Bioshock and Borderlands more if the game had actual checkpoints that meant it was possible to fail. But other people just want to experience the game without having to prove something to themselves. I love games for a different reason than some other person loves games, but that doesn't need to stop us from enjoying the same games. Bloodborne is so much more than its difficulty and Dishonored is so much more than just its story. It's time for game developers to consciously expand their audience by thinking far more carefully around how to design their saves, checkpoints and progression systems. It's one of the only places that we've seen almost no innovation in the last 15 years, the save system, the checkpoint system and progression systems have not been perfected. It's just a sort of inertia and laziness that has left us where we are. I implore developers, if anyone ever watches this, to think hard and carefully about what you want the save system to do, what you want the checkpoint system to do, and then how that will interact with different kinds of players. And I beg developers going forward to just give everyone more options. The simple difficulty system should be separated from the way the save and checkpoint system works. In the same way, most games have four or five difficulty settings, they should have four or five checkpoint and save system settings. It would improve almost every game I can think of. All right, that's all I got for today. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.