Checkpoints
05 December 2007 by Administrator
Checkpoints are useful things in videogames. They allow you to restart at a recent point in the game after you’ve made a mistake or for example failed an objective, ensuring that you don’t have to repeat much and ideally should minimise player frustration. Obviously not all games require a checkpoint system (such as MotorStorm), but the games I’ve been playing recently, which unfortunately I shall not name and shame, have proved to be rather maddening because of them.
The first problem I want to highlight is the reliance on the manual save. It can be a great thing to have, but you should never make the player rely on it. How for example does the player know they’re going to reach a boss encounter or particularly difficult point? More often than not they won’t, they’ll wade in, get killed and have to restart from the last time they had remembered to save (which may have been a while ago). Now this could be rectified by intelligently placed checkpoints at regular intervals.
The second issue is just that, why are checkpoints often placed at such infrequent intervals, with what seems like little consideration for the difficulty of the task ahead? In one of the games in question I had a series of checkpoints all within a couple of minutes, but then not one for a further 20 minutes afterwards. Almost mockingly the section with a number of checkpoints I was able to breeze through with little trouble, but then the following part I must have struggled at for the next hour.
I know this isn’t a new problem, and these points I’m sure have been raised before many a time elsewhere, but its worrying that such seemingly trivial issues are still a problem in modern game development. There are some great examples of good checkpoint systems, but unfortunately they still seem to be in the minority. Let’s hope my next weekend of gaming won’t be as frustrating as the last.
Paul Rustchynsky - Designer
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