Save games vs releases
Racer1
Join Date: 2002-11-22 Member: 9615Members
Join Date: 2002-11-22 Member: 9615Members
Now that save games are in play, how is UWE going to handle them with new releases?
They easy way (from the developlment perspective) is to basically reset any saves each release. This makes feedback 100% trustworthy. Otherwise, you never know if a bug is a cause of old savegame info. Unfortunately, this tends to tick off players. Someone who has put 20 hours into a particular game doesn't like to see all of their progress washed away each release. There is of course always the chance of save games not working during alpha/beta releases -- but if UWE does go this direction, they better make it clear up front, and maybe even let players stick with an old version if they want.
The opposite solution is to load everything from the save file. This makes it easy for players to continue their games, but makes most new content unavailable, besides updated menus/UI/etc. It also makes any feedback from these loads unreliable -- which is really helpful to the developer.
A middle ground is to load some of the info from the save file, and ignore the rest. Probably the easiest thing to do here is load a brand new world (as if starting a new game), but keep any player stats/inventory/position from the save file. As long as this fact is conveyed to the player, I think this is the best solution as it keeps the feedback generally reliable while giving the player some room to continue in their quest. There is always the chance that the save isn't compatible to the new game for whatever reason. When this happens, some kind of fallback would be nice, without having to completely start over. Of course, this version is the hardest to implement
They easy way (from the developlment perspective) is to basically reset any saves each release. This makes feedback 100% trustworthy. Otherwise, you never know if a bug is a cause of old savegame info. Unfortunately, this tends to tick off players. Someone who has put 20 hours into a particular game doesn't like to see all of their progress washed away each release. There is of course always the chance of save games not working during alpha/beta releases -- but if UWE does go this direction, they better make it clear up front, and maybe even let players stick with an old version if they want.
The opposite solution is to load everything from the save file. This makes it easy for players to continue their games, but makes most new content unavailable, besides updated menus/UI/etc. It also makes any feedback from these loads unreliable -- which is really helpful to the developer.
A middle ground is to load some of the info from the save file, and ignore the rest. Probably the easiest thing to do here is load a brand new world (as if starting a new game), but keep any player stats/inventory/position from the save file. As long as this fact is conveyed to the player, I think this is the best solution as it keeps the feedback generally reliable while giving the player some room to continue in their quest. There is always the chance that the save isn't compatible to the new game for whatever reason. When this happens, some kind of fallback would be nice, without having to completely start over. Of course, this version is the hardest to implement