Thoughts on Autosaves

I was playing BioShock 2 Remastered and encountered some nasty bugs. On multiple occasions, the game would CTD upon killing an enemy. I eventually fixed the problem by following this guide by hexaae, but it left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. 2K Marin unintentionally created a game where a crash is likely to cost the player an hour or more of progress, and the remastered edition introduced some crashes! (I played the original BioShock 2, and I don't remember it crashing like this.)

Now, this isn't entirely 2K Marin's fault. They were following the design paradigm created by 2K Boston in the original BioShock, and I don't blame them for not wanting to stray too far. For the reader who has never played either of these games, here's how they work:

• The game is divided into several large levels, each of which can take an hour or more to complete.
• The game autosaves at the start of each level, and only at the start of each level.
• If the player dies, they are resurrected at a Vita-Chamber. Essentially no progress is lost on death.
• As there is no real penalty for dying, making manual save files is usually a waste of time unless you're about to quit the game.

We can see that players are likely to proceed through the game largely ignoring the manual save option. There's simply no compelling reason to fiddle about in the save menu rather than actually playing the game. However, the autosaves are quite infrequent: if the player is forced to revert to their last autosave, they will lose a significant chunk of progress. The incautious player can but hope that the developers have made a crash-free game. Unfortunately, those hopes were unfounded, and I had to completely redo several levels. (I also lost progress to a brief power outage, which wasn't the game's fault, but it certainly did nothing to improve my mood.)

How could this have been done better? Let's look at some examples.

• From Software's Dark Souls III expects the player to die frequently, so it effectively autosaves whenever the player does anything. Your inventory persists between deaths, although the enemies respawn.
• Bethesda Game Studios' The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim expects to crash frequently, so it autosaves at every area transition. Areas are relatively small, so autosaves will happen at short intervals, and the game keeps the last three autosaves in case of corruption or other problems.
• Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity has challenging and mentally demanding combat with permadeath, so it encourages the player to be paranoid about making manual saves before any fight that looks particularly tough.

For BioShock 2, a degenerate solution might be to chop up the levels up to have more loading screens for autosaves, but I would consider this an option of last resort. Building large, complicated levels with no interruptions should be lauded, not discouraged. The save system should be modified to match the level design, not the other way around! BioShock 2 doesn't seem to be able to make saves smoothly; all saving is done through a menu or loading screen where the game locks up until the save is complete. This poses some challenges for us as armchair designers to insert some more autosaves. Perhaps the game might autosave after the player has swapped out their plasmids or gene tonics at a Gatherer's Garden or Gene Bank? The player is already on a menu screen, so the autosave won't interrupt any action. Players probably won't swap upgrades often enough for the save pause to become annoying, but they are likely to do so after completing some major milestone that has rewarded them with ADAM (the game's secondary currency for buying genetic upgrades). Now the autosave prevents them from ever having to repeat tedious upgrade-swapping.

The lesson for game designers is such: Make an effort to calculate an "average time lost to crash" statistic based on the way your game incentivizes the average person to play. If the ATLTC exceeds half an hour or so, I think your game needs more autosaves. Even if your game is rock-solid, future re-releases might not be, and smart design can mitigate software instability.

What Remains of Edith Finch and Representation

 

Ding!

I recently revisited What Remains of Edith Finch and picked off the remaining achievements. Obviously, earning 100% completion in a walking simulator is hardly something to boast of, but it occurred to me that WRoEF has something that makes it quite unusual among video games. You see, the main player character, the eponymous Edith Finch, is...straight!

For those of you who don't play many video games, let me explain what I mean. Straight women, who compose about 45% of the population IRL, are bizarrely under-represented as playable characters in video games. Female PCs almost never have husbands or boyfriends. My hypothesis is that this is an attempt to avoid repelling players who are presumed to be unable to empathize with someone who experiences romantic attraction towards men (though this just an interpretation I pulled out of my ass and you should take it with as many grains of salt as you please). Even Edith's orientation is merely implied by the fact that she is pregnant; we know nothing about her relationship with her son's father. However, I'm comfortable labeling her as straight, since there's no evidence that she's attracted to women at all.

Just for fun, I went through my game library to identify female PCs and make my best guess as to their orientations. I only considered pre-defined characters made by the developers, so BioWare RPG protagonists don't make the cut. Here's what I came up with:

I found 12 female player characters, 4 of whom are straight. However, Abby, Micaiah, and Kerrigan are playable only for a minority of their respective games. Edith Finch is the only straight woman I could find who has a majority of a game dedicated to her. I try to play a wide variety of games, but I suppose it's possible that gaming's missing straight women could be hyper-concentrated in genres that I don't play much, like hidden-object games or dating simulators.

So in the weird world of video games, if a female character is under the player's control, it's more likely than not that she will have no interest in men. Have fun making irresponsible society-wide generalizations!

The Horned Boy

Another game, another 100% completion post. This time, it's Shadow of the Colossus!

I'm in the 1%!

Platinum Personae

Once again, it's Platinum Trophy time here at Brendan's Blatherings! 2020 was the Year of Persona, and I earned platinum trophies for both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal.

 

P5R is a much easier game to 100% than P4G, and the statistics bear this out.

The Man Behind the Morons

I have taken the highly unusual step of playing a video game during the year of its release. My modus operandi is that I can "earn" a new video game by getting 100% completion in two old games. By happenstance, I finished Ground Zeroes and Monkey Island 2 in close proximity, and my next purchase was The Last of Us Part II.

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Automated Image Downloads from Twitter

When I want to include screenshots from games on my Switch or PlayStation in my blog posts, my process is as follows:

1. Take a screenshot on the console.
2. Use the console to send a tweet with the image attached.
3. Download the image from Twitter onto my PC via Chrome.
4. Upload the image from my PC to Google Drive.
5. Embed the image on Google Drive in the post.

The bottleneck in this process is Step 3. Twitter makes it a real pain in the ass to download full-size images through a web browser, so I decided to route around the problem and write a Python script to automate the process via the Twitter API. For any other Python developers out there, here is my solution:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rNSaH_ncibw4byvsd7uZmORupz6ppXKX/view?usp=sharing 

This program reads all of the tweets from a specified user, checks if any of them are new, then downloads any images attached to the new tweets. Of course, you'll need to specify your own Twitter API keys.

Enjoy!

The Biggest and the Bossiest

At long last, I have finally finished the first level of Metal Gear Solid V! For those of you who don't get the joke, Ground Zeroes was intended as the first level of what would be released as The Phantom Pain, but when it became obvious that MGSV wasn't going to be finished on schedule, it was split off, had some more content added, and was released as a standalone game.

Sixteen achievements. One level. 

In order to justify the sticker price without requiring more expensive content to be created, the game consists of seven missions that all take place in the same location, a fictionalized version of Guantanamo Bay in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately for my completionist playthrough, this means sitting through lots and lots of padding. Particularly offensive is the "Unlocked" achievement ("Unlock all trials"). Although it sounds simple enough, it requires the player to complete all missions on Normal and Hard difficulties, then mark all the enemies in all of the missions on Normal difficulty (except "Intel Operative Rescue"), then complete all the missions (again excepting "Intel Operative Rescue") again on Hard difficulty. To sum up, that's a total of 26 mission playthroughs. Keep in mind that there's only 7 different missions! Marking all of the enemies is an exercise in tedium, especially in missions where an enemy likes to lurk at a guard post on the edge of the map and there's no way near him except by getting into visual range of all his buddies. Of course, if you get spotted and the enemies call in reinforcements, you have to mark all of those enemies before killing them, or you'll fail the trial. However, even this pales in comparison to the pointlessness of having to complete the Hard missions twice for no real reason. There's no additional challenge to it: you just do the exact same mission again.

Speaking of "Intel Operative Rescue", that mission has an associated achievement that poses a real challenge: "Pacifist" ("Clear the "Intel Operative Rescue" Side Op without killing a single enemy"). If you want it, you'll need to complete the mission using nothing but the stun pistol and somehow restrain yourself from succumbing to the temptation to bust out the infinite-ammo grenade launcher you're supposed to be using. This will require you to quickly and repeatedly shoot the driver of a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle with a pistol. Good luck, have fun.

I'm Metal Gear-ed out for a while, but I'll eventually circle around to go achievement hunting in The Phantom Pain as well. Watch this space for the next video game I decide to take far too seriously!