I think the fact is people aren't really keen on startin a level over when they'd accomplished so much since beginning. Being able to save at any point in the game, yes has it's drawbacks - but no one is necessarily forced to use this complete freedom - if somebody want's to restrict this freedom to suit their own difficulty tastes, they can simply save at certain desired points much less often.

I think a good idea would be to have limited saving abilities when the player chooses a certain difficulty. If you were to choose Easy, you can save anywhere you want. Medium, save perhaps only every 3rd or 4th of the level. Hard, save only 1 or 2 times.

Didn't SoF incoporate this? I can't rememberr. 

If you haven't gone from start to finish of a level without saving then you haven't actually completed the level: your just fooling yourself. :P 

are you being serious or not? i am interested in what you really think.

I might go back to some classic Q1SP maps and try to play them all the way through without saving. 

Restricting saves to n per level is a pain in the backside because you don't know how long the level is going to be, so you can't use them optimally. If you want to limit saves, "save points" are probably a better mechanism. 

You should be able to save when you want, if people want to spoil the experience for themselves that's up to them. 

no it shouldnt be up to the player.
thats the whole point, which you are kind of missing.
its the game designers job to create the best game possible.
if defender or pacman had save points in, it would have been crap. What makes them classics (Possibly? thats kind of part of the question) is the tension induced by knowing there is no save mechanism. 

I've always found it frusterating when I get most of the way through a level, fall to a cheap shot from some strong monster, or drop down a stupid cliff that's extremley hard to navigate, and then have to start all over again.

Another problem is, having to play for another half hour because you're not able to save until you reach the save point or beat the level, or not at all. Especially if you're in a hurry or you don't have 3 hours to play all in a row.

Save points are fine, though strained. But having to go too long, too far, against your will, that's taking it too far. If you want to go through the whole level without saving, that's your choice. A better system is to count the number of times they save/load/die and reward them accordingly.

Also, for people who have to leave *right now* (really gotta go, and he's gonna be in there for hours, you just know from the sounds ;P ), you can have a quicksaveandquit function. You can save at any time in the game, but then it quits instead of letting you continue (so you can't keep it as a restart point in case you die, only for quitting and starting up later). 

I've done all the exm1 (millitary base) levels and most of episodes 1 and 2 straight through without so much as a save. The other more complicated levels though... There are some levels in the quake sp that I just don't like. Everything from the feel & design of my surroundings to the total loss of navigation (mazes anyone?)... I don't connect things in my mind well, and I spend a lot of time lost. The levels I've played repeatedly in beta testing I can beat in most any mod (or vanilla quake) and any difficulty and not die, barely getting hurt. But I wander around aimlessly too much in the others.

Course, as for the normal people... 

What nonenity says: I think players should have freedom in FPS; there are always ways to direct their decisions. I think HL did it best with both trigger_autosaves and the trusty F6 key: however badly I messed up, I knew I could rely on the Valve mappers to have put an autosave not too far back and in a sensible place.
Conversely, AvP ( prior to the Gold Edition ) had no saving druing levels. I did appreciate the challenge of trying to play intelligently, not always charging in Quake-like, which made you play more like your chosen species - a good thing. But there were maps that took an insane amount of focus and a lot of luck ( single player enemies had multiple potential spawn points ) to get even half-way through. Reaching a generator room or something, there'd be an errie lapse in the carnage, a great place to take stock of your inventory, lick your wounds and so on. I did that a lot in HL and it only added to my sense of being Gordon Freeman. But in AvP if even one alien then bled on me in a corner, I knew the hunt was over and I might as well restart. Not an attitude that should be encouraged in FPS.
As I've said before, it's a fine line between challenging gameplay and just bloody annoying. 

I actually enjoy getting lost in levels - exploration is what I enjoy most about SP; I love finding out what's around the next corner. Like you, I don't connect things together in my head very quickly so it takes me a long time to understand the whole layout of a level ( which gets to be a problem in multiplayer :P ) But I agree there are some id Q1SP levels that are plain infuriating because they don't reward exploration with new things - one just ends up wandering exactly the same architecture over and over until you accidently trip over some barely identifiable feature that's the only means of progression - that I consider bad design.

Btw: sounds?! Too much dietry fibre methinks... 

Saveless gaming can be good in adding tension and is simple. I got quite into it with the old Cube despite not liking it at first, but most levels weren't that hard back then. It is a way of increasing challenge. I had to get over a sense of greater nervousness when playing without save or I'd die *more* often.

Replaying a large amount of a level is not necessarily Fun. The most seamless way of maintaining an atmosphere even if you die *is* reloading. Starting over isn't maintaining the atmosphere -- if you favor it, you're saying the atmosphere can't be maintained, you just have to start over and see if you can maintain it this time (i.e. not die). The thing about SP FPS, though, is it's more a string of events than one continuous thing anyway, so I don't buy the case against. Plus, variation of environment is one advantage of FPS/modern games over the old repeat forever ones (and even those had one form of save: continue, or the elevated start level option in Tempest for example).

Save points leaves it up to the designer. Nothing inherent about the concept that requires them to be far apart.

I prefer save often, load rarely, exceptions when a level suddenly gets a lot harder partway. I'd rather not reload, but if I do I don't want it half the level back.

Yeah, AvP, of all games to not have save .. there's been a patch out almost since the beginning though.

Incidently, the new "Asteroids" (sic) does have savegame -- just like a FPS save. If your stats are crap when you save, save ain't going to help you. Makes sense, it's a long game with more visual than gameplay variety.

Then there's something like GTA3, you die you just lose some funds and have to continue from in front of the hospital, savegame's for turning the machine off. 

I wander around lost in deathmatch for about the first 5-15 minutes. In UT and in my 160 random map linup in Jeht (quake1), I've started getting sort of familiar with most maps, and fairly intimately with others. Still, it's a bad thing when I'm 3 frags behind and I don't know where any weapons are, where any players are, and all roads seem to be taking me back to were I started. :)

Being lost in a sp map was horribly annoying to me years ago because I'd spend so much time trying to figure out where I've been, where I haven't been, and where I need to go again. That was years ago though. I know for a fact that I'm a great deal better at it now (been trying to work on it, and gotten smarter).

Maybe I should try playing through Quake1 all over again, from start to finish, in normal difficulty. And without cheat codes on the e4 series. ;D 

saves should definatly be the choice of the player.

"please, don't tell me what to do. it sickens me."

i don't like being told how to play. if i need to save, don't you dare tell me i can't. i couldn't stand sof because of that, and never finished the game because i got so annoyed at restarting the map from 10 minutes ago over and over again because i had no saves left.

just because you can save doesn't me you have to. i like to save every couple of minutes just to be on the safe side. it doesn't necessarily mean i die all the time, but i prefer it to be there so that i don't have to redo the whole thing.

yeah. 

"you can save the game at any spot and constantly, and keep re-loading,"

if you need to keep re-loading over and over in an SP FPS, then the game is already fucked.

in an ideal game of this type, the player should never die, unless something stupid happens.

auto-save/quick-save is the catch-all saftey net for when stupid things happen.

pretty much everything else is frustration. 

you did know that sof had a custom difficulty setting which you could set to unlimited saves right? 

whole q1 without a single death ! I did it once
and dozens of times thru e1 and e3 

yes, but what difficulty?

and don't lie.

you know what happens to people that lie?

i dunno, but someone will think of something. 

had a save system that i remember being impressed by at the time. (about 5 years ago)

As you progressed thru the level you reached crystals which you collected (maybe 2 a level). But you didnt have to use them straight away, it was your choice when to, you could even save some of them for different, later levels.

The key points here were 1) its was the players choice when to use a crystal. 2) they were rare enough as to render them highly valuable. (only 1 or 2 per level). 

Still, a system of aotosave/quicksaves is good.
Depends a little bit on the pace of the game though. IE in an emulator, playing contra or whatever, there is an overwhelming possibility that one will be sitting with one had on the controls and the other on the save/load snapshot controls, feverishly saving every second when you didn't die/reloading when you do. ('course people think people that use the saving system in emulators are ghey, but my therapeutist says they're just the ghastly creations of a dysfunctional world.)
On the other hand, I forgot what I was supposed to use as an example here. But imagine that it was clever and the completely oposite of the scenario above kthx! 

oh, you *are* active here.. i emailed you re: your modded FGD ^_^ 

Was going to reply to the mail but then it seemed something went wrong on my part. Dunno if you got the mail or not, (most likely not) but here's a recap:

Fixed the bounding boxes on items so they are of the correct size and position
Fixed default values so they correspond with the default values in the .qc
Added tyrlite fields for the lights
Added the all important info_notnull entity
�
that is all
�
PS: Uploaded a new version of the fgd at my site just now. get that to make sure you have the most correct one. (The old one was, well, old...) 

Appreciate it. 

world collision detection is done with three entity sizes: point, player, and shambler.

bullet/player/monster detection is done using the actual bounds in the qc file. For example, the monster_dog's bbox is shorter than a shambler (i think -- can't verify now.)

This means that if you don't want your monsters to spawn stuck, you should have bounding boxes in the fgd that are equal to the size used for world collision. Otherwise you'd put a monster_dog in a low-ceilinged hallway and not know why he's stuck.

Sorry i can't give more specific info but i don't have access to any of it right now. 

Ya, I'm serious. Open save-games are good (especially when designers get excited by "surprise" unbalanced increases in intensity as a game-play device, or if one's system is struggling to "run" the game, or if one's power supply is not terribly smooth etc.). However, I was very proud of myself when I eventually (mastered mouse-play, then) went back and completed Quake on a straight through run with no saves.

I'm not too proud to admit that it was on Easy :P 

Right on. If the game is not fun or too hard for a player the lack of 'free' saves could make it just frustrating, making want to quit. That was the issue with Enclave (on Xbox) btw.

IE Even the first time I played Quake I rarely saved, cause it was fun and I didnt mind restartimg the level to try again. In fakk jumping levels I qucksaved often, cause presize jumping over deathvoid is not my idea of fun and I`d hate to replay it (never liked mario).

phait: why lie. I`v been replaying quake (esp e1 and e3) numerous times and I know where every monster and every item is. Its not that hard even on hard skill, except maybe e4 (but I dont like to play e4 anyway)