The history of saving in games is complex. The first game to allow saving of any description – 1978’s Space Invaders – only allowed the player to etch their high score in the cabinet’s memory.
It took eight years for a title with a modern-style save system to come along, namely, Nintendo’s genre-defining RPG, The Legend of Zelda. This utilized a battery-powered cartridge to keep Link’s journey so far intact.
Since then, developments like auto-saves, level passwords, and cloud saves have ensured that the save system is a dynamic thing.
Still, removing save capabilities altogether has become a bit of a trope in gaming in recent years, as developers seek to add a challenge that saving took away. Hardcore and ‘Iron Man’ modes in games like XCOM can turn an inconvenient outcome into something truly devastating.
Data Sets
Checkpoints, i.e. places where the game saves automatically, taking control away from the player, are another variant of the save system.
They’re usually found in racing games and first-person shooters, forcing the player to either complete a section without losing or dying, lest they be sent back to where they last started. It’s one of the more simple ways of keeping progress intact, although it can mean a lot of frustration.
Now, Sony wants to patent something that falls between all of this. The Japanese giant envisions a world in which players can replay their experiences from any point they’ve already passed.
It does sound an awful lot like a checkpoint system, but it seems to involve a running save, with data sets guiding the player’s ability to jump in and out at will – or, perhaps more appropriately, back and forward.
It could do YouTubers a favor, helping them to single out gameplay segments for walkthroughs, for instance. However, a lot of the wording in the patent document hints at streamed games, otherwise known as cloud games.
Short-form Gaming
This kind of system may also hint at the industry’s interest in short-form gaming. As evidenced by mobile gaming and battle royale-style experiences, play sessions seem to be getting shorter. A separate industry niche, casino gaming, has been dependent on this kind of play for decades. The online slots NJ operator PlayStar offers plenty of games – including Space Invaders – that have rounds lasting just a few seconds.
While it’s unlikely that video game developers will condense their experiences to quite that extent, it allows players to experience their favorite levels and boss fights without having to see Helgen destroyed for the tenth time at the beginning of TESV: Skyrim.
Of course, courtesy of auto-saves, most veteran Skyrim players can probably trace their journey back to a convenient point already. The idea seems to be that gamers get a DVD-style ‘tracker’, which singles out events or scenes by name.
There’s no point getting too excited just yet. Sony seems to have been sitting on this idea for quite some time now. Yet with the new PlayStation Portable offering a vision of Sony’s remote gaming plans (even if it doesn’t have cloud capabilities), this new way of saving might not be too far off.
At least we’ll be able to skip the journey up the Throat of the World in Skyrim – and that mean old troll.