Thursday 11 September 2008

Spore Save Games

Hi Mr Wright,

I'm a frustrated game designer. What particularly frustrates me is the single save slot in Spore. I can understand why you do it - you want to create a persistent universe where changes carry on from one game to the next. But I want to have the freedom to experiment from a fixed base line; to see what choices I make at each stage of evolution to carry on to the next.

More importantly, if your game keeps losing save files: as it has just done for me; and appears to have done for other people playing the game on the net - I want the reassurance that you will have auto-saved when I finished the Civilisation level after grinding my way through city after city of unenjoyable game play for the previous two hours.

That is all.

Regards,

Andrew D.

PS: While you're here, you might want to read some design suggestions I have for Spore... and how to backup your Spore games.

5 comments:

VRBones said...

A.fkn.men to that.

Or what's worse is having no autosave ability. The game crashes pretty regularly (especially in space stage), so with no autosave I've lost all the way back from space stage to tribal stage some times.

The only other games that insist on single saves are roguelikes ... oh wait ...

Mikolaj said...

UnAngband has 2 savefiles and autosave at each dungeon start. :)

VRBones said...

So you're saying that UnAngband allows you to die then restart at the begining of the level again? Or choose to reload to the start of the level instead of where you last saved?

I can't say I've tried specifically in UnAngband, but that is definitely not the case in other roguelike variants. The general sentiment thoughout the community is that multi-save/loads are cheating.

I regularly set up batch files to allow multi-saves specifically so that I can experiment different strategies for a difficult level, but I have never seen an in-game ability to do the same. Guess I'll have to hunt through the menus again in UnAngband ...

Andrew Doull said...

UnAngband autosaves, and then overwrites the save file if you save/quit.

I've figured out the massive UI problem that causes you to lose the save file if you try to save at the start of the Spore space stage. The problem is, you can't save on the planet. And you can't leave the planet until you complete the training exercises. So when you try to quit - you're not given any option to save...

VRBones said...

I think it's if you are on a mission you can't save. It just so happens that the first 5 minutes of space stage is 'training' via missions. I had a buggy mission where it failed to recognise that I had visited the planet, therefore I couldn't complete the mission, therefore I couldn't save, therefore there was no option but to quit (2 hours later).