Playing Past Your Mistakes

In the manual for Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, Bethesda left a message encouraging players to avoid the “replay the save game” strategy. They said, “most computer gamers use the save game to maximise their playing ability. Anytime something goes wrong, they return to a saved game and replay it until they get it right. The final history of their game looks like an endless streak of lucky breaks and perfect choices. [But] role-playing is not about playing the perfect game.

It is about building a character and creating a story. In fact, you will never see some of the most interesting aspects of the game unless you play through your mistakes. If your character dies, by all means return to your last saved game and replay it. However, if your character is caught pickpocketing, if a quest goes wrong, or some other mundane mishap occurs, let it play out. You may be surprised by what happens next”.

This is a noble stand against “save scumming”, which is the art of returning to an old save file the second you get spotted in a stealth game, or lose a beloved team member in an RPG, or get a bad roll in a game with random numbers. And it’s sorely tempting to simply undo your mistakes or reset an unlucky event, but - as Bethesda says - if you do that, you might just miss some of the best anecdotal stories the game has to offer.

You know, like coming “this close” to dying, but turning it around and winning anyway. Or killing a panicked guard, seconds before they can raise the alarm. Or an exciting extraction when your stealthy plan starts to go hideously wrong. Or having to sadly move on through the story, while bearing the loss of your favourite party member. And so it’s a lovely sentiment. But, ultimately, there’s no point putting this sort of thing in the manual.

If you’ve got an intention for how players should experience the game, you’ve got to build it into the game itself. So how can we make games where players don’t want to return to a quick save at the first point of adversity? Games where you are, in fact, encouraged to play on past mistakes, failures, and setbacks - and potentially see some of the most interesting aspects of the game? Well, for some games, the strategy is to make sure that setbacks are tolerable - and not so critically damaging that you’re better off just returning to a previous save point.

One way to do this is to give the game a really wide “failure spectrum”. That’s a term dreamt up by Tom Francis - creator of Gunpoint and Heat Signature - and it describes the range of states between perfect success and total failure. Think of a game like XCOM, where you can successfully finish a mission with all your team members alive, or botch your objective and leave with two injured units, or come home without a single living soldier.

Pretty much every game has a failure spectrum, but some have a much more generous one, than others. For an example, Tom points to the stealthy open worlder Metal Gear Solid V, which has a huge range of states between being a sneaky snake and a, uh, dead snake. So, if a guard sees you, he won’t immediately start firing. He’ll just come in to investigate more closely. If you do get spotted, you enter into this slow-mo reflex mode, to give you a chance to headshot the guard in question.

Screw that up, and the guard will need to manually call up his buddies for support, giving you a chance to stop him. And even after all that, Snake can still escape and return to hiding. Or enter combat. Or even call in an helicopter and just take the whole “espionage” bit of the MGS slogan and dropkick it into the ocean. You’ll only die if you manage to screw all of that up. So this is a huge failure spectrum, with all sorts of states between completing the mission without ever being seen, and bleeding out on the battlefield.

And that means that mishaps aren’t so punishing that you might as well reload - they just shove you a little further down the spectrum. But the thing about a failure spectrum is that, in a lot of cases, it’s reversible. And if you play well you can actually turn things around and crawl back towards the successful end of things. That’s a big part of Far Cry 2. This is another game with a generous failure spectrum, thanks to its big health bar, loads of healing syringes, and the buddy system - where you can get one extra chance to keep playing, after your death.

And it’s also a game where you’re constantly facing setbacks. You might find your guns jamming in the middle of battle. Or find yourself suffering from a Malaria attack while sneaking past an outpost. Or have your car break down, just as you’re making a getaway. But these setbacks serve a really important purpose. You see, in a 2009 GDC talk, designer Clint Hocking explained that, originally, he wanted Far Cry 2 to be all about intentionality, which is achieved by having the game split between two phases.

There’s a planning stage, where you survey the scene, look for items of interest, watch guard patrol patterns, and plan your escape route. And then an execution stage, where you actually carry out your plan. But the creators decided that they didn’t want you to either have your plan totally work, or totally fail. Instead, they wanted you to suffer small setbacks that would cause you to bounce out of the execution stage and back to the planning phase.

Clint describes this type of gameplay as improvisational. It’s this idea of constantly moving between planning and execution - but within a single, continuous playthrough. And so that’s another benefit of making people play through mistakes and bad luck. Because suffering adversity causes you to change your goals in an exciting, dynamic way - so you can claw your way back to victory. Like in a shooter - if you take a lot of damage you’re forced to change your focus away from combat - and towards getting into cover, finding health packs, or maybe even crafting a medkit.

And in a stealth game, getting spotted means you’re forced to run away and get back into cover, or just give up on sneaking around and deal with your enemies in the old fashioned way. And this only works if players don’t reload their save game the second they get thrown off course. So to reduce the chance of this happening, Clint made sure these setbacks were small, unpredictable, and recoverable. Things like Malaria attacks and jamming guns might wreck your plans but they’re far too tiny to warrant a reload, they’re easy enough to turn around, and are often completely unpredictable when they’re about to occur.

“It is exactly because the loss is small and unpredictable that players don’t attempt to reload the game to escape it,” says Clint. Now all of this falls apart if the player is rewarded for perfect play, or punished for making mistakes. Meaningless ranks and achievements for never getting spotted in a stealth game are fine. They’re aspirational rewards for highly skilled players. But if making mistakes will cause the rest of the game to be significantly harder, then it’s no surprise that a player will reload to a previous save game the second they screw up.

Back to XCOM: losing soldiers and suffering casualties means you’ve now got to recruit feeble rookies, making you less likely to succeed at future missions - creating a nasty positive feedback loop of death and failure. No wonder, then, that some gamers will resort to save scumming to keep their favourite soldiers alive. It’s just too harsh, otherwise. Perhaps a better approach is to try and make failure as interesting as success.

Look to the Shadow of Mordor games, where getting killed by an Ork captain means that they’ll remember you and bring up your history in a later encounter. So if there’s no tactical benefit for perfect play, and there are meaningful outcomes for imperfect play, then gamers will naturally want to roll on past their mistakes and let events play out naturally. Of course, one easy way to fix all of this is to simply remove the ability to reload a previous save file.

In Darkest Dungeon, the game is always saving over the top of your file, making it near impossible to rewind your mistakes. Developer Redhook Studios did this for two reasons. For one, they wanted players to have to live with bad decisions, and truly awful dice rolls. This is a game where rotten things happen, and you’ve got to deal with them. And also because they wanted players to really struggle over whether they should take certain risks - knowing that they can’t just restore a previous save game if things don’t go their way.

In a 2016 GDC talk, designer Tyler Sigman says TYLER SIGMAN: “Permanent consequences were what we were after. We want you to, at all moments, be like, ‘should I go a little further and get a little more treasure. Do I think I can make to the end of this quest even though these two characters are afflicted and this one is almost dead?’ And to do that you know we needed this terrible save system that is just really really mean”.

Other games do this too, like survive ‘em up The Long Dark, which automatically saves over your game the moment something bad happens - like getting attacked by wolves or hurting yourself - so you’re forced to keep playing from that most dramatic point. And ultimately, this is pretty common in console games, where saving your progress isn’t so easy to do and you must rely on actual save points or checkpoints. This doesn’t mean you can’t let players easily save their game when they need to take a break, though.

In Dark Souls you can only permanently save your progress at bonfires - but you can suspend your game at any point. This quits the game, and lets you continue from that point next time you play. But then that save is deleted, meaning you can’t rewind to that point if you do something silly. So, there are lots of compelling reasons to keep players in the game - and not reaching for the quick load button the second something goes wrong.

Screwing up causes you to dynamically shift your goal, and do something different for a while. Awesome stories can occur when things go horribly wrong. And risky play is far more meaningful if you can’t just rewind and try again. But it can’t be up to the player to enforce this pure way of playing. I’ve quoted Civ 4 man Soren Johnson before, who says “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game”.

So if designers really want to keep players in the experience, they’ve either got to lock off easy save scumming, make setbacks so tolerable that they’ll want to keep going, remove rewards for perfect play, or make failure as fun as success. Only then will players “let things play out. And be surprised by what happens next”. Hey! Thanks for watching! Game Maker’s Toolkit is made possible thanks to everyone who pitches in over on Patreon.

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