Posted January 30, 2025
Other advantages of a manual save system include walkthrough creation assistance, freedom of branching (sometimes it's fun to do something completely out of character in an RPG without messing up your main game), a "bookmark" to save a particularly funny / cool scene you want to show someone else later on, hardware benchmarking (because "official" pre-scripted benchmarks are rarely done at the most demanding part of a game (eg, you might want to test the CPU by saving near a huge crowd of people in a city or test draw distance impact on GPU by saving on top of a hill overlooking various landmarks), more incentive to explore in difficult games (sparse checkpoints in hard games can simply discourage exploration) and last but not least, games that would otherwise place checkpoints up to 20 mins apart can actually be playable by busy people who may only be able to snatch short 10-15 min game sessions at a time and want to pick up where they left of.
In some games, every stage starts in a clean state; the complete state of the game can be described b which stage you are on at the start of the stage. Hence, a save file could consist of a single byte (assuming there are at most 256 stages). In games that use password saves, this is significant, as it allows for the password to be short and/or easy to remember. On the other hand, is saving mid-level is possible, then we suddenly need to store significantly more data, like the player's position, health, and power-ups, the position, health, and animation/AI state of every enemy that's spawned, information about what has already spawned and has yet to spawn, the state of power-ups in the level (collected or not), and all sorts of other data.
Also, bugs are more likely and harder to recover from when there's more data in the save file. If the save is only at the beginning of the level, then the level can be reset to a known-good state (assuming it's possible to complete the game in the first place; if it's not, the game should not be released in that state!). Any bug that comes up won't be saved in the save file, and therefore resetting the game and reloading will clear the bug. On the other hand, when more data is saved, the game could be saved in a glitched state, and then that glitched state will be carried over. (Example of a glitched state: The key has been picked up, the key is not in the player's inventory, and the door that the key is supposed to open is still locked.)
