Savoir-not-faire

I’m so tired of video games with imperfect save game systems. It’s such an easy thing to get right.

I’ve played two games of late that have frustratingly screwed save features: Fable 3 and FIFA 11.

The Fable issue was just…crap. When I ran into those issues about a week ago, it almost forced me to start blogging again – I was so irritated. Ranting is a hard sell, though, especially about something so niche as Fable 3.

But now that I’ve got the FIFA spiel to back it up…

With Fable 3, the save system was almost completely wrong. It works thusly: once you start a game, that game loads automatically after a press of start at a title screen. There’s practically no menu between the word go and the game action. Presumably, this is meant to streamline the game and ultimately eliminate the ‘gaminess’ of it, something that the whole of the product seems meant to accomplish.

But then there’s no control.

The meta-game, the user interface is where players take control of how the game works, in some very real ways. I suppose the prime example would be an options menu, which literally gives the player “options.” Without that level of control (in this case, of save games), options are limited.

So, my Fable 3 experience was limited by the limited control over save games. It’s probably not worth expanding on beyond that.

For FIFA 11, the issue may be more digestible.

There’s a Virtual Pro mode, which contains a lot of value and payout. As such, I want to play Virtual Pro, and Bryan also wants to play Virtual Pro. And then, we want to play Virtual Pro together, on the same Xbox, at the same time.

This isn’t possible.

Each Virtual Pro needs to be saved to a different Xbox profile, and that profile needs to be active, but only one profile can be active at one time. Ergo, this inanely flawed save game system is directly preventing our absolute enjoyment of what is really a good and fun game.

I can’t imagine this or any other of the myriad broken save game systems have particularly difficult fixes. It’s probably just a one or a zero somewhere. So it has to come down to one of two things: carelessness or simply bad decisions.

The games industry should definitely be past either of those, though, especially for major titles like Fable 3 and FIFA 11. Long gone are the days of needing to complete a game in one session or saving game progress through different passwords.

It’s 2011. I can store gigabytes of data on a disk the size of my fingernail. Why can’t I save my Fable 3 game at two different moments or save two different Virtual Pro players on one profile? The industry and technology has come too far for issues like this to plague otherwise stellar games.

Event of the Week:

Since it's past midnight on the 14th, Bryan's birthday is tomorrow (the 15th). Happy birthday, B.