This reminds me of how some PlayStation game's developers complained that they were required by Sony to add a false multi-second delay to their game's save routine, so the user would have enough time to read the mandatory warning not to turn off the console. Their game in fact saved so quickly there needn't be a warning at all.
This is really interesting. I read that warning every time I save and I never noticed the delay. For some reason, it doesn't bother me like the archive utility animations. I guess it's because saving the game is a such ritualized action.
I wonder what other requirements Sony imposed on developers. Maybe they have their own video game-oriented human interface guidelines. Do you have a source for this information? I found plenty of technical documents and SDKs but nothing about interfaces.
Kind of related, the reason there's a "Press A to play game" on xbox (and a lot of PC ports) is because Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds, and if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement.
N64 had press Start to start, years before XBox was even a thing.
And yes, many/most PC ports are of very low quality. Gone are the days of PC-first Triple-A games with forgotten features like Quick-save/load, LAN-multiplayer, Map-editor, official Mod-support. These days, these ports feel like they started porting two months before release, done by two coders. All these console-ish things like messages "don't turn off your system" (yah-right), press a key to start (yup), save-points (wtf), always-on single player (...)
The other reason behind "Press A to play" is that a console can have several controllers associated with it. Pressing a button at the title lets the game know which controller the user is holding.
>Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds
What is the rationale behind such a requirement?
>if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement.
Does this mean those screens/videos that get displayed after the game starts and before the menu appears are required by Microsoft to be skippable?
If that's the case then it's good UX design in my opinion. I think those things are an unacceptable waste of player's time; I hate them so much I rename the files in the game's directory so it will fail to show them.
Presumably so they can see how long it takes to handle input events, because that's a good proxy for whether the application is responsive or not. What they don't want is the game freezing. But that's harder to measure directly.
Can only speak for PlayStation 2 games (I also worked on PS3 and XBox 360 but didn't handle that part). Sony's Technical Requirements were a pain. We had to build a freaking complicated State machine to handle all save scenarios (PS2 still used those external things to save games, you had to handle the user taking it out midsave, put back, etc). We had a game rejected for having a SINGLE space between PlayStation and that registered trademark symbol.
I'm never actually sure if I actually saved in the PC port of Valkyria Chronicles. I think we've been trained to wait a while to save since the 8 bit consoles so something feels a bit wrong when things instantly save. Undertale makes amazing use of this, though.
There was a time, when F5 key for Quick-save was common in PC games.
Together with Quick-load, it worked very fast, no need for info-screens, it just worked in milli-seconds and allowed gameplay styles completely forgotten or newer experienced by console gamers who are keen to their save-point system.
Baldur's Gate best feature. Allows you to test all variations of the game, every encounter, so much potential, so much possibilty you could just explore, rewind, explore, rewind.
One of the best, and most under-utilised features of Half-Life, to name one of many. Made clearing a room an entertaining exercise in how few crowbars/bullets/rockets can you use...
quicksave/quickload encourages bad game design. Look at games with save anywhere abilities that include elements of chance like Skyrim and Fallout. So you are able to pickpocket and use charm in these games but because you can save anywhere does anyone ever live with the chance these things fail?
Of course not they just try>reload>try>reload>try>succeed. Making that whole skill set pointless and the mechanic pointless
not offering quick-save is bad game design. a game should be about fun. nowadays it's often more about work (boring grinding gameplay, save-points were you have to play the same passage several times again... oh what great game design - not). with current gen-consoles there is no single technical reason not offer quick-save & load. and for driving games, the quick-playback feature introduced by Codemaster in GRID should nowadays be common, but sadly is not.
