Re: Dead Space 3 Save game catastrophe.

What you describe is normal game mechanics.

When you leave it only saves your stats and inventory, not the game progress itself. You will continue the story on a (most likely) far away "checkpoint" and all the enemies and normal items to collect will be there again. But special items like artefacts and weapons parts will stay in you inventory and will not be aroudn anymore.

Yes - compared to Deadspace 1-2, in those you could save and load anytime, Dead Space 3 followed the game console mechanis in saving. And this is in fact a hundred steps back in reasonable game features for PCs if you ask me. I can only hope that most game producers - at least in the PC versions - will not follow this kind of savegame-system. I hate it too. Lost about more than 1 hour of gameplay due to that lately. I often ask myself in those situation: "Why the f*** I played yesterday longer just to restart at this point again?".

More badly, you can't really tell how "far" you will be thrown back if you leave now. That is the thing I hate the most in this mechanic.

But we have to live with tthat in DS3 - they can't change it anymore.

I now understand better why they changed got rid of the (direct) savegame system.

The more I think about the coop-play mechanism, how it works, there was no way to make use the old system anymore. You can play the whole game in a coop-campaign (not onyl the special coop-missions). Player 2 can join and leave whenever they want to. That's in fact a cool feature - though I didn't played it with someone yet.

Now image what would happen, if one or the other player is able to save and load anytime. If you save, the other PC/console has to save too. What if the player leaves and another joins that doesn't have the save game? Yes, it could be transfered, but defpending on how many MB the file is, it causes wait time.

Also, if a game is loaded, the story is reset, that means inventory and health should be too. This is maybe for you a good thing, but maybe the other player is not happy with it. How you decide when it is OK to load and when not? Make a vote system? Possible, but not a really good solution anyway.

With introducing the checkpoint system, game fluency is mantained and fairness between players guaranteed. With the lot checkpoints and the ability to jump to chapters/optional missions anytime you want, the downgrade is not so bad as I initially thought. I even now understand how far you will be thrown back inthe story line. It's obvious: to the chapter beginning.

So just remember:

• checkpoints will save your inventory / collectibles permanently
• checkpoint will temporarily remember your progress
• leaving game will save your inventory / collectibles but you have to start the chapter again (monsters and normal items respawned)
• game crashing will mean you will lose inventory / collectibles since last checkpoint and you have to start chapter again (monsters, items and collectibles respawned)
• leave game never at the very end of a chapter, decide early when new chapter began, if you plan to play long enough to complete it

Indeed, often game crashes are a bad thing with this system.

But I have to change my mind and be fair enough to say that I was wrong. The developers must have really thought about the mechanism change in the process of programming this game and choose a good solution that is suitable enough for solo, but way better for coop playing.