Let me ask you something. If you were reading a really good book for the first time but when you got to the last chapter you were told you have to start from the beginning, read all the way back to the last chapter, and THEN you could finish, would you still read the book? Lucky for us books have no restrictions. I can read a book start to finish and never have to worry about losing my place. I can use a bookmark, fold the corner of a page, or even mark the page number down in my phone. I can also read a book starting from the middle, read the last chapter first, or skip around randomly if I was so inclined. In fact most forms of media are set up this way. Books, music, and movies can all be viewed in any order you wish. So why not games?
This question kind of popped up for me as I was hit with one of the worst things that can happen in gaming, the dreaded corrupt save. There are plenty of ways games can be ruined. Back in the day was far worse. I'll never forget the most heinous power outage of my young gaming career. I was playing MGS3 on my PS2 shortly after it had launched. I had already started a save file, but the weekend had finally come and I was ready to have a serious gaming session with a game I had been looking forward to for months. I played for roughly 6 or 7 hours making incredibly slow progress because when I play MGS I fully intend to do things as stealthily and methodically as humanly possible. Then it happened. The lights went out, my screen went blank, and I sat there open mouthed because I had never taken the time to save.
Auto saves are probably the greatest thing to come to games since the D-pad. Manual saves have become a thing of the past, but even still I find myself saving frequently, especially should the game be particularly long. Could you imagine playing a game like Persona 5 and having your save wiped with just a couple hours of gameplay left until the end? That's some rage inducing s*** the likes of which only Kratos can really do justice to. So I ask again, why can't we pick up a game wherever we want?
Some games do give you the opportunity to replay missions after they have been completed. This is something I truly wish all games would do, but why stop there? What if I watched a friend play the first couple hours of a game and I realized I really wanted to play that game? How cool would it be to start the story where I left off while watching someone else play?
Do you want angry gamers? Cuz that's how you get angry gamers!
I realize gaming is set up the way it is because of many different factors. I'm sure questions like "What about character progression?" and "What if the game had multiple paths?" have popped into your mind at this point. Yes those are very good points. I honestly don't really have an answer for you, I'm not exactly a game developer, but remember what they did when they released Final Fantasy VII for iOS? You can boost your characters stats to max and turn off random encounters so you can breeze through the game as leisurely as you want. Why can't more games do that? Why can't we be given more freedom?
What if a game started and gave you multiple options for a difficulty that read: Easy, Normal, Hard, Custom. Custom could give you all the tools to play the game how you want and it could disable trophies/achievements so you couldn't cheese your way to a platinum or a ridiculously high gamer score. It's just an option. If I want to play a game like normal then I absolutely will. I mean who honestly starts reading a brand new book in the middle? Still though, if I was picking up a game from years ago and wanted to replay a particular moment immediately why shouldn't I be able to?
What do you think? Am I crazy? Well probably yes to that, but I really think this should be something to be considered. Thanks for reading.