Kxmode wrote on Nov 17, 2019, 19:27:
Why is there a checkpoint? If the answer is consoles, today's console have hard drives making the checkpoint system obsolete. So why do developers persist with checkpoints? Does it take too much development time to put in a save/load anywhere system?

There's no F5 or F9 keys on the controllers

Although I guess some games have it as a feature, such as those racing games that allow you to rewind after a crash. Which is pretty neat. I guess it's just a matter of time before an FPS game does it. Thematically it would fit well into something like Super Hot. And now that I think more about it, we had it ages ago in Prince of Persia Sands of Time, done beautifully.

I don't mind checkpoints if the game does it well, such as Dark Souls where the checkpoints (bonfires) are part of the world, and the challenge of the game is specifically getting from one to the other as best as you can. (instead of most games, which use checkpoints as more of checklist, and usually in the wrong damn stop, and only as a way to punish the player. That's bad game design from the get go - you need an incentive not to die, which isn't a punishment (unless that's part of the game, such as hardcore mode in Diablo)).

I think largely though it's a memory / gpu / cpu limitations on consoles (and most PCs) - often they are pushed to the limits, and actually stream the textures and 3D models in just before they are needed, and let go again sooner after, because they simply can't fit the whole level into the memory at once (and the CPU / GPU can't handle it all in one go either), and even if they could, it would take minutes to load a level from scratch - where as now we are tricked into playing a snippet of the game while the rest loads seamlessly during gameplay, bit by bit, so we don't notice the loading - pretty smart tbh. Which is why rewind works OK, since all of that is already loaded. But I don't think there are enough resources (even on PC tbh) to be able to load a whole different area of the map easily like you can with something like Doom 1 or Quake. You'd be looking at long loading times between loads, unless they were in the same area of your game. Where as with checkpoints, they hide all of that loading (since you typically start in an area which loads super fast, and then the rest loads in the background as you play).

Not always the case of course, but I think that's the main reason.