I think there’s two main points of frustration:

1) Pausing and continuing play is conflated with the consequences of failure.
2) Designers tend to not think in terms of using saves to define units of gameplay, and so when people pass sections that they feel are a “unit”, and have to do it multiple times, they feel frustrated.

As far as what else would you take away from the player - why do you have to take anything from the player? Simply not allowing them to continue past the failed challenge is a punishment in and of itself. Puzzle Quest actually *rewarded* you for failure.

More to the point, why do you have to reload from a saved game on failure of a challenge? Why can’t the game simply put you back at the beginning of the challenge/level/area? Why do we need to go through the mechanics of selecting a saved game when we fail to pass a challenge?

If I save before a tricky jumping puzzle/boss/whatever, and die in the process, putting me at the beginning of that challenge is functionally equivalent to me loading my save game from that point.

Making the two use the same mechanism is lazy design. By using “loading your game” as the mechanic to reset state on death, the designer doesn’t have to think about where to break up sections of gameplay. The problem with this is that it forces that on the player - and if the player doesn’t know that a particularly tough section is coming, and forgets to save, then they’re kind of SOL. I personally think that any time a designer increases the load on the player so that they can do less work, it’s a mistake.

Half-Life 2 is a pretty good example of doing this right. While they technically used auto-save as the failure mechanism, the presentation of it to the user was entirely different - it wasn’t “hit the load key,” or “navigate the load menu,” it was just “click the mouse button.” Through this dissassociation of loading/saving and failure, I generally found myself not using save games to protect against failure, but only to stop play and resume it later.

There are some evils with save points - 20 minutes between saves (like you mentioned), saves right before cutscenes (I’m looking at you, God of War 2), no saves before bosses, etc. And those can suck.

But powerups done poorly can suck, too. Poor level design can suck. That doesn’t mean that we don’t ever use levels or powerups - it just means that we need to fix problems with them when they’re discovered.

I do think there are some games that don’t work well with save points. Generally, those are games that can’t be chunked into discrete sections - things like Civilization.

I guess my biggest point here is that saying “save points are evil” is too broad of a brush. They can be a useful tool, if used right. We just need to think more about *how* and *why* to use them.

Which is kind of an overall theme of this blog.

Thanks for the comment

Halo 3’s save points were a lot better about that.

However, I’m not sure if there is a better solution to the your issue about the ONLY consequence (didn’t you really mean consequence rather than “condition”?) of dying is going back to the last save point. What else would you take away from the player?