I Just Wanted To Save My Game [Update]

Having kept an eye on Pacific Drive for months, I was really excited to finally get a chance to sit down with it on the weekend. Sadly, after just a few hours, I've already uninstalled it.

If you haven't heard of or seen it yet, Pacific Drive is a survival game where you play a person trapped in a weird phantom zone, and your entire experience is based around driving, maintaining and upgrading a piece of shit old car:

Disclaimer: I am not normally a huge survival game fan. I have to do enough surviving every other waking moment in my life to find much joy in scrounging around for cloth and cobbling together some crappy tools. That said, the setting here--and, as the former owner of a 1983 Toyota Corona station wagon, emphasis on a piece of shit old car--seemed cool enough that it might win me over.

And for a while, it did! Like Riley has already blogged, this game is wonderfully tactile; the highlight of my time with Pacific Drive was easily the act of getting in and out of the car, which every single time requires you to open the door, turn the ignition and put it in gear. Sounds mundane, but it really grounds you in the whole car-based experience!

After a while spent driving around, getting zapped, smashing some stuff, picking up a ton of junk and crafting some tools, though, the time came for me to put the controller down and go live my life. I've got a wife, I've got two kids and I enjoy things outside of the internet and video games. There's a lot going on right now, so when I was done with Pacific Drive for the night, I looked for a save button.

Weirdly, there wasn't one. Even though this was a singleplayer game. Figuring, OK, it's a survival game, maybe developers Ironwood Studios want to prevent save-scumming, I assumed it was auto-saving on a somewhat regular basis. I was only half-right. The game was auto-saving, but it was also telling me that the last save had been 17 minutes ago.

The game only lets you manually save when you're back at your garage, Pacific Drive's home base, but otherwise is only autosaving whenever you enter a new "junction", the game's term for its roguelike instances. That's a deal-breaker for me. Absolute non-starter. There are many nights of my life where I only get 45-60 minutes to kick back with a video game in between cooking dinner, putting kids to bed, playing football and watching some TV with my wife, and if I'm going to run the risk of losing almost half of that time just because something comes up and I can't save the game, then that game is done for.

I am not the first person to have an issue with this. So many people have been asking about Pacific Drive's save situation that Ironwood Studios issued a little statement on the game's Steam forums, which says:

Currently, saving functions like this: when you’re in the garage, you are able save up to your current level of progress. Parts will stay on the ground, your inventory stays the same, you’ll even have the same amount of gas in the tank for the car, etc. While out on a trip into the Zone it’s a bit different. You’ll keep all your progress up to the current junction, but nothing after - your game will save automatically when you enter a new level and the game won’t save again until you get back to the garage, or move on to the next junction.

Due to the scope of the game, and our focus on providing a robust and varied experience across a high number of trips into the zone, with variable map sizes, anomaly populations, and the amount of hazards, we had to make technical sacrifices early on in the project that makes revisiting this save behavior not feasible. While we understand why this is highly requested, it’s not something we plan on revisiting for those reasons.

We believe that once a majority of players have had time in the game, it’ll be apparent why the save system is working this way. The game gets much faster and more intense the more you learn your way around the Zone and you’ll have plenty of time to grab the essentials and get out or take your time and explore. If you do need to save mid-run, just head for the next exit and then you can safely quit the game once you load into the next level, without losing any progress.

That understates the annoyance somewhat; you often can't just "head for the next exit", especially if whatever is taking you away from the game is even remotely urgent. The statement does at least provide two explanations as to why the game's save state is the way it is, though. First, Ironwood say it's a technical thing. The second, related to this, is that the whole point of the game is to prepare, load up for a run into the woods and then get out there, get what you need and head home.

It's not the first roguelike to be designed like this! Most others, however, don't take 30-45 minutes to clear a room. What this gameplay loop suggests is that if you don't have 30-45 minutes to set aside to make a run, then maybe don't do it. And that if you don't think you'll be able to regularly do that, then maybe don't get the game at all.

I don't want to sit here and tell Ironwood what they should have done with their game. They developed it, made technical decisions, designed Pacific Drive's loops that way for a reason and have released the game they wanted to release, which--let's be clear--a lot of people are very into.

I just want to sit here (as someone who was so otherwise excited for this game!) and be a little bummed that, for all Pacific Drive's other accessibility and quality of life toggles--and it features many--it couldn't find a way to be more accommodating of people who ever have to just...stop playing a video game for whatever reason. 

UPDATE: 5:15am ET, March 1: If you'd like to take a much deeper dive into both the technical and design reasons behind the game's save system, game director Seth Rosen has written a very long and constructive explainer on Pacific Drive's Steam page. A highlight:

Pacific Drive shares some of its DNA with extraction games, with survival games, and with roguelite games. All of these genres are driven by a sense of stakes: the threat of failure, the threat of starting from scratch after a mis-step. Without these stakes—the threat of losing everything that you’ve worked so hard for—these games lose their teeth. And those teeth can be sharp! But that’s what makes them compelling, too. It’s a delicious friction that provides massive satisfaction when overcome, and can be bitter and frustrating when you succumb. I worked on Don’t Starve for several years earlier in my career, so I’m no stranger to the ways that games can be delightful and maddening at the same time.

Pacific Drive is a game that is designed in this vein. When you go on a trip into the Zone, you’re gathering precious materials, materials you desperately need to keep your car running so that it, in turn, can keep protecting you. You won’t make it through the Zone in one piece without your trusty steed. The inability to save the game mid-level (combined with the failed run penalty) is the thing that creates the stakes I mentioned above: you’re out on a limb, dangling over a proverbial canyon that’s filled with anomalies. If you lose your grip, or take a wrong step, disaster can strike. This is one of the main sources of the tension that pervades each expedition into the Zone. It is integral to the core (default) experience of Pacific Drive: if you had the safety net of being able to save at any time, and then rewind to that save after one such misstep, the tension evaporates.

Worse yet, if you could save and reload at any point in the middle of a level, it would mean that any inconvenience or situation that is starting to tilt against you no longer needs to be dealt with. Pacific Drive is at its best when it asks you to be dynamic, to react to a changing situation, especially a situation you didn’t quite anticipate or prepare for. It’s these emergent moments where you’ll find creative solutions to the problems you’re facing, and the game is most alive. If we had included manual saves that work in the middle of a junction level, it would rob the experience of this aspect, because you can always just go back a few minutes and do it better the next time. The Zone is a place of consequence. It’s unforgiving, and uncaring. And you, and your car, must persevere in spite of this.