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Their wordsThis is an old argument where one side talks about the convenience of saving anytime and the other talks about the need to make games challenging, but this is a false dichotomy.
Our reading
Technical limitations in older consoles likely led to the separation of save points and checkpoints.
Their wordsI think the answer is for technical reasons rather than design reasons. God of War was designed for the PlayStation 2 and Resident Evil 4 originally appeared on the GameCube (and later on PlayStation 2 and Wii). These consoles take a few seconds to write a save to the memory card, so doing this every time the designers wanted a checkpoint would probably have been too annoying to the player.
Our reading
A save system should allow players to stop playing at any time and resume with minimal replaying.
Their wordsA save system should allow the player to stop playing at any time, allow the player to pick up where they left off with as close to zero replaying as possible, and save as automatically and seamlessly as possible, so the player will not forget to do it.
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