I can imagine the saving mechanic was a consequence of earlier parts of the game’s design.
Designer’s Thought #1 : The world is too big to be active all at once, with all these NPCs moving around at once, and all the speech data to load. So let’s split it into sectors, and have a scene transition between sectors. Also we can change environments this way, loading a different tileset for the town/desert/ice worlds, and we only need to buffer speech data for each sector.
Designer’s Thought #2 : If the player kills all of the pre-placed mobs, the world will be free of those mobs, and is pretty much saved without all the adventuring. So let’s have the mobs respawn – and we can do this on sector change. Little puzzles like getting a key to open a door can also respawn if not completed. These puzzles can be self-contained within each sector, which simplifies the mental model for the player since they can’t carry a key half way across the world – it’ll disappear from their hand once they change sector.
Designer’s Thought #3 : If sectors are going to respawn on (re)load, we don’t need to store very much data in the save game, only the sector we are in and a few global variables like player lives/magic and what parts of the story are unlocked.Yeah, and we’ve seen this in other games, so there is precedent.
