Incline On the topic of Consequence Persistence & save systems

[retinoid]

Save scum all day everyday, deal with it fucking nerds. Don't bother @'ing me.

 

[JarlFrank]

retinoid

 

[Saduj]

I really dislike checkpoint saves because the save points are usually at the end of a linear string of fights. If it involves trash combat, I probably don’t want to do the same fight five times in one sitting. And it is annoying that someone decided that I must.

Even in a game like Hard West where the battles are good and take time, I’m not always interested in doing three or four in one sitting. That’s a game where the experience was much improved by adding a quick save feature. And there is no save scumming that one either.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

 

[JarlFrank]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

My point about discouraging risks still stands.

If you have only one save and can't exit without saving, you're not gonna experiment with shit that will likely result in screwing up your game, therefore making you play more conservatively.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

My point about discouraging risks still stands.

If you have only one save and can't exit without saving, you're not gonna experiment with shit that will likely result in screwing up your game, therefore making you play more conservatively.

Why is this a bad thing compared to playing recklessly because you know you can go backtwards in time at any point?

 

[barghwata]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

My point about discouraging risks still stands.

If you have only one save and can't exit without saving, you're not gonna experiment with shit that will likely result in screwing up your game, therefore making you play more conservatively.

Why is this a bad thing compared to playing recklessly because you know you can go backtwards in time at any point?

Maybe you're both right ..... both of these approaches have their own merits and at the end of the day it's down to personal taste.

 

[Harthwain]

When people talk about permadeath, they talk about us three being mean. 'Oh, they wanted to make it extra hard, so they threw in permadeath.' … permadeath is an example of 'consequence persistence.' … Do I read this scroll, do I drink this potion? I don't know. It might be good. It might be bad. If I can save the game and then drink the potion and—oh, it's bad-then I restore the game and I don't drink the potion. That entire game mechanic just completely goes away. So that was a whole reason why once you have taken an action and a consequence has happened, there's no way to go back and undo it.
…
The good stuff is just as permanent as the bad stuff.

Permadeath doesn't really suit some games, especially when the game in question linear, so you really want permadeath to go with something that creates unique situations.

I remember trying to play Pillars of Eternity on ironman. It basically meant I went into situations where I couldn't win (or had very low chances of winning), because I didn't know it, and the system they made didn't encourage disengaging from combat (you basically took free hits until you died), so once you were in a fight it was to the death. I went into a cave with a bear and engaged it? New character. OK, now I know I don't go into a cave and engage the bear... And it kind of went on like this, which made me realize that trying to do an ironman playthrough in Pillars of Eternity was a mistake. At least for a first playthrough. This got further amplified by the fact that games like Pillars of Eternity are basically combat games and it's hard to avoid combat, since it's meat of the game. On the other hand, once you know the game inside and out you may try it again, but at this point you know what's going to happen when and where, so... it kind of defeats the point.

In games like this you are far better off with doing a "soft ironman".

However, there are games where permadeath and limited saves work well together (Neo Scavenger, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, to name the most obvious examples here), but that's largely because both games were made with permadeath/limited save system in mind, and it shows.

 

[Saduj]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

If you’re referring to my post about checkpoint saves, it wasn’t directed at you in particular.

With regards to save on exit, it doesn’t prevent “save scumming” so just making it less convenient seems almost spiteful to me. I guess it would effectively prevent something like saving after every turn in combat. But I just don’t care if someone else is doing that. If having a save anytime feature ends up saving me a grand total of two minutes of my time and that also means that a million other people are save scumming every dice roll, I consider the feature a net positive.

 

[JarlFrank]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

My point about discouraging risks still stands.

If you have only one save and can't exit without saving, you're not gonna experiment with shit that will likely result in screwing up your game, therefore making you play more conservatively.

Why is this a bad thing compared to playing recklessly because you know you can go backtwards in time at any point?

It restricts certain playstyles. If you wanna ironman, add in an optional ironman mode that those who need the threat of permanent save deletion upon character death can use, while everyone else plays normally.

 

[luj1]

... systems that promote consequence persistence?

- Checkpoints
- 'save & exit'
- delayed story consequences (SWKotOR, Arcanum, etc.)
- "With this character death the thread of the prophecy is severed... "
- rolling dice for stats
- most importantly you and your own playstyle (see this thread)

Do they make the game more enjoyable?

Absolutely.

 

[V_K]

In principle, I think the way Ishar 1 or Blade of Destiny did it - paying for saving anywhere with XP or money - was reasonable. The cost wasn't so high that it stopped you from saving occasionally to try out something risky, but it quickly ramped up if you savescummed every two steps.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Molina]

I'm curious to know if save system from Outward doesn't satisfy everyone. No death no save, only consequences and news outcomes.

 

[Metronome]

The ID game works best in short gauntlets like Rogue and not epic marathons like Angband. These things take a lot of finesse to implement even in roguelikes. He's right though. If you can just reload to change outcomes, the mechanic you evaded is no longer relevant. This is huge a issue I see in a lot of western RPGs which seem to rely on the player being a good sport. Earlier I was playing Underrail and making a big stink about throwing and initiative for this reason.

Allowing the player to just reload away consequences without tailoring those consequences to that possibility is bad design. Expecting the player to intentionally gimp themselves is even worse design. Having delayed consequences so players need to restart the entire game rather than reload is Sierra-tier bad design.

I really shouldn't be punished for playing a game "in good faith" because the developer was being thoughtless.

 

[Bah]

My largest issue with something like only having exit-saves is that modern game developers don't produce code of sufficient quality to prevent data loss. Games crash, and I don't have the patience to deal with buggy software, so I'd be fairly unwilling to play a game with exit-only saves.

 

[Damned Registrations]

My largest issue with something like only having exit-saves is that modern game developers don't produce code of sufficient quality to prevent data loss. Games crash, and I don't have the patience to deal with buggy software, so I'd be fairly unwilling to play a game with exit-only saves.

While games crashing has consistently been an issue for a long time, data corruption is exceedingly rare, I've never had it happen. And even in games where it does, it's often just as bad for conventional saving anyways. Having checkpoint and exit saves means even in the event of the game crashing you're not losing any more progress than you would normally- dark souls works just fine that way.

It restricts certain playstyles. If you wanna ironman, add in an optional ironman mode that those who need the threat of permanent save deletion upon character death can use, while everyone else plays normally.

What you're proposing restricts game design though. There are untold legions of games with garbage design aspects because they're all made with the assumption that the player will just reload if something really bad happens in the short term. Combat with massive variance in enemy damage leading to unavoidable instant death, retarded enemy/quest layouts where you can just randomly walk into a dragon and die without warning, stupid branches in quests where one path has an inexplicably shit outcome because you can just reload, total lack of replay value so everyone can do everything on a single runthrough just by reloading 5 minute segments to try it all- these are all symptoms of this kind of design.

Rather games should be designed with limited saves in mind and if people can't handle consequences they can go ahead and cheat. There's a reason the Konami code gives you 60 lives instead of reducing them down to 3.

 

[Bah]

While games crashing has consistently been an issue for a long time, data corruption is exceedingly rare, I've never had it happen. And even in games where it does, it's often just as bad for conventional saving anyways. Having checkpoint and exit saves means even in the event of the game crashing you're not losing any more progress than you would normally- dark souls works just fine that way.

1st poll option: Save and exit only, exit save deletes upon continuing

So your save gets deleted when you start playing again. And then the game crashes while you're playing so ALL save progress is now lost. The first poll option is entirely unusable.

 

[Damned Registrations]

While games crashing has consistently been an issue for a long time, data corruption is exceedingly rare, I've never had it happen. And even in games where it does, it's often just as bad for conventional saving anyways. Having checkpoint and exit saves means even in the event of the game crashing you're not losing any more progress than you would normally- dark souls works just fine that way.

1st poll option: Save and exit only, exit save deletes upon continuing

So your save gets deleted when you start playing again. And then the game crashes while you're playing so ALL save progress is now lost. The first poll option is entirely unusable.

Nobody really uses that system though. Roguelikes appear to work that way but keep checkpoint backups in case of a crash.

 

[Bah]

I remember many years when I was 11 hitting a game breaking bug in Wasteland, and I had saved over my main save after triggering the breaking condition, so I had to start all over. Since that day, I make copious numbers of different saves and never overwrite them.

 

[Ranarama]

I swear this site is full of illiterate people.
Read it again. "Exit save".

Welcome to Dragon's Dogma, a PC port so shit you get a single save slot, and so buggy that you can lock the progress of the game by valid player decisions.

I'll take an actual save system. I'm not a fucking console peasant.

 

[Maxie]

All this talk about discouraging players from this or that frequently mentioned in this itt makes for a comprehensive image of Codexia - a cabal of old women, hateful and spiteful, unable to accept people half their age would also like to have fun every now and then

If you sincerely believe that sacrificing software flexibility that is the concept of save on demand is worth it due to your personal views on fun, then you have very little reasonable ideas to share probably on a much wider array of topics

It's a non-issue, a phantom Codexers conjured to lose in fight against it - there is nothing wrong in quicksaves, they were never wrong in the first place, a quicksave free system makes no sense in 2020

 

[rusty_shackleford]

All this talk about discouraging players from this or that frequently mentioned in this itt makes for a comprehensive image of Codexia - a cabal of old women, hateful and spiteful, unable to accept people half their age would also like to have fun every now and then

If you sincerely believe that sacrificing software flexibility that is the concept of save on demand is worth it due to your personal views on fun, then you have very little reasonable ideas to share probably on a much wider array of topics

It's a non-issue, a phantom Codexers conjured to lose in fight against it - there is nothing wrong in quicksaves, they were never wrong in the first place, a quicksave free system makes no sense in 2020

That's a lot of words to say "I like to cheat"

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Welcome to Dragon's Dogma, a PC port so shit you get a single save slot, and so buggy that you can lock the progress of the game by valid player decisions.

I'll take an actual save system. I'm not a fucking console peasant.

The single save slot of Dragon's Dogma was a design decision, not a console limitation, but the PC port has the virtue of easily being able to copy the save file, allowing the player to maintain as many backups as he likes, whereas in the console version the backup process necessitates copying the save file onto an external USB drive and then from the USB drive to a computer, too irritating a procedure for frequent use.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I demand the developers enable the cheat mode for everyone, not doing so limits my fun.