But whilst having it in mind, developers surely don't account for it as being used as a game mechanic. Or rather abused. I suppose if they care about providing a more curated experience, then they'll make the system difficult to abuse, as the example with Exiled Kingdoms shows. Or will limit the number of saves available or similar. That's fine too. But ironically, it means they go out of their way to prevent save system being (ab)used as a game mechanic, not create a particular mechanic having save system as its core.
Of course developers account for savescumming. But instead of creating systems to combat it, they just adapted their games to cater to savescumming crowd, which is one of the main reasons for the decline of gaming.
Take what Josh Sawyer said:
Take something like the classic spell Disintegrate from A/D&D. In older editions, this was a total win/loss spell. If the target failed the save, it died, flat out. People effectively used this as an effective degenerate tactic against many difficult enemies in Infinity Engine games. The first spell cast would be Disintegrate. If the target made its save, the player would just reload and try again.
With Disintegrate reworked as a spell that does a large amount of damage on a failed save and a decent amount of damage on a successful save, it's no longer an all-or-nothing spell that encourages save scumming. The effects are still variable, the results of the save still matter, but it's one check that's normalized with many others during combat. The more the randomized checks of combat are normalized, the more the player's specific character strategies and tactics matter.
Problem: Savescummers abused the OHKO spells to reload boss fights infinitely until they instawin an encounter, ruining their experience in the process.
Solution: Rework iconic and interesting spells, to instead be one of the hundreds of the same, boring "min dmg - max dmg" spells.
This is modern gamedev in a nutshell. Their answer to some retards savescumming like crazy and ruining the game for themselves, is to instead preemptively ruin the game for everyone, treat the whole playerbase like retards and adjust the design accordingly.
While the save systems like one in KCD etc, are better answer to savescumming than just making the game retarded like in above example, they are still solutions to something that is not a problem, but instead a much needed feature. Having the game able to be ruined by savescumming, is a great way to ensure that dumbfucks will ruin it for themselves, then move on to instead play call of duty or something, instead of polluting the RPG genre with their presence.
Save systems were never a problem, retards abusing it and ruining the games for themselves were never a problem, devs designing their games to cater to those retards, however, are a problem.
