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Savegame limitations?

Should there be any savegame limitations in RPG games?


  • Total voters
    131
  • Poll closed .

mondblut

Arcane
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Ingrija
All of the above are issues with RNG and the solution is something i've already wrote about in my previous posts in this thread: have the RNG state be part of the game state that is saved so it doesn't matter if the player loads after a bad roll: the next time they reload they'll get the exact same roll. You could even use different RNGs (each with their own saved state) for each type of roll to avoid muddying the RNG state by unrelated actions (e.g. to avoid something like "use skill A => skill A check fail => reload => do a search or whatever else that relies on a random number => use skill A => skill A check succeeded" because both both "skill A check" and "do a search or whatever" would use the same RNG).

Never underestimate the craftiness of players, fools. You can store terabytes of fixed RNG seeds for every action in the game, we will still find a way to reset a poor roll where it doesn't matter and conserve a good one for where it does :obviously:

Ask JA2 how did their pitiful attempt at storing the seed fare. Protip: it was bent over and buttfucked just like every other attempt to control the way we want to play.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
All of the above are issues with RNG and the solution is something i've already wrote about in my previous posts in this thread: have the RNG state be part of the game state that is saved so it doesn't matter if the player loads after a bad roll: the next time they reload they'll get the exact same roll. You could even use different RNGs (each with their own saved state) for each type of roll to avoid muddying the RNG state by unrelated actions (e.g. to avoid something like "use skill A => skill A check fail => reload => do a search or whatever else that relies on a random number => use skill A => skill A check succeeded" because both both "skill A check" and "do a search or whatever" would use the same RNG).

Never underestimate the craftiness of players, fools. You can store terabytes of fixed RNG seeds for every action in the game, we will still find a way to reset a poor roll where it doesn't matter and conserve a good one for where it does :obviously:

Ask JA2 how did their pitiful attempt at storing the seed fare. Protip: it was bent over and buttfucked just like every other attempt to control the way we want to play.
We already know we're never going to convince you that you're a cheater.
We're just convincing everyone else that you're a cheater. And you do a good job of helping us.
 

WhiteShark

Learned
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When I was young I played Mega Man X for the first time on an emulator. I discovered save states and used them extensively in a boss fight. Here's what I would do: everytime I managed to get in a hit without taking damage, I would quicksave. If I got hit, I would quickload. Needless to say, it trivialized the whole affair. I was not required to be skillful, to truly understand the mechanics of the fight. If I could get in one clean hit, then that's what "counted" thanks to save states, even if that clean hit only came after a dozen failed attempts.
This example is basically what i wrote several times: Mega Man X relied on its lack of a proper save system for its difficulty, so of course introducing savestates would obliterate it.
Honestly reading this just boggles my mind. A real time fight with a unique boss isn't "real" difficulty if using save states makes it easier, huh? Care to explain what "real" difficulty would be then?
 
Joined
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut
When I was young I played Mega Man X for the first time on an emulator. I discovered save states and used them extensively in a boss fight. Here's what I would do: everytime I managed to get in a hit without taking damage, I would quicksave. If I got hit, I would quickload. Needless to say, it trivialized the whole affair. I was not required to be skillful, to truly understand the mechanics of the fight. If I could get in one clean hit, then that's what "counted" thanks to save states, even if that clean hit only came after a dozen failed attempts.
This example is basically what i wrote several times: Mega Man X relied on its lack of a proper save system for its difficulty, so of course introducing savestates would obliterate it.
Honestly reading this just boggles my mind. A real time fight with a unique boss isn't "real" difficulty if you using save states makes it easier, huh? Care to explain what "real" difficulty would be then?
Average savescummer argument: "nothing is difficult because I'm cheating"
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Post your perfect Pitfall II score and you can join this conversation.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Hard drives drastically reduced the amount of time required to save and load games relative to what had been required when saving and loading to floppy disks, thus allowing save-scumming without a corresponding expenditure on the part of the player. Designers could artificially restore a time delay to saving and loading, permitting players the option of save-scumming but with added time expense. :M

P:K tried that.
 

Gastrick

Cipher
Joined
Aug 1, 2020
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1,704
Back in the coin-op (and Atari 2600) days repeating sections was the only option. That kind of suspense adds a whole different dynamic that there’s really no other way to recapture and the automaticity one develops in the repetition hones ones skill to a level hard to attain in any game that allows saving at all.
It is more intense and suspenseful to play these retro action games with no save states, but save scumming lets you become more skilled a lot faster. Playing the game after without saves after playing with them will make it noticeable. It's because you repeat all the difficult parts but quickly go through the easy parts. Also, would that even carry forward to RPGs? If RPGs involve a lot of steps like giving characters items.

P.S. Does Pitfall I count?
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Of course. II’s the one I remember because of that cave.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Honestly reading this just boggles my mind. A real time fight with a unique boss isn't "real" difficulty if using save states makes it easier, huh? Care to explain what "real" difficulty would be then?

I have already written about my thoughts on the matter previously in the thread. For Mega Man X explicitly i cannot really answer because i haven't played the game (or any Mega Man really) as aside a few exceptions (e.g. Duke Nukem 1) i'm not into 2D platformers much.

Back in the coin-op (and Atari 2600) days repeating sections was the only option. That kind of suspense adds a whole different dynamic that there’s really no other way to recapture and the automaticity one develops in the repetition hones ones skill to a level hard to attain in any game that allows saving at all.

As i already wrote, there were more factors into play than just some designer deciding to use a limited savesystem (or not a savesystem at all, in these cases) to artificially increase the game's length, like hardware limitations or in the case of coin-ops, gouging your coins :-P. But i already wrote about that, are we now in the part of the thread where i have to start repeating myself? That's boring and i wont bother :-P

Never underestimate the craftiness of players, fools. You can store terabytes of fixed RNG seeds for every action in the game, we will still find a way to reset a poor roll where it doesn't matter and conserve a good one for where it does :obviously:

Ask JA2 how did their pitiful attempt at storing the seed fare. Protip: it was bent over and buttfucked just like every other attempt to control the way we want to play.

You can always open the savegame in a hex editor or whatever and TBH i do not really care how people play the game as long as they're having fun.
 

WhiteShark

Learned
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Honestly reading this just boggles my mind. A real time fight with a unique boss isn't "real" difficulty if using save states makes it easier, huh? Care to explain what "real" difficulty would be then?

I have already written about my thoughts on the matter previously in the thread. For Mega Man X explicitly i cannot really answer because i haven't played the game (or any Mega Man really) as aside a few exceptions (e.g. Duke Nukem 1) i'm not into 2D platformers much.
Honestly this is what I had expected but I didn't want to jump to conclusions. I think the fact that you don't even play the genre you're declaring to be replete with "fake" difficulty speaks for itself. Here's all what I found for your definition of "real" difficulty:

But yes, these limitations do make the games harder, this is never something i argued against - what i argue is what i replied to Pentium above: that difficulty is cheap, it comes from the game's implementation instead of the game's actual rules.
The fact is, the "actual rules" of Mega Man X is that you must dodge the enemies attacks consistently (or at least consistently enough to not die) while attacking the enemy until he dies, all in real time. Depending on the boss fight this can be a fairly challenging task. It absolutely qualifies for "real difficulty" by your definition: there is no special hindrance by the game's implementation. Nevertheless, you can trivialize any boss fight by doing what I did: saving after every successful hit, loading after every instance of damage received. It would be absurd to assert that because you dodged successfully once that you had mastered that attack pattern; it is likewise ridiculous to say that you have mastered a boss just because you defeated it once. However, this is exactly what you state here:

Even in games that rely on player skill, like a platformer, you can either perform the control combinations in the expected time sequences to pass the obstructions (e.g. jump over a large gap by run+jump at the right position) or you cannot. After you have demonstrated (to the game) your ability to do that there isn't a reason to put the player in a position where they have to repeat something they've already demonstrated their ability to overcome just so that there game's length and difficulty can be artificially increased.
By this reasoning accomplishing a task successfully, once, is the only "real" difficulty, and any repetition of said task regardless of context is "artificial" difficulty only meant to pad out the game. I suppose in your ideal, "real" difficulty game with no padding, bosses would only use each of their attack patterns until you successfully dodged it once, there would only be one unique instance of each platforming obstacle, and so on. Such a game would not be trivialized by save states, I suppose, but it wouldn't matter since it would be trivial to begin with.

You know, it's okay to admit that you just like being able to quicksave/quickload anywhere at anytime regardless of how it affects the game experience. It would be more honest than these arguments that it somehow doesn't affect """real""" difficulty or consequences.
 

Humanophage

Arcane
Joined
Dec 20, 2005
Messages
5,032
Case in point - currently playing Thea 2.

Been doing quite great, spent about 15 hours between 3 days on a run. Logged in today whilst a bit tired, wrongly assessed the risk and got a couple of key characters killed in the second fight. Time to restart again and waste 15 more hours on getting to this point. Or I suppose I could trudge on and waste 10 more hours until I die with a crippled party.

All this is testing is your consistent attention when playing games. Everything turns boring because you are incentivised never to take risks and never do anything non-trivial (or else pay with your time). To be honest, I suspect that many of the people who use 'savescumming' to denote saving are probably not used to complex games and are justifying their ineptitude by getting back at people who like those games. They learned a word and are now applying it to anything that moves, like people using 'simp' to refer to anyone commenting on women's appearance in some god-forsaken comment section.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The fact is, the "actual rules" of Mega Man X is that you must dodge the enemies attacks consistently (or at least consistently enough to not die) while attacking the enemy until he dies, all in real time. Depending on the boss fight this can be a fairly challenging task. It absolutely qualifies for "real difficulty" by your definition: there is no special hindrance by the game's implementation. Nevertheless, you can trivialize any boss fight by doing what I did: saving after every successful hit, loading after every instance of damage received. It would be absurd to assert that because you dodged successfully once that you had mastered that attack pattern; it is likewise ridiculous to say that you have mastered a boss just because you defeated it once.

But i already wrote that savegames can make a game easier. And yes, from your description it sounds like the difficulty of the game would be those actions you performed between using savestates and the perceived increase of the difficulty is due to the lack of savestates in the base game... which is basically what i'm writing so far.

By this reasoning accomplishing a task successfully, once, is the only "real" difficulty, and any repetition of said task regardless of context is "artificial" difficulty only meant to pad out the game. I suppose in your ideal, "real" difficulty game with no padding, bosses would only use each of their attack patterns until you successfully dodged it once, there would only be one unique instance of each platforming obstacle, and so on.

No, i already wrote to you previously that:

Right, obviously introducing an obstacle type - be it a platforming section or an enemy encoutner - isn't something to be done one and thrown away, but this should be done in terms of the level design: if the game wants to test your skill several times, then the levels (or whatever) should have those tests instead of implicitly relying on the lack of a savesystem that will force the player repeat previously beaten sections.

The game itself can ask you to do something more than once, that should be obvious and self-explanatory (to the point where i shouldn't even have to write that quote above, and TBH i am a bit annoyed that despite writing this i have to repeat it again, is there a point of making arguments if they aren't going to be read?) and is in line with what i've written so far. If a game asks you to overcome an obstacle (jump puzzle, encounter, whatever) six times as part of its level design or enemy design or other part of the game's rules/content it is different from you having to overcome the same thing six times because you had to restart five times from a checkpoint (or whatever) that was placed before the obstacle.

One is part of the game itself (which is also something that can be criticized - e.g. for being repetitive, or avoiding to be repetitive which is the ideal as having to overcome the exact same obstacle multiple times isn't exactly fun) and another is part of the game's implementation - specifically the interface between the player and the game's rules - that exists outside the game itself. If nothing else (and not to be confused as my main point, just another thing that shows how these two are different) you can't criticize a game for being repetitive because you had to repeat a checkpoint 10 times, but you can criticize a game for being repetitive for placing the same encounter 10 times in a row.
 

WhiteShark

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The fact is, the "actual rules" of Mega Man X is that you must dodge the enemies attacks consistently (or at least consistently enough to not die) while attacking the enemy until he dies, all in real time. Depending on the boss fight this can be a fairly challenging task. It absolutely qualifies for "real difficulty" by your definition: there is no special hindrance by the game's implementation. Nevertheless, you can trivialize any boss fight by doing what I did: saving after every successful hit, loading after every instance of damage received. It would be absurd to assert that because you dodged successfully once that you had mastered that attack pattern; it is likewise ridiculous to say that you have mastered a boss just because you defeated it once.

But i already wrote that savegames can make a game easier. And yes, from your description it sounds like the difficulty of the game would be those actions you performed between using savestates and the perceived increase of the difficulty is due to the lack of savestates in the base game... which is basically what i'm writing so far.
If you cannot see how being required to do multiple tasks in real time, consecutively, successfully, and with minimal margin for error is genuinely more difficult than doing one task at a time with infinite margin for error, there's no point in continuing this discussion. You might as well argue that being unable to slow the game speed is also an "implementation detail" that only raises "perceived" difficulty.

Even in games that rely on player skill, like a platformer, you can either perform the control combinations in the expected time sequences to pass the obstructions (e.g. jump over a large gap by run+jump at the right position) or you cannot. After you have demonstrated (to the game) your ability to do that there isn't a reason to put the player in a position where they have to repeat something they've already demonstrated their ability to overcome just so that there game's length and difficulty can be artificially increased.
No, i already wrote to you previously that:

Right, obviously introducing an obstacle type - be it a platforming section or an enemy encoutner - isn't something to be done one and thrown away, but this should be done in terms of the level design: if the game wants to test your skill several times, then the levels (or whatever) should have those tests instead of implicitly relying on the lack of a savesystem that will force the player repeat previously beaten sections.

The game itself can ask you to do something more than once, that should be obvious and self-explanatory (to the point where i shouldn't even have to write that quote above, and TBH i am a bit annoyed that despite writing this i have to repeat it again, is there a point of making arguments if they aren't going to be read?) and is in line with what i've written so far. If a game asks you to overcome an obstacle (jump puzzle, encounter, whatever) six times as part of its level design or enemy design or other part of the game's rules/content it is different from you having to overcome the same thing six times because you had to restart five times from a checkpoint (or whatever) that was placed before the obstacle.
These two statements contradict each other. Can you not see that? According to the first, if you've done something once you should never have to do the same thing again. Whether it's content repeated due to checkpoints or content that simply recurs at multiple points in the game, it's still repetition. I'll just assume that you weren't being clear in the first statement and the second is your true position as you assert now.

If nothing else (and not to be confused as my main point, just another thing that shows how these two are different) you can't criticize a game for being repetitive because you had to repeat a checkpoint 10 times, but you can criticize a game for being repetitive for placing the same encounter 10 times in a row.
You absolutely can and people often do.
 

Pentium

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Yes, removing beef from the menu does "encourage" people to get chicken.
1. Yes, it does. The fact you're in denial won't make your life any safer.
27648.jpg

2. Do you feel smart coming up with retarded analogies? It shoudn't work that way, tho.

Or unless the player is conscious of what they expect from the game and able to exercise self-restraint when it helps them pursue that experience.
Blah blah blah this argument was too old even before this thread.

How do you design a game around instantly winning the game?
Achievement: Badass Clicker

This is often more than a small design issue, in my experience. Games with limited saving often force you to continue playing past the point when you need to stop just so you can reach the next save point, but you don't always have time to push forward to the next checkpoint when real life calls. If you don't reach the save point in time, they basically force you to complete the exact same mundane tasks over again, with no reason.
Then don't play games if you're unable to satisfy your chick for a long time enough.
 
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Harthwain

Magister
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Dec 13, 2019
Messages
4,690
Or unless the player is conscious of what they expect from the game and able to exercise self-restraint when it helps them pursue that experience.
Thing is - the player shouldn't have to "exercise self-restraint" when interacting with the game. The game should be designed in a way that the player is interacting with it as is it meant to be played, without the player having to resort to house rules.
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
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I always love resource based saving like in older Resident Evils and Kingdom Come Deliverance. It strikes good balance of allowing to save at leisure or being cautious, depending how much of save items you have.
 

jungl

Augur
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Mar 30, 2016
Messages
1,420
It doesnt work for most games. Imagine playing gothic 2 with save game limitation. It was bad in kingdom come. Works fine in strategy mission based rpgs, fps and survival horror games.
 

Can't handle the bacon

Guest
This example is basically what i wrote several times: Mega Man X relied on its lack of a proper save system for its difficulty, so of course introducing savestates would obliterate it.
Wtf am I reading. Even normie RPGs usually don't allow saving in the middle of combat, let alone a boss fight. What is even the point of playing a game if you can use saves to immediately circumvent all of your failures?

Imagine playing gothic 2 with save game limitation.
That would be fantastic.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
If you cannot see how being required to do multiple tasks in real time, consecutively, successfully, and with minimal margin for error is genuinely more difficult than doing one task at a time with infinite margin for error, there's no point in continuing this discussion.

Well, perhaps since you manage to ignore even the bit that you quoted where i acknowledge that it makes a game more difficult. That many games rely on their (lack of or broken) save systems for their difficulty is something i mentioned from the beginning of this thread.

These two statements contradict each other. Can you not see that?

The second clarifies and expands on the first statement - after the part you quoted i wrote "even in the case of player skill based games, the game should introduce something different and more challenging for the player to overcome instead of using the repetition introduced by a limited (intentionally broken) save system".

I mean think about it logically, this was even in the context of using a platformer as an example, would it even make sense to imply that after you -e.g.- show to the game that you can jump there wont be any more jumping on a platformer? Because your interpretation seems to be something like that, however that interpretation makes no sense at all, so why are you sticking to it instead of trying to understand what i meant (the full thing i wrote, not just the bit you quoted) especially when i write a clarification about it?

In the case of the platformer i was referring to things like a gap in the level. After jumping that gap having the level ask you avoid the same gap is pointless repetition - the player already demonstrated their ability to jump that specific gap. Instead it should use something different (in the confines of what the game is all about, obviously - so a platformer will still use obstacles that you'd expect from a platformer to have), like a different gap, a trap, a combination of a gap and a trap, a jump that requires some initial running, a gap that relies on some lever and a mechanism to close or whatever. Many games, very often including platformers, have limited "vocabularies" in their design but that doesn't mean they have to repeat the same words or "phrases" over and over (a gap followed by a trap, followed by a gap, followed by a trap, followed by a gap, followed by a trap is still repetitive).

Whether it's content repeated due to checkpoints or content that simply recurs at multiple points in the game, it's still repetition.

Content that is repeated due to checkpoints is not the same as content that recurs at multiple points in the game which itself is not the same as content that is placed on a row multiple times one after another - note that i compared the first with the third, not the first with the second.

If nothing else (and not to be confused as my main point, just another thing that shows how these two are different) you can't criticize a game for being repetitive because you had to repeat a checkpoint 10 times, but you can criticize a game for being repetitive for placing the same encounter 10 times in a row.
You absolutely can and people often do.

And they are wrong because one (placing the same encounter 10 times) relies on the game's design itself and is an explicit choice some designer made whereas the other may vary between players (some might not even need to repeat a checkpoint or only do one or two repetitions, others may repeat it 20 times or abandon the game at that point). The first is something that pretty much every player will experience so it makes sense to criticize it as something you can point to and explain, the other will be a different experience for every player.

Wtf am I reading. Even normie RPGs usually don't allow saving in the middle of combat, let alone a boss fight. What is even the point of playing a game if you can use saves to immediately circumvent all of your failures?

Read all the previous posts i made in this thread, it should all be explained there. If you have questions and find something not clear, i can -try to- clarify.
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
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If you have any save game system, even limited or resource based, it is like cheating. Only the old arcade games have the correct save game system: i.e. they don't have it at all. Furthermore you have to pay with real money every time you want to play the game again. This increases tremendously the difficulty and the enjoyment of the game. Restarting the game without restriction is like cheating.
:troll:
 

Gargaune

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3,136
Thing is - the player shouldn't have to "exercise self-restraint" when interacting with the game. The game should be designed in a way that the player is interacting with it as is it meant to be played, without the player having to resort to house rules.
I know this'll sound like semantics but it really isn't, you gotta distinguish between form and content. There are other aspects related to the form of videogames, the medium itself, which impact the challenge of the experience, things such as difficulty settings and cheats, but I hope we're not gonna get to "devs should disable the debug console 'cause I can't resist toggling god mode." So when you sit down in front of your screen, you've gotta be able to decide what sort of experience you want from a game and whether you'll let a suboptimal outcome play or if you'll drop the difficulty, cheat or hammer that F9 key. That's you choosing how to "interact" with the pages of a book, not with the story written on them.

Videogames are not strict directorial affairs, and determining your own approach to save/load as a house rule falls outside of the scope of the content (in most cases). Even if you value that added challenge and tension, games are lengthy experiences and often prone to bugs, mishaps and muddied design, so having to moderate your own behaviour towards platform affordances like cheats and savescumming is generally worth it over finding yourself locked out of exploration or experimentation or, yes, even opening that fucking chest after three natural ones in a row. Also, as a point of courtesy, consider that it's a smaller ask of an Ironman afficionado to simply ignore the Load function than of a savescumming addict to exploit or hack their save states into the game. Naturally, I have no objection to a setting in that respect.

But at this point you'd argue for that holistic design approach where purposefully building the game around a single, rolling save state would force developers to make a better, more interesting title that would present the player with continual value throughout a "no refunds" playthrough, am I right? Well, actually it would force them to make games easier. All those arguments about how killing savescumming would elevate games by upping the challenge are wrong, in a beautiful fit of irony, precisely because they are correct. Designers would have to tune down all across the board (not just combat or platforming, but stuff like character building and consequence severity as well) to keep it accessible to a wide audience. Yeah, there is a target demographic for punishment and games to cater to it, like Dark Souls, but then that one game almost defined a subgenre in and of itself to the point that non-sliced bread became the "Dark Souls of bread." It's not for everyone and it's not for any game.

Bottom line, there's been a lot of focusing on minutiae and unwarranted optimism at work in this thread. Save limitations work in a niche segment, but there's no incline to be had in rolling them out across the whole medium, quite the opposite, and it's a big price to pay just for not having to resist the appeal of the Quickload key when you end up using one too many healing potions.
 

Harthwain

Magister
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4,690
I know this'll sound like semantics but it really isn't, you gotta distinguish between form and content. There are other aspects related to the form of videogames, the medium itself, which impact the challenge of the experience, things such as difficulty settings and cheats, but I hope we're not gonna get to "devs should disable the debug console 'cause I can't resist toggling god mode." So when you sit down in front of your screen, you've gotta be able to decide what sort of experience you want from a game and whether you'll let a suboptimal outcome play or if you'll drop the difficulty, cheat or hammer that F9 key. That's you choosing how to "interact" with the pages of a book, not with the story written on them.
1) There is no point discussing cheats. Anyone is free to use cheats in a singleplayer game, but I think everyone agrees that playing a game with cheats defeats the purpose of playing the game.

2) If some plays are more suboptimal than others (or other plays are way stronger than others) then that's a balance design problem and telling the player to not use a playstyle that is stronger is not really a solution, because each skill, item, spell, etc. was designed to be used. While increasing difficulty can be useful in adjusting the difficulty to a desired level, it is only going to exacerbate the fact that the other stuff is going to be less effective, meaning the broken play still remains the strongest. Can the player not use the play in question? Sure. But he shouldn't be asked to do so. That's my point. So trying to use that as an argument is not really going to work.

3) If the game has save and load fuction then it is there to be used. If the game designer wants the player to play in a specific way, then he designs the game to be played so. This included how the save game system operates within the confines of the game.

But at this point you'd argue for that holistic design approach where purposefully building the game around a single, rolling save state would force developers to make a better, more interesting title that would present the player with continual value throughout a "no refunds" playthrough, am I right? Well, actually it would force them to make games easier. All those arguments about how killing savescumming would elevate games by upping the challenge are wrong, in a beautiful fit of irony, precisely because they are correct. Designers would have to tune down all across the board (not just combat or platforming, but stuff like character building and consequence severity as well) to keep it accessible to a wide audience.
There are roguelites.

You are still not expected to reload there (if you die, you die). However, roguelites can have meta-progression system rewarding you in various ways after you are defeated. The upside means you get access to more interesting content. The downside is that the game may get easier as unlock generally can be more powerful than the blank slate you start with. That said, it is not the same as "designers tuning down difficulty across the board", like you suggest, but the same we discussed previously: the game being less "difficulty-resistant" to certain perks/build/strategies, etc. But that's true for any game that is not "perfectly balanced".

Yeah, there is a target demographic for punishment and games to cater to it, like Dark Souls, but then that one game almost defined a subgenre in and of itself to the point that non-sliced bread became the "Dark Souls of bread." It's not for everyone and it's not for any game.
:nocountryforshitposters:

Darkest Dungeon being an incredibly difficult game is a myth spread far and wide by the casual players. Once you get the hang of the mechanics you should be able to do just fine. Sure, you need to survive from checkpoint to checkpoint, but the same [beating opponents] is true for literally every game. That's how progression works.

It's not for everyone and it's not for any game.
I don't think any reasonable man would argue otherwise. The point isn't: "All games ought to have limitations on saves". The point is: "Limitations on saves can be done in an interesting way and add something to the game you otherwise wouldn't get".
 
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Gargaune

Magister
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Harthwain, the game developer gave you a platform affordance in the save system, it's up to you decide whether you want to employ it every once in a while or before every locked chest. You have that freedom the same way you have the freedom to min-max or not, it's not the game designer's job to strictly regulate how you interact with the game right down to the moment you go take a leak, nor does the existence of power builds amount to the developer "asking" the player not to use them. The point in bringing up cheats is simply that, like the F9 key, they're there and thus demand a similar "effort" to ignore as savescumming does. Arguing that they're clearly not part of the intended experience is pointless, because nobody who sits there mashing reload until they finally get the 19 to open that chest doesn't realise that's not part of the intended experience either.

I don't think any reasonable man would argue otherwise. The point isn't: "All games ought to have limitations on saves". The point is: "Limitations on saves can be done in an interesting way and add something to the game you otherwise wouldn't get".
That's not the direction the thread's been going in. I've agreed that there is a niche segment where save limitations are valuable, but they're not generally beneficial to the majority of videogame types where the foremost thing they'd add would be either frustration or idle clicking. As for that niche segment, I'm not telling you not to like it but I have no interest in playing checkpoint to checkpoint whether it's Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon or Darkly Darkness and I can't possibly imagine putting up with a save-limited Temple of Elemental Evil or Bethesda Game™. Or Kingdom Come: Deliverance, for that matter. I did, however, play Heavy Rain that way... almost. I ended up scumming twice because it was my first ever console game and I fucked up with the controller, but I otherwise had no problem committing to the playthrough because I had an idea of what I wanted to get out of it.
 

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