We already know we're never going to convince you that you're a cheater.
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
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.
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?
Average savescummer argument: "nothing is difficult because I'm cheating"
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
You absolutely can and people often do.
1. Yes, it does. The fact you're in denial won't make your life any safer.
Blah blah blah this argument was too old even before this thread.
Achievement: Badass Clicker
Then don't play games if you're unable to satisfy your chick for a long time enough.
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.
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?
That would be fantastic.
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.
There are roguelites.
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.
