Saving During Combat

[Baron Dupek]

In Apeiron's titles, in some later missions (Marauder) and encounters (jungles and urban warfare in High Calibre/Hard Life in Game Level 5+ out of 10?), you have hard time to finish encounters in one sitting unless you play them perfectly and offensive to not wait for AI to come for you.

 

[gaussgunner]

Having an action rollover log to facilitate an undo button adds a lot of complexity. I've only ever seen it in 4x games. Any tactical combat examples?

If you have in-combat saves, you can just save to memory or a temp file every turn, then reload to undo.

You may as well implement saves during combat for testing, anyway.

Personally, I like fairly long battles and it's nice if I don't have to finish them in one sitting. If I have an hour to kill before an appointment, I'm not gonna play a game where I have to choose between being late, rushing through it, or losing an hour's progress. Games also have a tendency to crash or get corrupted during big battles, so I like to have a few savegames during and before combat.

If people want to savescum, who cares. I don't even like to do it. If I make one dumb mistake I'll reload in combat. If that fails I'll start over from the beginning or look for a way to avoid the battle.

Good idea in theory, but that would be one slow-ass undo button. I could make it so that it doesn't have to load the entire scene again or even optimize for relevance, but even loading just the relevant data would be non-trivial. People tend to hate unresponsive buttons.

Anyway, if an undo button is mostly a workaround for poor hit box detection and misclicks, my time is better spent preventing those.

Don't get stuck in the programmer's mindset that slow load/undo is a bug. It's a feature. Make the savescumming trash suffer!!!!!

 

[Faarbaute]

I like the convenience of being able to save at any time, but I also feel like it lowers the stakes considerably if you can save during combat.

At worst, it can also create an environment where the developer is constantly trying to get one over on you, tricking the player to take on unforeseen consequences as a way to punish them for playing the game wrong by save scumming. I find this infuriating. On the other hand, no save during combat opens up the possibility to string combat encounters together to accomplish a similar effect, but it's the lesser of two evils IMO.

In conclusion, no save during combat. The convenience is not worth it.

 

[laclongquan]

Based on my experience: Forbid saving in active combat in any way. Think fallout new vegas: can save if hostiles nearby but not if shooting each other.

Save in combat like F2 or Silent Storm make us exploit that tool too much. it's in our nature to use ANY tool we can, and over use BETTER tool than worse ones.

Dont even talk about "self control" or "no abuse moral" like a moron or noob in gaming field! In video games we just use any legal tool within our hands.
+++ Some will use logical reason like you need to save during too-long or too-big fights. While it's quite valid, on paper, it open door to over-abuse save/reload. The answer to that reason is control pacing and terrain from the development stages. Ensure that player should always be able to have a safe place to save after 20 minutes of playing, either by setting safe space, OR just AUTO-SAVE, biatch! set about 10 autosave slots and 15 minutes interval.
+++ Some talk about metagaming, but it's not about that. It's about acknowledging that save/reload is the most powerful tool in the hand of gamers, and developers need to control the degree they can abuse that tool. The difference between manual saving and 10 autosave/15min interval is that the control lie in the hand of developers, not gamers. Without that tool fully in their own hands, they wont build up the bad habit of overuse reloads.

IF it's unavoidably to have a combat-save feature, for whatever reason I dont care to know, then it's necessary to implement something to reward a straight play instead of getting interupted with reloads.

Get a mechanic that recognize a reload into combat zone, and change the loot/regenerated equipments downward compared to standard fare. Say, does it record equipments of combatants? If no, when they reload, make the standard, non-quest, loadouts of the hostiles get reduced in either quality or number, so that player's harvest will be lesser. If it does record, then does it record level or xp reward? If no, then reduce the level or xp reward down a notch.

The reasoning is: since you have to reload during combat, it mean things get too hot for players to handle. In which case we reduce the difficulty for you. No need to thank us~

OR HELL, if the downgrade thing is too hard (more script to calculate) then set a straight-play-bonus/gift after a fight and the reload thing will disable this straight play bonus, everything else the same.

 

[Sykar]

I am a firm opponent of saving during combat. If your encounters are so long that it is warranted, your encounters are far too long, period. The only exceptions are basically ironman mode games where you cannot reload, like TOME for example.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Based on my experience: Forbid saving in active combat in any way. Think fallout new vegas: can save if hostiles nearby but not if shooting each other.

Save in combat like F2 or Silent Storm make us exploit that tool too much. it's in our nature to use ANY tool we can, and over use BETTER tool than worse ones.

Dont even talk about "self control" or "no abuse moral" like a moron or noob in gaming field! In video games we just use any legal tool within our hands.
+++ Some will use logical reason like you need to save during too-long or too-big fights. While it's quite valid, on paper, it open door to over-abuse save/reload. The answer to that reason is control pacing and terrain from the development stages. Ensure that player should always be able to have a safe place to save after 20 minutes of playing, either by setting safe space, OR just AUTO-SAVE, biatch! set about 10 autosave slots and 15 minutes interval.
+++ Some talk about metagaming, but it's not about that. It's about acknowledging that save/reload is the most powerful tool in the hand of gamers, and developers need to control the degree they can abuse that tool. The difference between manual saving and 10 autosave/15min interval is that the control lie in the hand of developers, not gamers. Without that tool fully in their own hands, they wont build up the bad habit of overuse reloads.

IF it's unavoidably to have a combat-save feature, for whatever reason I dont care to know, then it's necessary to implement something to reward a straight play instead of getting interupted with reloads.

Get a mechanic that recognize a reload into combat zone, and change the loot/regenerated equipments downward compared to standard fare. Say, does it record equipments of combatants? If no, when they reload, make the standard, non-quest, loadouts of the hostiles get reduced in either quality or number, so that player's harvest will be lesser. If it does record, then does it record level or xp reward? If no, then reduce the level or xp reward down a notch.

The reasoning is: since you have to reload during combat, it mean things get too hot for players to handle. In which case we reduce the difficulty for you. No need to thank us~

OR HELL, if the downgrade thing is too hard (more script to calculate) then set a straight-play-bonus/gift after a fight and the reload thing will disable this straight play bonus, everything else the same.

That made me think of the arkam knight consecutive hit counter. Hmmmm.... a no save counter bonuses to incentivate you to take the risk and get bigger rewards. A bit of a bonus that hopefully doesn't wreck game balance.