Play video games the way YOU want to and stop worrying about how other people play. This is a major problem in MMOs/Multiplayer games, I don’t know why we should open the door for people to be upset about someone else’s Singleplayer experience.
It’s a single-player game, let people enjoy things the way they want to. I personally don’t save-scum the skill and ability checks, but I will save-scum on a tough fight if I’m in a losing position - and I ain’t gonna knock on people who do and don’t do that in a single-player game.
For multi-player, I would discourage it since dealing with your friend’s fuckups is like, half the fun of a tabletop session.
I think reloading a difficult fight you’re losing isn’t necessarily savescumming. What’s the alternative, letting it play out until you get a TPK and then starting over with a new level 1 character because “that’s what would have happened in pen-and-paper”?
I think this is the challenge for some who don't want to reload a save. But random dice --with 1 always failing and 20 always hitting are just that random. No play skill involved.
I agree. But hey, people do permadeath no-reload challenges of XCOM, too. Some folks are crazy.
I just don’t think reloading a save after losing a fight counts as savescumming. That functionality is such a core part of games that we had to invent an entire genre to design around not doing that (Roguelikes).
Yeah, I have to agree. When it’s a single player non competitive environment, who gives a fuck? Even if it ruins the game for the person doing it, that’s all their are hurting, their own experience.
They’re not saying that it does ruin the experience, they’re just saying that if the argument is that the experience is ruined, it’s only the player’s experience that is ruined.
Presumably IGN have not been able to generate sufficient clicks by saying ‘this game is really good and not very controversial’ so they’re turning to shit like this now.
Save summing is enjoyable. If I wanted to live with my horrible decisions I’d turn the game off and engage with reality. Anyone debating how someone else enjoys something they paid for is a muppet.
IMHO, no harm in a single/cooperative multiplayer game. If the player wants to go through the hassle of saving and loading repeatedly, that’s their decision. No harm to the community at large.
I don't think there's ever been a save scum debate. Most people just do it, especially the game is unreasonable or has easily missable / permanently locked content that you lose out on forever after dozen or hundreds of hours of playtime unless you save scum.
It's more like most people do it without shame because they have lives, jobs, families, and limited time and energy to play, and a vocal minority of tryhards and internet trolls (who also save scum but lie about it) who try to force their twisted values on the majority for no other reason than to try to control everyone because of some personal dysfunction.
The gripes I see about save-scumming usually come from those who would prefer not to but don’t have impulse control, so they’d prefer developers to take away from players who don’t care, and have valid reasons for doing so like you listed.
Developers disallowing saving when I want make me so irrationally angry. Let me play the game in a way that I know I will have fun. Not allowing it has always been a way to extend your game artificially.
Also it means I can’t pick it up to play unless I have a large block of time I know will be free and I rarely have that so basically I can’t play the game.
Octopath's final battle is a gauntlet of eight or so bosses, followed by the last boss with two forms. One of those forms, if you don't manage to dispatch a specific enemy at a certain perfect moment, runs the risk of actually trapping the player in an endless loop as everything keeps healing itself faster than the player is able to take anything down.
This is a known possibility that forces you to restart the entire gauntlet again from the beginning just to have a chance, and you can't save in that room. Guess whether I've technically finished Octopath or not. You're goddamn right I'm going to figure out how to glitch it and save anyway, because I don't and will never want to sink genuinely 2-3hrs of my life each time I try to beat that, with less than zero guarantee that I actually will. I get the feel they were going for, but who the fuck is responsible for this decision.
Where Baldur's Gate is concerned, I do clinically have difficulty making decisions but I'm mostly only doing it because I love the writing so much. 90% or more of my save scumming is dialogue related and I'd take it as a huge compliment.
I severely dislike role-playing in a way that makes me choose options I don't actually believe in, so every file I've ever played for any game tends to be identical. But in this game and this game only, I desperately want to see what happens if I do and it's almost always rewarding. It's SO good
They didn’t put quick save and quick load on single-keys in easy reach because they expect you to live with the consequences of what happened. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that save-scumming is part of the design intent is lying to themselves.
Save scumming is the only way I can tolerate games like this. For as awesome as the game is (very awesome) sometimes consequences fall within the range of acceptability and sometimes they don't. When they don't, save scumming is what keeps me from putting the game down for good.
I try to think of it in terms of how it would go at a D&D session.
For example, if i roll perception well, seeing a tile is trapped, and tell the DM i avoid it, he's not going to have some NPC trigger it because i forgot to tell them to stop following me, so i feel justified in reloading a save in that case.
Lmao I often forget to unlock my party when dealing with traps only to have Shadowheart haphazardly wander right into the painfully obvious tripwire as the trap dice check is loading
I’m the first area with Withers I didn’t fully understand traps. I saw one and we avoided it then I turned off turn based mode. What I didn’t notice was the fireball traps on the walls. It was extremely confusing but hilarious watching it unfold. It wasn’t too big of a deal but I totally get what you mean. Even apart from that it’s annoying how they don’t just avoid ones other people saw.
First of all, I don’t think there is any right or wrong and everyone should just play the way they enjoy most, whether that is rolling with their failures or ensuring they get the outcome they desired (because they might perhaps not have time to do a second playthrough of a 150 hour game).
Secondly, I think the desire to savescum usually materializes because of inherent game design issues. Failures are often less interesting and satisfying than successes, regularly closing the door on additional content which leads to the player feeling like they’re missing out. In pen-and-paper, improvisation between both players and the DM usually means there are other ways to access that same thing if the first option fails, but this is much harder to implement in a CRPG and so many checks end up being “succeed or miss out”.
The only game I’m aware of that really tried hard to design around these types of problems is Disco Elysium (though even that game had several instances of fascinating content possibly missed because of a dice roll). Still, I really wish more RPG developers would study this example and adopt a similar “fail-forward” design principle.
There is no debate. If you think save scumming is wrong: you’re wrong; just don’t do it yourself at that point since someone else doing it doesn’t affect you at all. Saving and reloading is the one, universal thing about video games that makes them so great. You can keep trying different things until you succeed, without all the tedium of starting completely from scratch every time.
I remember when Pathfinder Kingmaker released there was a very vocal group that said the game was too difficult and they were forced to save scum. Now everything in that game basically had a slider and you could completely customize difficulty, but that meant you were changing it to the forbidden option labeled “Easy”. The pride these people had, they just couldn’t do it.
The funniest part of it is that Owlcat did fix it. That group’s attitude was very much “finally, it’s playable. About time”. However, all that Owlcat did was move those sliders for them and renamed it normal mode.
Having received Kingmaker for free and tried it on a supposedly "normal" difficulty, I totally understand why people save scummed and did it myself, because the game balance is so poor in the early sections that if you don't save scum, progressing was often literally impossible.
And then later on, if you got some really bad rolls, particularly when travelling or making camp, even if you could progress, you'd have used so many resources that it wasn't worth it. The worst part was that certain class combos were overpowered and others were really horrible too. That game was just all over the place, and I eventually stopped playing it not because I couldn't handle the difficulty, but because it was a chore to play and unfun.
Very clunky all around, and it got repetitive too and had many work-like elements. I hear the sequel is much better, so I may try that instead later, or the upcoming 40k RPG from Owlcat.
Christ, that game. Coming into it I’d just played Dragon Age: Inquisition and took one big lesson from that previous experience – no more filler quests. Is the quest part of the main plot? No? Do I actually predict a good payoff, and not just imagine it could maybe be there? Also no? Then skip the quest. That approach would have saved me like a 100 hours on DA:I that were entertaining but ultimately, in retrospect, wasted. I thought it would serve me well coming into this new game.
Imagine my surprise discovering that after the first act Pathfinder: Kingmaker becomes “wander and stumble upon side quests to pass the time, the game”, crossed with some kind of painfully elaborate toy version of Crusader Kings that I found I had zero enthusiasm to play. Once the main quest became officially gated by in-game time I was tempted to quit right then. In spite of myself I said “fine let’s explore” and tried going to four different places, only to get rekt each time due to ‘not supposed to be here yet’ underleveling. That’s when I shook my head sadly and threw in the towel. I suddenly gained an unexpected appreciation for DA:I, which at least did entertain me for those 100 wasted hours.
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