There’s no accounting for taste, but you’re missing a ton of great games with that stance. Do you also demand every game offer a god mode? Because the ability to instantly and freely undo every single mistake, unlucky roll, or whiffed shot, and to never have to live with or recover from any consequence is pretty far down that road.
If you quicksave every single step and quicksaves don’t overwrite, perhaps. In the real world it doesn’t actually work that way.
This argument always leads people to talking past each other and coming up with ridiculous extremes. (No one quicksaves in Doom after every successful shotgun blast.)
It’s hopeless to use a horrifically unbalanced game like Grimoire as a battleground for any kind of intelligent game design debate.
I like to quick save before every successful shotgun blast so I can go back and relive that moment of glory.
I’ve never understood the argument against save anywhere. Like, I get that some people enjoy the tension and high-stakes of checkpoints or whatever, but if that’s your deal, no one is forcing you to use a bunch of saves.
The standard response is the player can simply choose not to save, but when an awareness of save-availability impacts design, you can get some issues. Level designs and challenges that might have been left on the cutting room floor in a checkpoint situation might be left in. I think it applies particularly to action games where the flow and also a sense of moment-to-moment tension are enhanced by absence of a safety net. It’s like the difference between practicing a piece of music alone at home, when you know you can stop at any time and work on a particular measure, versus performing before an audience, when you have to play the whole thing straight through. I also think it’s an open question how much of the burden of self-control ought to be shifted onto players versus integrated into the overall design. You could say that tennis players should have the discipline to hit the ball at least 3 feet over the ground, but there’s a net to enforce that.
But really, saying ‘save anywhere or GTFO’ just means ‘I won’t buy games without save anywhere,’ which is fine. The market will play out as it plays out.
Yep.
The best system utilizes both checkpoints and save-anywhere. That way you don’t actually need to reflexively save; you only feel compelled to do so at decision points. If you forget to save and die, you don’t lose a ton of progress.
Game auto saves at every step. But only one save allowed. If I can save scum i will have to fight that impulse all game, not fun.
I think people struggle with this because they start the debate from the design implications instead of from the player’s perspective. The best way to think of saving and checkpointing is that a player should never have to repeat something tedious and trivial on the way to the interesting interaction they failed the last time. We all understand that the unskippable cutscene before the boss fight is bullshit. Sometimes even replaying the first phase of a multi-phase boss fight is bullshit, as in the awful Furi.
The time requirement isn’t necessarily relevant. I’d rather replay a 30 hour permadeath roguelike than make the same 45 second run from a bonfire to the boss room more than 4 or 5 times. I recently raged at Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the simple act of moving forward 10 paces and climbing a ladder. (The added wrinkle here is that I sometimes failed within moments, so there was no interesting content.)
This also applies in the other direction: it doesn’t have to be an instant restart either, since a little decompression can help. Game design is hard!
In any case, I think either checkpoints or save anywhere can work as long as this principle is kept in mind.
A poorly-balanced RPG like Grimoire is already kind of screwed because the encounters have such a different impact. But I hate over-designed compartmentalized encounters from a lot of modern games too. Yup, game design is still hard.
This, suspend anywhere (so you can get out of the game) is always good and very welcomed indeed. Save anywhere is also fine, as long as it’s not reload any-number-of-times and the save quits the game.
Saving and reloading anytime is fine for most games, but stuff like Dark Souls (for example) would be broken by that. The basic risk reward loop wouldn’t work at all.
As a designer, save anywhere in certain genres makes you lazy (case in point, the titular game of the thread) and it’s hard enough to design without putting some other difficulty on top. It also makes proper difficulty adjustment really hard, since you need to compensate for people who will save scum and for those that will forget to save frequently. Most precise action games (where the difficulty tuning is paramount) do not allow save anywhere and I think that’s the reason.
But, as a player, save anywhere in some games also makes me lazy. I know I should know better, but I too often try to brute force an approach through reloading instead of engaging with the design and taking a different approach altogether from a while back. As a player I am grateful some games are strict with their saves. There’s a reason some games offer Ironman modes. Because without those, it’s really hard to control yourself as a player (Ironman modes are indeed a fine compromise in certain genres/styles).
But some games are better with save anywhere and I’m also grateful that those game indeed designed with save anywhere in mind have it. It really depends on the tuning and what the experience is supposed to be. At the end of the day there’s no correct answer that fits all games. It’s different from game to game (and from player to player, although I feel the game’s design is probably more important in how it’s perceived).
I love the Tactics Ogre PSP and Fire Emblem Echoes approach: Suspend anywhere on the tactical map and save anywhere on the strategic map. The suspend anywhere is compensated by granting you a number or rewinds, so that one mistake does not force you to replay, solving one of the problems with tactics games in that the battles can be long and the refight tedious, but too many mistakes indeed spend your rewinds and indeed force you to think again at your force composition.
lol
u guys talkin bout this like Grimiore a game and Cleve a person
lol
It’s Fallout fan fiction. A “wasteland,” sheesh.
And to complete the usenet nostalgia effect that a Grimoire thread induces, the thread has now digressed into a save anywhere argument.
Ideally, Tom would have changed the name of the forums to CSIPGS for a day on release.
Arguments that boil down to “you can just choose not to use _____” can be applied just as well to a button on the interface that instantly defeats every enemy in sight. Would you want that to be added to every game?
I see poorly thought-out save-anywhere approaches as another manifestation of Soren Johnson’s “water finds a crack” theory:
A phrase we used on the Civilization development team to describe this phenomenon is that “water finds a crack” – meaning that any hole a player can possibly find in the game’s design will be inevitably abused over and over. The greatest danger is that once a player discovers such an exploit, she will never be able to play the game again without using it – the knowledge cannot be ignored or forgotten, even if the player wishes otherwise.
Civilization 3 provides a simple example with “lumberjacking” – the practice of farming forests for infinite production. Chopping down a forest gives 10 hammers to the nearest city. However, forests can also be replanted once the appropriate tech is discovered.
This set of rules encourages players to have a worker planting a forest and chopping it down on every tile within their empire in order to create an endless supply of hammers. However, the process itself is tedious and mind-numbing, killing the fun for players who wanted to play optimally.
Similarly, when you can save anywhere, you should save everywhere if you’re trying to play optimally. Otherwise, you’re giving up a powerful tool and making the game harder in proportion to how infrequently you save. It’s no different than deciding to only use the starting weapon, or deciding not to pick up any medkits.
I don’t want to have to balance the game on the fly by deciding how far apart my saves should be – I want to use all the tools the designer has given me to the best of my ability to overcome challenges.
I couldn’t imagine using it, but I don’t see where it causes a negative experience (aside from a slightly more cluttered UI).
John Walker at RPS would love that feature!
If someone is so OCD that they will deliberately ruin their own fun to achieve “optimal” gameplay, I say let them. You can’t satisfy the needs of everyone, so the best you can do is aim to satisfy most people. And most people don’t obsessively save-scum.
Yeah, actually, that was a poor analogy on my part. I wouldn’t object to an explicit cheat option being more standard as a way to say “I’m not having fun here, and I’m going to step outside of the designer’s intended experience for this part of the game and move on to the next thing.”
The problem with save-anywhere is that to all appearances it is part of the intended flow of the game, so it’s more pernicious.
Oh hell yes! Or even better, a setting that just never spawns any enemies to begin with! I was playing Lego Avengers with my son over the weekend and just wanted to knock down and build up other structures and the game just did not stop throwing enemies at us the whole time, got seriously old. If Steam could make a baseline function that flipped enemies off I’d be down.