

Accepting the consequences of a life without quick-saves - sp332
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/09/accepting-the-consequences-of-a-life-without-quick-saves.ars

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scrrr
20 years ago a game's aim was to prevent you from advancing to the next level.
It was frustrating sometimes, but the reward was bigger (= telling your
friends you reached a certain level). Now most games do everything to help you
proceed. Meh. Boring. I'd rather have a challenge.

I remember when I beat the track record on the (totally unforgiving)
F355-racing arcade machine once.. People were actually applauding.

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beaumartinez
I think this is why difficulty settings like "nightmare", "veteran",
"legendary", and just plain hard exist.

Someone has to make a game in which the hardest difficulty setting is so
extreme you _always_ die in the first ten seconds from a headshot.

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VBprogrammer
I wish more games had some kind of machine learning decide what was hard
enough. There's nothing that feels quite is weak as picking one far from the
hardest setting and still getting annihilated!

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jcromartie
I love the game Jagged Alliance 2. It's a really _really_ deep tactical
strategy game... but it is absolutely _ruined_ by quick-save. Many people play
it with their finger on the save/load keys, saving after each turn, and
loading if anything goes wrong, even to the point of reloading after a _missed
shot_. What would be a really tense and strategically demanding game turns
into a totally unrealistic situation where the "good guys" totally steamroll
the enemy without a hitch.

I fell for it, and I played that way until the game became unenjoyable. Now
I've been playing Fargoal and Demon's Souls, and various multiplayer games
where you can't even pause, and it's a much more rewarding challenge.

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Xurinos
This is a great discussion of challenge by perfection (few saves/retries), as
I pointed out here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725036>

Some people like that. It might not be a suitable challenge for casual gamers
with little time on their hands, although that can be greatly mitigated by
allowing save-quit.

I first saw someone use the save-quit approach on the Gameboy Advanced for
Dragon Warrior: you quit the game, saving your progress, and when you come in
again, it restores you perfectly and deletes your save.

I am not sure how something like that would work for a game like Galaga. It
might be too disruptive.

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m-photonic
While the save-quit approach would be a fairly pointless way of playing
Galaga, save states could still be legitimately useful as a means of making it
more convenient to practice playing the higher levels.

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darklajid
This is something I recently (re-)discovered for me as well. Grabbed Mount &
Blade Warband when it was a bargain on Steam and chose, mostly out of
curiosity, that the game saves on its own, everytime, everything. I see my
brother game the game world. Running around, encounter, ooops, this is too
hard/reduces my standing with X: Load a save game. Boring. For me it was a
much more realistic (and - rich) experience. Every action influences the
outcome. Oops, I just accidently (seriously) proposed to the character. Now
what?

I'm hooked again to this way of enjoying a game and really enjoyed the article
(and the reminder of "Heavy Rain". Awesome game).

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Palomides
not really a new concept; one of the defining features of roguelike games has
always been permadeath. I do agree with the article in that the risks of bad
decisions makes games way more engrossing; if you can't make a bad decision
it'll feel boring and railroad-y.

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sp332
I was surprised that games designed with savegames in mind are actually more
compelling when played without using that feature. I'm sure the _Dead Rising
2_ developers didn't expect most players to play through without using
savegames to do better in the game.

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scott_s
Dead Rising, as far as I know, does not have quick saves. It is developed in
Japan, and Japanese developers notoriously have an old-school mentality
towards saving: discrete save points with no quick saves.

