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Decline Save States

Joined
Apr 5, 2013
Messages
2,430
What's your opion guys on savestating?

Seriously, I cannot play without them anymore.

It's ot a matter of difficulty but of lack of time. Generally, idea of not giving a choice to save anywhere is retarded. What's the point of doing the same shit part that has already been carved in your brain and muscles only to die in a brand new moment and repeating this shit all over again? Actually, even found out it makes some games waaay moar fun e.g. Fantastic Adventure of Dizzy - pretty large open world title for a NES/Famicom, mostly an adventure but have a few twitchy part that are hard as fuck (last platforming section when you jump on slingle blocks using weird jumping mechanics and there's wizard throwing skull that makes you fall off and die), can waste whole your progress in few seconds... and this game hasn't got ANY form of save at all!

I don't feel it's cheating anymore or smt. Propably newer will buy any console, just waiting for emulation and all of its goodness.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium II

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Savestates are borderline cheating and greatly reduces the difficulty of those old action games. But it's only you and your computer and if neither of you cares...
 

Shackleton

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
I both love and hate them. As Excidium says, although convenient they are borderline cheating... but there's always that tiny risk (especially in PCSX2 where it's F1 and F3) that you'll press the wrong button when loading after a death and save over your state with a fresh 'Game Over' screen. :argh:

Having done that once on a pretty far along playthrough of Dark Spire, I've learnt to treat save states with some care now and use Memory Card saves as backup, along with switching slots every so often.

It's no different than having a quicksave button really, but on games not designed for it there's no denying it trivialises the challenge for the sake of convenience.
 

The Fish

Arcane
Joined
Feb 25, 2014
Messages
1,216
If you don't want to waste your time then don't fucking play computer games.

Save states are shit. If you remove all challenge from a game then what the fuck are you playing it for? The scenery?
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
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Feb 17, 2009
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Platypus Planet
I've lost interest in games because using save states trivialized the whole experience. I prefer to play my games as authentic as possible, usually avoiding emulators altogether.
 

octavius

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Bjørgvin
Used Save States in only two games: Knights of Legend since the regular saving was fucked up, and Might&Magic 1 since the beginning is so brutal. I regretted using SS in MM1.
 

Gentle Player

Arcane
Joined
Jul 1, 2011
Messages
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Location
Britain
I used save states when I first started emulating console games - I couldn't help myself and was used to the quicksave feature of PC games that I was also playing at the time. I found that they actually ruined the games for me, and now I only use save states on occasions where I have to leave the game and don't have time to get to a save point.

There's actually a very interesting debate to be had about the relationship between game difficulty and saving mechanics, and if mainstream game developers and commentators cared more about the craft then we'd probably hear a lot more talk about this. Two of my favourite games are the first two Oddworld titles. If we just consider moment-to-moment gameplay, then Abe's Exoddus is probably a fair bit more challenging than Abe's Oddysee; but because the former has a quicksave feature, it's an easier game overall - I am able to win the game with the best ending and 100% completion, yet I haven't the skill or patience to do so in Oddysee. Another of my favourite games, Thief, is also made much easier purely due to quicksave - it makes blackjacking every guard, normally somewhat risky, utterly trivial. I enjoy it much more with self-imposed saving restrictions.
 

mondblut

Arcane
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Aug 10, 2005
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22,205
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Ingrija
Save whenever you feel like it. It's your game to rape and abuse as you see fit. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
 
Joined
Jan 1, 2011
Messages
584
Save states are useful for practice in certain games, such as arcade games. If you're playing something like Gradius or R-Type then the later levels are really hard and need you to play them a lot to figure out how to deal with things, and it's a waste of time having to play the simple early levels again every time you fuck up. Much quicker to put a save at the start of the level (or even individual hard parts of the level) so you can practice like that. That's what I did, and now I can 1CC them legitimately with no problems.
I think they're better when you just use them as training tools rather than relying on them though. The point of using them is to get good enough that you don't need to use them anymore. If you don't even try playing without them then that's basically just cheating.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
Useful for practice and experimentation in games.
Use save states at the begging of the level/map and nothing difficulty wise will be lost.
What i find much more needed for older games(especially jrpg's) is the turbo button. Playing some games without it is a nightmare.
 

Durandal

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May 13, 2015
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New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I hate it when developers can't into pacing or intended challenge at all and just give the player ability to save whenever, case in point Max Payne. The game would autosave... at the start of each chapter (part) only. And often those autosave points would be very far removed from the next with no way to tell when without beforehand knowledge, which when combined with a low enemy vs. player TTK and some dick-ass enemy placement around corners getting you killed fast, there's not a whole lot of people who could manage to get from point A from point B without dying and retrying over and over on their first time. So they let you quicksave infinitely (with some harder difficulties enabling limited saves, although these difficulty settings are only unlocked after beating the game) as some kind of compromise, after which anyone who has played Max Payne will develop a dangerous quicksaving habit.

One thing I liked about Marathon is doing away with quicksaving in favor of save points in an FPS. It's not like you have to do everything in one go (save for some masochistic levels), and some levels can prevent you from backtracking to a savepoint by naturally locking you into a point of no return until you destroy the enemies in your way, much like how you can't save during combat in an RPG. It also makes encounters feel more tense, at times you don't know how long you have to hold out until you find the next savepoint which makes the moment when you do find them all the more satisfying. Moreover it also perpetuates that 'surviving by the skin of your teeth' feeling.

Infinite quicksaves allowing you to cheese large parts of the games are just cop-outs on the developers' part. It's when developers don't know how or don't bother to integrate player death into gameplay having an effect beyond forcing you to retry a certain section of the stage again that they always fall back on to savescumming, because it's always functional and most people are used to it anyways. It's like someone settling for regenerating health because 'it just works'. But the end result is often that, without the game telling you, a lot of its challenge (whatever challenge was intended) can become diminished. Are you trying to tell me that the pursuit of trying to beat a level in one go is equal to the playthrough of someone who quicksaves so much to the point where even my own grandmother could beat the game? Get out with that shit, if someone wants to quicksave every ten seconds because he's such an insecure little shit, he should be playing on Easy Mode. There's always limited quicksaves and different difficulty settings affecting saving opportunities to prevent such idiocy: see Hitman.

And then we have other examples, like Dark Souls and Shovel Knight, where dying has other lasting effects. Why settle for a basic save-whenever-you-want paradigm instead of integrating life, death, and saving into your gameplay and narrative?

Savestates have their place in practicing old arcade games, games reliant on long-term challenges where savescumming doesn't really ruin anything, or in a game reliant on trial and error, but too often it is a patchwork solution because the developers can't be arsed to think of something better and don't want to piss off players by having them play by their rules, so they just make their rules a bit more vague.
 

Dawkinsfan69

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I mean if you use them to cheat then it's cheating right?

So if you don't like abusing the system then don't abuse it..

Save states are nice because they let me save the game and quit if I need to go do something, rather than being stuck playing for another 30+ minutes to reach a checkpoint.
 

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