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Decline The great evil of save-scumming

fantadomat

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Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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There is some wild weirdness in how you (can) use savescumming in a game like Doom. Something dark...like shooting people while jerking off. Just sayin'.
How the fuck can you savescum in Doom?! I do save a few times per level,mainly at the beginning,some times i just totally forget about saving because of the fun. The game does need a manual save and that takes too much time for savescuming,takes you out of the groove.
 

Master

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My people have a saying: "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.". There's another saying we have, too: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat!".
Who are your people, the Ferengi?
last-outpost-ferengi.jpg
 
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CptMace

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Dark souls. The model of great combat design.
You're confusing design and implementation. Shitty hitboxes, bosses who are so big that they can't hit anything that hugs them etc has little to do with the design itself.
But I guess a video of someone who purposefully only backstabs is somehow relevant.

The great tragedy of Demon's Souls. The series it gave birth to is so popular and its notoriety so riddled with shit memes that people forget the astonishing incline it brought upon us all.
 
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vivec

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I gotta admit one thing; dark souls made is possible for the developers to realize that it was okay to punish players who weren't good.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Comprehend this: introduce a completely unrestricted rewind time manipulating mechanic to ANY real world game. Watch them all be ruined, no matter the context. It's completely counter to most game rules.

That's why you can't savescum in multiplayer.
 
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CptMace

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I gotta admit one thing; dark souls made is possible for the developers to realize that it was okay to punish players who weren't good.
It also was a game designed without any awesome button. In a context of Gears of War, Uncharted and other Batman Arkham Choregraphy. Even more true for Demon's Souls.
 

Baron Dupek

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Is it me or Steam strengthen this problem with turning your games collection into backlog checklist with titles that you want to beat asap and be done with them and save scumming help a lot with it?
 

Bohrain

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
The incentive for savescumming will always be there if an action done in short term, whether stocastic or deterministic, has a significant effect on outcome. And saving and loading isn't restricted a lot.
Trying to combat it usually does more harm than good, since it tends to mean longer periods of not being able to save which is frustrating and elimination of random procs that actually matter which makes games stale.
 
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Davaris

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Comprehend this: introduce a completely unrestricted rewind time manipulating mechanic to ANY real world game. Watch them all be ruined, no matter the context. It's completely counter to most game rules.

That's why you can't savescum in multiplayer.


You guys haven't seen a game called Braid. I think this is the video where the designer shows how he got the initial idea and worked up to the final game though a series of prototypes.

 
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flabbyjack

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I find it weird that so many games go out of their way to prevent you or punish you for save scumming, but so little of them reward you for NOT save scumming. Frayed Knights is the only one that comes to mind that has a reward system for not save scumming.
More games come to mind that limit the player's number of saves during a playthrough or punish the player somehow for saving more frequently. Can't remember the names though.

Limiting the availability of save spots or save frequency also limits save-scumming, hence Teh Codex's preference for 'save everywhere'. If you can only save in town, you aren't as apt to reload a scene at the bottom of a dungeon because its inconvenient, both in terms of load times and in-game time -- Sort of like how Kingdom Come only lets you save upon rest of upon drinking a gallon of moonshine.

Sometimes I fantasize about having the power of save scumming IRL. I gotta say it escalates pretty quickly. Similar to how someone might imagine they could fly. It's pretty fun, try it.

:greatjob:
 
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Castozor

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Nov 12, 2014
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I think limited saving or checkpoints make for more interesting gameplay experiences but a game should always have a save and quit button so I don't waste progress if I have to leave at an inconvenient time.
 

HansDampf

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This reminds me of the DevGameClub podcast when they were playing X-COM. Naturally, they played it on Easy and tried to savescum their way through every mission and keep everyone alive. Their experiences sounded everything but fun, horror stories of constant struggling with thousands of quickloads per battle, lots of timewasting, and they only got like 2 or 3 months into the campaign. Despite all that, they were still praising the game. They even preferred it to NuXCOM.
In their follow-up interview, Gollop told them the AI would dynamically adapt to the player's skill. Meaning, if you lose battles and lots of soldiers, the aliens will attack less frequently and ease up a bit to give you time to breathe. If, on the other hand, you manage to win every battle perfectly without any losses, they will advance in their tech tree faster and become more aggressive. So, by savescumming (grinding perfect play), the DGC guys actually made the game unnecessarily hard for themselves, way above their skill level.

What in the fuck are you exactly playing for in the first place? Just to get it over with?
Fully agree with your post, and this is why it's degenerate. What's the point of quickloading until you finally roll a 20, because that's the only way your retarded strategy could actually work? You've learned nothing and only wasted time mindlessly repeating the same steps over and over again. Lost 1 HP? Better quickload!
I stopped doing it because:
1) It interrupts the flow of the game.
2) It's basically cheating.
3) It made me hoard the cool and powerful items and save them for tough boss encounters, instead of using them now. Those "tough bosses" never come, of course.
4) I can trust the developer to have provided a safety net. If there is a tough battle ahead, chances are you are going to find some goodies (or the game may have dynamic difficulty like in the X-COM example above). There will always be layers upon layers of safety nets. Especially in modern games, you could probably go to the final boss/battle/area stripped naked, and the game would throw enough badass equipment at you to make it as fair as possible. In oldschool games you may actually need a brain though. :o

Some games are designed around quicksaves, like Shadow Tactics, which will even remind you to save every minute. It has the advantage that it allows you to experiment, but I still think it's a flaw. I'd take well-placed checkpoints over quicksaves in almost any game.
 

SausageInYourFace

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
I keep seeing people parroting this notation for over 20 years, but have yet to see one factual example of "yay, failing is actually fun and opens new opportunities".

I too have trouble coming up with the 'new opportunities' example on the spot even though games like AoD and Numanuma probably have many.

I was thinking more in terms of emergent stories and drama that happens when you fail a quest, when you fail skill checks and have to come up with alternative solutions instead of just routinely reloading until success.

It can be very simple things like not routinely reloading when a party member dies (like many players do) and just making due with the new situation and having the story play out like that.
 

ColonelTeacup

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I can't really see it. Please, before your passion overrides your judgment, read what I have written below.

What is so wrong with save-scumming anyway? It's a computer game after all. You are supposed to win at the end. I can see the scenarios in which it is bad, namely when the difference in winning or losing an encounter is based solely on chance or at least predominantly based on chance. That as I see it is just a consequence of bad design.

I can think of two alternatives to alleviate this problem: Firstly, make all checks "hard", i.e. there is a simply a skill level requirement that you need to accomplish anything; no die rolls like in NWN that allow you to pass a check. This is not PnP after all. Secondly, make the rolls have a small effect based on the chance like in AoD where you can save-scum but you are punished for it by having to do it a billion times to win a fight without the requisite skill. People autistic enough to do that exist and there is no problem with that. If you are an autist in the other direction, i.e. you want to "iron man" aka torture yourself to finish a *computer game* you are welcome not to use the quick-save system. Just use the save button on exit.
I save after every action in fallout 2. Those percentages are bullshit, especially the critical failures, and I refuse to accept them.
 

EGarak

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Some games I find myself more susceptible to "save scumming" more than others. Stealth games (or games which have a major stealth component) seem to be a common one, because I don't like fucking up stealth and having to deal with the consequences. I know that's decline and I'm trying to deal with it though, because the tension in playing a stealth game is in knowing that IF you fuck up, you're gonna be in deep shit - and you can't have any real tension if a quickload is all it takes to resolve that problem. I also sometimes do it in RPGs if I think I'm going to be faced with a decision and I'm not sure which option will be best.

Gotta say though that the most I've save scummed in recent times was in playing nuXCOM, because I never fucking beat that game and it was pissing me off.
 

AwesomeButton

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Some games I find myself more susceptible to "save scumming" more than others. Stealth games (or games which have a major stealth component) seem to be a common one, because I don't like fucking up stealth and having to deal with the consequences. I know that's decline and I'm trying to deal with it though, because the tension in playing a stealth game is in knowing that IF you fuck up, you're gonna be in deep shit - and you can't have any real tension if a quickload is all it takes to resolve that problem. I also sometimes do it in RPGs if I think I'm going to be faced with a decision and I'm not sure which option will be best.

Gotta say though that the most I've save scummed in recent times was in playing nuXCOM, because I never fucking beat that game and it was pissing me off.
Stealth mechanics as well as other game-specific mechanics are more prone to "incorrect translation" from what happens in the game to what the player sees on the screen, or hears through his phones. Consider the Arma games. How many times you've fucked something up in such a game, because you didn't press the right combination of three buttons in order to stop, go prone, switch your M-16 to grenade thrower mode, and alert your AI-controlled team? Or how many times you got shot because your IRL field of vision which your display provides is far smaller than that of your supposed character in the game as he walks in the forests, and you didn't see the block of 2x5 pixels which represents a bad guy 150 m away from you.

Of course I would save scum in such a game.
 

Pizzashoes

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Oct 31, 2017
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I just played through AoD as a two-handed axe-wielding fighter. Once I got to the final boss, I realized the character could kill him, but it would take tons of tries. So I spent about forty minutes save-scumming to beat it. That was bad gameplay I didn't have to experience, and the supporters of the game would say I was an idiot for not playing the game some other way. But that forty minutes was actually way faster real-time than replaying the game enough to figure out a better build.

So who's the bigger autist? The one who trudges through the same patch of dirt over and over to find a diamond or the one who tries to sell fool's gold to a hundred buyers?
 

Ocelot

Learned
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Feb 21, 2018
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I gotta admit one thing; dark souls made is possible for the developers to realize that it was okay to punish players who weren't good.

I thought I was getting the hang of it until I faced Capra Demon, which forced me to stop stacking armor and learn what poise is or how armor weight affects speed.

Modern games need more casual filters like Capra Demon that force legitimately bad players to rethink how they play the game.
 
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vivec

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Oct 20, 2014
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I gotta admit one thing; dark souls made is possible for the developers to realize that it was okay to punish players who weren't good.

I thought I was getting the hang of it until I faced Capra Demon, which forced me to stop stacking armor and learn what poise is or how armor weight affects speed.

Modern games need more casual filters like Capra Demon that force legitimately bad players to rethink how they play the game.

Games that actually involve player consideration of the full mechanics' system to succeed are like that. In that respect, games like PoE *are* good. Unfortunately, there the game has terrible mechanics.
 

newtmonkey

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Savescumming is lame, but in this day and age you had better allow people to save wherever they want (or at least allow us to quit and resume, like Dark Souls).

When I first played DOOM etc back in the day I savescummed like a madman, but now I just save at the start of each level. I don't care if I die 15 mins later with the exit in sight, the game is so fucking perfect that I am HAPPY to replay the same level again if I screw up. And I don't care how busy you are, even the longest DOOM level (or level in any classic, worthwhile FPS) is short enough that having to restart is no problem.

One thing I have noticed recently that I like: games that set the default savegame name to the current location. M&MX and Wasteland do this. I think this strikes a fine balance, because I am 100% in control of when I save, but there are also repercussions—I overwrite my save if I decide to savescum in the middle of some area, so if I completely screw up, I have to revert to my save from the previous area.
 

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