Save Scumming and You

[SmallHatLogan]

In the past I've abused save states when using emulators. I'm pretty sure I've done it in the middle of Pokemon battles (I'm not proud of that). I don't do it any more though. I realised how stupid it was and that it was actually making the games less enjoyable. Instead of overcoming challenges I was just going through the motions and playing for the sake of it rather than to really enjoy myself.

 

[Pizzarand]

If Games has the possibiltiy to save-scum it is totally a valid option for any player to do. Unfortunately most games that offer this aren't really designed around that fact. Most of the time it is the most effective strategy for the player as it garanties success and has no penalty whatsoever. The drawback is that it breaks the gameflow and releases all tension as nothing bad can affect the player. I feel like it is a superfluous saving method. In linear games like most shooters it can easily be replaced by a checkpoint system and in other genres where decisions can lead to bad/good consequences it removes the possibility of negative outcomes and therefore negates part of the game, which the begs the question why even have bad consequences at all if the player can just avoid them. As many have stated before, I think Dark Souls saving system is ideal, not just because it avoids the save-scum pitfall, but because it is a unique system specifically made for he game without which the game wouldn't work. Too many Developers ignore the saving system, they see it of only secondary importance. However it is integral to the game and how the player interacts with it. It is a fault of the industry that save-scumming is still possible in so many games.

TL;DR Save-scumming doesn't enrich gameplay and reduces tension immensly, but players can't be faulted for using it. The fault lies with lazy game developers, who give players this option.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

It's a sad, sad time when people are abusing you for the way you save in a singleplayer, solo experience.

I do it, just like in Singleplayer games I'll glitch, cheat, exploit, mod, whatever the fuck I want in my own personal game.

And that's my view as well.

Hell, in some games, save abusing is the only way to get what you need (Disgaea 2, for example. Try perfecting an item without plenty of reloads to get those mystery gates or the Assembly Chicken).

 

[Amnesiac Pigeon]

I need to be forced not to do this.

It is a reflex since I played Half Life back in the day.

I can guarantee that I would have ruined Dark Souls for myself if I could save scum my way through it.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'm much better than I used to be. I once put down over 1000 saves on one game of Tomb Raider III because I was saving after crossing a single room or fighting one enemy.

Now, I sometimes actually lose progress when I die because I forget to save.

 

[Ratty]

More options for the player on how they want to experience the game is always better in my opinion. And I've never gotten the "shaming" for saving and reloading in games that give you the option to do so as a default, like most PC titles. If the developers didn't see it as a legitimate way to play the game they wouldn't have given the option.

I do consider it cheating in old console games that didn't have a save function in their original release/design. Since a lot of modern re-releases/compilations add such save functions which can totally break the challenge and flow of the game(s). But even then it's a matter of player taste and impulse control.

I mean movies didn't originally have pause buttons when they were in the cinema. And just like home theaters have allowed for longer films like the LotR director's cuts, save-anywhere allows for tougher games who's difficulty can be adjusted to suit the tastes of the player.

captcha: too many cooks

And not enough players? What are you trying to say here captcha?

 

[DEAD34345]

Really, I think save systems in general are just broken, and they stand in the way of lots of potentially interesting aspects of playing games. Changing the amount of saves just changes how clearly the brokenness can be perceived. Being able to save and reload means nothing you can possibly do in the game matters at all, since you can always reverse it, and making the saves rarer just makes the whole system more inconvenient rather than actually fixing the core issue (that choices have no consequence).

This all became very clear to me when I started playing roguelikes years ago, every emotion you get from doing something in a game is 100 times stronger when you cannot reverse it, it feels like a real choice you have made, a thing you have done. Roguelikes are almost always painfully bad games when you cheat and use saves, often even the base game mechanics are just terrible by any objective measure, but the simple act of making choices permanent causes every moment to be intense and interesting. I really wish it would be tried more in other types of games (and maybe it will be, Dark Souls utilised similar ideas and was very, very successful).

Obviously that doesn't mean we should just remove saves from games altogether and be done with it. 99% of games are specifically designed with the assumption that the player can reverse time whenever he sees fit and wouldn't work without it, but I personally think that's a very limited experience for a majority of games to stick to. Maybe in the future we'll have different kinds of games altogether, and saves will be limited to the sillier or more "arcadey" kind of games where it really fits.

 

[FPLOON]

I seem to only savescum when I take advantage of a game's autosaving feature... Other than that, I rarely manually save in general and the times that I do, I end up forgetting to reload those kind of saves in the first place...

With all that said and done, I do remember a long time ago doing something like that in Pokemon just to keep the in-game time total as low as possible... (I think it started my trend of hating certain things that happen "randomly" in-game and stuff like that...)

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

Really all 'save-scumming' does is help me manage my time on a game with less constraints. If I only have a given mount of time to play a game, due to work and school situations, being able to pick a game back up at any point is extremely convenient and helps me think less about time-management (IE: What can I get done in the free hour and a half I have today?) And lets me just have fun. Also if I die, it's insanely nice to not have to go back through something when working on said limited time frame, unless I'm playing a game where that's the point, like Dark Souls.

I also hate it when a game doesn't let me drop a manual save - Batman Arkham series, any shooter out there, even BioShock Infinite. I don't like it when the game tells me when I am or am not allowed to quit playing. It just feels silly. Sure it's as simple as 'move on to the next segment,' but sometimes there are cutscenes after those segments, and you find yourself not giving a shit about the cutscene because you've already decided you want to quit. So you're not engaged, or worse yet, you find yourself so terribly engaged that you keep playing against your better judgement or become angry about having to quit.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

In Bethesda games (specifically TES and Fallout), it is down to the player to decide when and where they "respawn" on death. As nice as this sounds, it does lead to complete breakdown of any challenge when you can just save before any difficult part. Unfortunately in Bethesda games, you have to save often, because they crash all the bloody time. There are quite a lot of transitions and loading screens in these games, which are a right dick for crashing, so you have to save before every transition otherwise you could easily lose a lot of gameplay down to forces completely out of your hands. Save-scumming in these games is pretty necessary and even fair in most cases. However, it does take out the challenge somewhat if you can immediately erase any consequences that you don't want. If there is a save anywhere function, the temptation is always there, but what can increase that temptation is when that is the only way to respawn upon death. Even a game with save anywhere should have a hub or checkpoint at which the player can repsawn (like DS's bonfires) so that they don't lose gameplay or progress every death, but still have to live with or legitimately retry any bad events.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, though, that first and foremost these are games - played for fun - and almost always single player games, so it really doesn't matter. You aren't getting some advantage over others, and you aren't ruining anyone's fun. And if someone gives you shit for not being "hardcore" either just do a playthrough without doing it or tell them to go play on the M1. Maybe that's a bit harsh but a certain 'go-fuck-yourself-ness' is needed in whatever you say to them.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Basically, if a game is designed in such a way that it encourages or even requires save scumming, then it's a poorly designed game.

*Blink blink* Super Meat Boy is a poorly designed game suddenly?

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Hm... "Save scumming", eh? Well, okay. I've been meaning to vent about this for a while anyway. I've never cared for the concept, to be honest. It feels like it was coined by some elitist so he could brag about how seldom he saved a game compared to someone else because he wanted to feel superior, and then it caught-on as a real controversy; probably because it was a slow post day or something. Let me ask you a quick question: If you and I beat the same game; you saved 5 times, I saved 50 times; did I cheapen, or otherwise defeat the challenge of the game? I would argue that no, I did not. Some people talk about save scumming like it adds bullet time into a game, like I'm able to save at every frame of a battle and then rewind to just before I took a hit so that I can avoid it. They take to arguing against letting players save anywhere with the same fervor that they will argue that a TAS speedrun is "cheating" and "doesn't count". That's a debate for a different topic, though.

I think this ultimately boils down to one simple question: What is challenge? The reason I feel that "save scumming" is a flawed sentiment is because it's based on the same faulty logic that has people referring to an MMO quest with a low drop rate as "hard". Simply put, time is not challenge. Certainly time is limited, I can only sit here and play a game for so many hours until I have to sleep or go to work or eat. However, while it's understandable that an item with a low drop rate is "hard" to get, it's not challenging to get it. It's just a matter of a roll of the dice. Rolling dice isn't hard. I can sit here and roll a d20 all night and get plenty of 20s. Maybe I'll get the occasional two or three 20s in a row, but let me ask you this: Does that make me a better dice roller than another guy who never gets multiple 20s in a row? No! Of course it doesn't, we're just dropping a chunk of plastic on the table.

So where am I going with this? Well, as I said before, time isn't challenge. At its worst, save scumming can only really be said to be cutting the time out of a game. Okay, but what about that speech challenge that I "save scummed"? I only had enough points into my speech skill to get that challenge to a 10% completion rate, and since I saved before the conversation, I was able to reload and repeat until I succeeded anyway. I rendered the entire point of the speech skill useless because even a 1% chance will eventually succeed. Well, you're right, the speech skill was rendered completely useless. Let me ask you this though: Did I render the speech skill worthless by save scumming through the conversation, or did the developer render the speech skill worthless by implementing it in a way that completely removes player agency? Let me ask a follow-up question: If the developer "fixed" this problem by removing my ability to manually save, and then sets the game up to auto-save when speech selections are chosen, has the speech skill been fixed so that it's useful, or will players just avoid the speech skill entirely since the skill points spent in it can be potentially wasted even when the skill is maxed and you still fail speech challenges due to poor dice rolls?

The answer? Removing save scumming didn't fix the problem, it just introduced another problem; or rather, the problem stayed the same. The speech skill (in both scenarios) is useless. Removing save scumming from games doesn't make them "harder", it just makes them more time consuming at best, and can break the game (or reveal how they're broken) at the worst. If a game has a mechanic that can be "beaten" by save scumming through it, the answer isn't to remove the player's ability to save, the answer is to fix the broken mechanic. Forcing checkpoint-only saving is basically a cover for lazy game design.

 

[Nazulu]

It's hard for me to not do it. My mind is hell bent on completing the challenges any way I can, so the option just sits in the back of my mind, scratching away.

There are certain games that need it I reckon, because of problems, like Half-Life and all it's bugs and ambushes. All games have those types of challenges you can get really sick of too, and of course there are cut-scenes you don't need to re-watch. I don't believe it should be a option in boss fights though.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Never had a problem with it, I always abused the quicksave/quickload feature in Half-Life, Indiana Jones and other PC games...

 

[Doom972]

I used to play like that, but I slowly allowed myself to make more mistakes and now I just quicksave after killing a group of enemies or looting a room, even if it didn't go as well as it could. If you're trying to get rid of this habit, try playing a game that doesn't allow for saving everywhere.

 

[Dragonlayer]

It depends on how I feel the game treats me. I save regularly, but I'll only reload if I fail because of some arbitrary bullshit (same thinking with cheats: had to use cheats yesterday on Evil Genius because I'd gotten myself into an unwinnable situation. Fucking P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Marines and super agents!).

 

[Dragonlayer]

Depends on the game.

I save-scum like a ************ in Mount and Blade for example. Took a random javelin to the face? Quit and load! Lost a battle? Quit and load! Knocked out of a tournament? Quit and load! Tried to recruit from your prisoners and none of them were biting? Quit and load! Managed to recruit from prisoners, but they all ran away as soon as night fell? Quit and load!

I even save-scummed my way out of a declaration of war a couple times. Already had three other factions gangbanging me, just wasn't in the mood for a forth.

Oh, I also found a way to save-scum in XCOM: Enemy Unknown's "Iron Man" mode. As in, the specifically-non-save-scumming mode. That felt wrong though, so I only use it to take back misclicks and such.

I reload in Mount and Blade depending on how invested I am in my current playthrough. After spending hundreds of real life hours to build up my character, only to lose it all because I was blindsided by 60 bandits after losing all my soldiers in a particularly vicious battle, sends my finger right for the load button. But I didn't reload after being killed within 10 seconds of my very first battle in Fire and Sword by peasant's lucky head-shot because I thought it was extremely realistic and extremely hilarious.

 

[Jason Rayes]

Basically, if a game is designed in such a way that it encourages or even requires save scumming, then it's a poorly designed game.

*Blink blink* Super Meat Boy is a poorly designed game suddenly?

How do you savescum on Super Meat Boy? The levels are tough as buggery but they are short as hell and designed to be completed quickly. As far as I know you can't save the game between each jump and reload if you mess up, which is what would be required to count as savescumming the game. Its like saying you can savescum 10 second ninja.

 

[endtherapture]

Depends on the game.

I save-scum like a ************ in Mount and Blade for example. Took a random javelin to the face? Quit and load! Lost a battle? Quit and load! Knocked out of a tournament? Quit and load! Tried to recruit from your prisoners and none of them were biting? Quit and load! Managed to recruit from prisoners, but they all ran away as soon as night fell? Quit and load!

I even save-scummed my way out of a declaration of war a couple times. Already had three other factions gangbanging me, just wasn't in the mood for a forth.

Oh, I also found a way to save-scum in XCOM: Enemy Unknown's "Iron Man" mode. As in, the specifically-non-save-scumming mode. That felt wrong though, so I only use it to take back misclicks and such.

Agreed on it depending on the game.

I don't save scum on RPG games basically. I just take stuff as it comes and live with the consequences on there.

But Football Manager...I do save scum on that. When I lose to Chelsea as Arsenal I'm like "okay don't reload, fair enough", but when my record signing breaks his leg in the 1st minute of the first game of the season and is out for 10 months, yeah I'll reload then.