Save Scummer

[The Critic]

I will pay for a Yahtzee XCOM voice pack.

Cuz who wouldn't want to send him out to get killed* by aliens.

We need a petition to send to Firaxis to make this happen.




*(anal probed)

I would also pay for a Yahtzee voice pack, especially if he included the Micheal Parkinson impression that he alluded to in the article. Maybe he could be persuaded to bring out his Slippery John and Barry voices as well...

On the subject of Save-scumming, I have to admit, I've done it. I've done it a lot in games. XCOM, though, I have one playthrough where I'm save-scumming, and the rest are Ironman runs. I agree that it adds tension to the game and makes it more fun, but I also agree with Yahtzee's point that XCOM could stand to be a tad more forgiving when it comes to screw-ups. It's true, if your primo squad gets wiped out late-game, you're pretty much done for.

If we could take more proactive measures in XCOM, and perhaps make it so that we have the capability to train some recruits up to Corporal (I'm not talking about an upgrade like the New Guy upgrade, I'm talking about something like the Psi Labs that you send troops to and they come back after a certain amount of time trained up to a set rank) or some similar system, it would lessen the deal-breaker status of late-game TPKs, and thus reduce our reliance on save-scumming. Plus, it would allow us to make all of those extra snipers that are stuck at Squaddie rank useful because we could train them up to get either Snapshot or Squadsight, and thus make them not wastes of Barracks space anymore.

 

[Cyrus Hanley]

I will pay for a Yahtzee XCOM voice pack.

Cuz who wouldn't want to send him out to get killed* by aliens.

We need a petition to send to Firaxis to make this happen.




Screw it, I'm bothering a friend who works there to get this ball rolling...




*(anal probed)

I wouldn't even want him doing accents, I'd just replace every voice pack in the game with Yahtzee talking in his normal voice.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

I found myself save scumming a bit in Dishonoured because if you get spotted you usually have to fight about 5-10 dudes. I find it way too easy with all the gadgets and pistols and powers to kill them all and have no sneaking to do for the rest of the level. It's like bizzaro save scumming. I'd do the same in Deus Ex. I normally was so kitted to the teeth I would blast through them and make the level a ghost town. And yes I played on hard.

 

[Rack]

I still save scum, even though I hate it. But I do it because I have no idea if the option to press on is there or not. In Half Life it mostly was, tough fights would generally be preceded by health packs. On Max Payne it certainly wasn't, you not only had to get through some fights without getting hit, you had to make sure you were hit the exact right number of times in the exact right spots or it would ramp the difficulty to where every shot was fatal.

In Xcom at the very least if things are getting tough you can drop the difficulty back to normal, that should be enough to get you out of any scrape short of total save file corruption.

My current bane is Dishonored as not only does it not give you (or should I say me, my fps skills aren't the greatest) enough resources to get yourself out of danger, if you are (I am) ever spotted and don't save scum it completely fucks the whole game up spamming you (me) with dozens of the most irritating enemies and giving you (not me, I'm save scumming and hating it) a "screw you!" ending.

 

[Legion]

When they iron out some of the more ridiculous bugs in Xcom, then I will stop "save scumming".

Having one of my soldiers panic because an enemy unit being mind controlled by my side dies?

I don't bloody well think so.

 

[Zydrate]

I've actually... never done this. When I play a game I get way too immersed, I don't even think about a quicksave key.

Am I a good person for this?

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

I guess the rule of thumb is that players should be punished for screwing up, but that punishment should only create more challenges for them, it shouldn't end their game, or make it impossible for them to win. When either of those happens, save scumming is not only acceptable, it's probably the only way to have fun.

Beautifully put. When he brought up the ten-finger trick for adventure books, I thought, "Yeah, because it's the only way to finish one!" Too often those devolved into bouncing you along a preset path after you made a single choice (ex. If you choose to escape rather than rescue the princess, every path leads to your death/imprisonment). It's the same problem that adventure games have: if you don't follow the line of thought of the developer exactly, you're going to be unable to proceed.

A good game lets you mess up, shows you what happened because you messed up, and lets you try and work out a way to survive.

 

[Shiro No Uma]

For the audio pack issue, aren't the localization teams supposed to do the VO, game audio and line producing (story edits) to fix content for regional context? I'm guessing it was subpar for this game?

 

[(name here)]

I generally only savescum in XCOM when literally my entire squad dies, and reload to the start of the mission. If the squadsight sniper survives, it's all good. The thing is, unlike in the original if you abort or lose you get all your stuff back. Even squaddies can be effective when fully kitted out. Of course, it's also a matter of how tight your margin is. I managed to keep panic low enough one botched mission didn't push countries close enough to the red to force excellent performance on a terror mission.

 

[Krantos]

So, Yahtzee, why didn't you like Dark Souls again?

Because Dark Souls is akin to compartmentalized save scumming.

See, what Yahtzee is talking about is letting failures mold how progression plays out. In the example he used, accidentally taking his health down to 20 resulted in having to be extra careful going forward. It wasn't the being extra careful he was interested in, it was the fact that it's necessity was the result of something he did.

Essentially, he's making the case for games to let you continue when you fail at something (provided you didn't fail too badly) and allowing that failure to lead to emergent gameplay.

What happens when you fail at Dark Souls? You die. And have to reload. It's a game in which there is no room for failure, and therefore, no room for failure-induced emergent gameplay.

Dark Souls is a game about getting it right. It's about understanding the mechanics and figuring out enemy tactics and attack patterns. It's about repetition of a thing until you know exactly what to do. It's about trying again, and again, and again until you just nail it and the inherent rush that produces.

That's the exact opposite of what Yahtzee's talking about here.

Save scumming is most often used when people want to apply the Dark Souls method to other games. I do it all the time when I'm trying to do a ghost run on a stealth game, or when I'm playing a shooter and want to take everyone down in a bombastic over the top way. It's about getting it just right.

TL;DR Dark Souls exemplifies exactly the opposite type of gameplay that Yahtzee is talking about here.

 

[Estevao Levy Lima]

I only play XCOM in Ironman mode.

 

[mateushac]

Well, I'm not usually savescumming, but after 13 restarted games, I think I just might need to do that in order to beat the damn thing. (I probably could get back on my feet in most of these restarts, but the speed at which the difficulty rises in this freaking game always makes me think I'm behind the curve techwise)

 

[Muspelheim]

Perhaps aware that save scumming has a tendency to make things unorganic, it seems save scumming is actually impossible in Dwarf Fortress. Whenever you load your fort, the only ways to quit is either to save and exit or abandon the fortress (the "I give up"-button, or as I like to call it, the "I'm a beardless shame to dwarven culture"-button ), so barring a crash to desktop, you can't actually savescum, which actually works alot in the game's favour.

Yes, just quickloading when a magmacrab attack leaves the pumps unattended and the fortress flooding with magma (in the middle of a zombie whale siege) would be an easy way out of disaster, but it'd not be nearly as fun as either fighting for your life to get back on top of the situation, or just watch the hilarious doom spiral tearing the fort to bits.

If you just stick with it, you might very well end up in a situation where your city of 200 elite craftsdwarves and warriors have been reduced to a soapmaker, the fortress accountant and a suicidal toddler bricked inside the armory, but it'll be all the more satisfying if the trio actually makes it, breaks the spiral and allowing you to start anew. That would've never have happened if you had just gone "Bollocks, I'll just quickload" as soon as the events began.

While it isn't the most sturdy foundations, it can pay off to build on your mistakes.

 

[Swyftstar]

It's taken me years to give up on the ideal of a perfect game. I used to have multiple saves along various points in time that allowed me to go back to any one if I didn't like the result. I would even start over if I didn't like the way things were turning out or if I felt I missed something in order to get a perfect result. I finally just stopped and started living with missing that uber secret item or living with an imperfect character build or a silly mistake I made.
I've actually found that playing this way is less stressful. I don't really care about being hardcore or anything, it's just actually more fun to forget about trying to be perfect and just play the game. You get so hell bent on being perfect you are likely to miss the fun of just playing. It does take some time and practice to get over it and I will say that in some games, like Xcom, it's still a good idea to keep a save in a good spot in case some random foolishness messes you up so badly that to continue going would feel like a chore but for the most part, just play and laugh at your mistakes.

 

[Windu23]

I typically do 3 playthroughs of a game: One where I save scum to make sure I know how to do the things the game asks me to do, one where I play for the story and one where I do my best to perfect everything else I might have missed in the first two. I'm doing it in AC3 now because I've never played an Assassin's Creed game and I don't know a lot of the systems. I forgot you could go barehanded in a mission, for example, and kept getting stuck because I didn't know how to get around a specific guard without killing him or getting caught. Does it hurt the experience of the game, yes, especially if it's done excessively or at every little mistake. But if it's not abused, and instead used a tool to help yourself understand the game, it doesn't really factor.

 

[Piorn]

I just hate it when games just "End" upon death, that's just a lazy design choice. It also makes savescumming mandatory, because you have to revert to a previous save, and it doesn't have any consequences. That is one of my major problems with Fallout, Skyrim, Deus Ex:HR, and many more.

XCOM has the right idea, but punishes you a bit too harshly for things you often can't see coming.

 

[The Random One]

I'm not even sure why a voice pack like that hasn't been made by legions of fans yet. (Maybe they're too busy playing XCom?) They don't even need Yahtzee, they just need the blokes that did voice acting for Killing Floor (both of them) (no, really, there literally are only two voice sets for the Killing Floor male characters).

*a mutton smashes through a wall* "Bloody 'ell, guvnah! That chap's got fists the size of a bleedin' Mini!"

So, Yahtzee, why didn't you like Dark Souls again?

I have no idea why so many people put Dark Souls on the same boat as stuff like Yahtzee mentioned - Day Z, The Binding of Isaac, XCom, Spelunky etc. These games are incredibly hard, yes, but they're also randomized, (or in Day Z's case highly dependant on other players' actions, to the point that it's a different experience on every playthrough). When you die on Dark Souls, you have to replay the same part of the game over and over and over again until you master it. When you die on these other games, you have lost. You don't even get a chance to try again; that specific configuration of environment and enemies is gone forever. You have to master the tools of the game, and not specific parts of it. More importantly, every level is brand new, so the only difference between living and dying is the quality of your tools: you'll be exploring randomly generated maps anyway. Now, I won't say Dark Souls is worse, but I personally can't stand that kind of gameplay, while I love ultra-hard games with random maps.

 

[ResonanceSD]

I'm save scumming like a lunatic in XCOM because my game keeps randomly crashing.

And that's the only reason.

*cough*.

 

[1337mokro]

The only time I save scum is with a bad game.

Not to say X-com is a bad game, it just has allot of bad game elements. Shooting through cover. Enemies teleporting in behind you (like literally teleporting from one side of the map to the other), the horrible indoor camera controls that are godawful at showing you where you move your units, etc.

All little tiny points that annoyed me. One guy gets shot in the face through a wall... fine, what the fuck is that?? Sectopod from behind? He spawned near my chopper?! How did a giant death robot manage to spawn near my chopper on a single highway?! What it can still shoot? How? Isn't it supposed to wait it's turn? Double hit. Sniper gone, Assault gone, Heavy gone because he got popped through a solid piece of wall. Last guy panicked. FUCK! Game Over.

Describing an actual mission going FUBAR. Though this is no longer living with mistakes, this is the game giving you the finger and telling you to start a new campaign.

I say no. I am not going to restart a 30 hour campaign because the game decided to kill my entire squad for shits and giggles.

(also only 6 squad members? Seriously...)