Save Scummer

[Quijiboh]

My favourite episode of emergent failure gameplay was in Guild Wars, when my entire party was murdered in the Hall of Heroes - except for me as I was the only one who'd brought along any skills that increased movement speed. I ran away and hid, then everything turned into a cat-and-mouse stealth game as I snuck around the dungeon trying to resurrect everybody. Successfully putting my party back together and finishing the dungeon was quite the rush.

I only really save scum in games to avoid repetition. If death means I have to go back through a bit and do it pretty much exactly the same as before, then it quickly descends into tedium. If I can avoid that, I will.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Where exactly has this really horrible sounding phrase come from? It's almost as if whoever came up with it is trying to make people who make use of the tools they're given feel bad.

That's exactly what it's trying to do.

'Save-scumming' places the blame entirely on the player. I don't think that's right. The game has to take some responsibility for making it possible (and advantageous) to do something like that, and at the same time should also make sure the bulk of the gameplay isn't spent replaying large sections that you've already done because of some silly death you ran into.

Amnesia was a game I thought did this right. I don't remember needing to save much because I barely died in the game. Yet there were plenty of times I felt threatened enough that I WAS going to die, or go insane, which made the game more entertaining. When you have a game like that you don't feel the need to save much at all.

Oh, and checkpoints suck.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

I'm a full-on shameless save scummer because today's games just do not give a fuck about those who are unable to 200% them and cure all the world's diseases.

Developers/writers are going in a very wrong direction, in more ways than one.

 

[Amgeo]

The problem with "Gordon Brown Mode" is that at the end the evil scum-sucking aliens form a coalition with Nick Clegg.

 

[anthony87]

Yeah I save scum like a ************ when I have to. I'm okay with it though seeing as how Comix Zone is really really really really really really really really really hard.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

XCOM, even on impossible, is way too easy if you reload to keep your troops alive.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

So Dishonored comes along with an achievement for never being seen all game long. As I see it there are 3 possible tracks to this achievement.
1. Be insanely lucky. No amount of sitting on a rooftop looking around with binoculars will save you from every hidden ambush or tight corridor patrolling guard.
2. Play the game until you've memorized every npc's location & path. Perhaps this is what they intended with the achievement, in which case they should be able to log quicksaves and DQ you.
3. Save scum.

Now, I hate achievements, (that's another story) so I just want to get them all out of the way so I can play my game in peace and quiet. So I opt for option 3. Is it enjoyable? Not terribly, and even less so when I realize the immersion and reality of the scenario are going right down the drain. But I blame this particular instance on the achievements. The only other time I end up save scumming is early on in Bethesda games when you're not sure if the room you're walking in to will have 12 enemies twice your level due to some scaling mechanic. And then it's not so much reloading if I lose a little health, it's reloading because I got utterly destroyed and need to find another route or simply avoid the area.

 

[GoodApprentice]

Speaking of turn-based games and voices, remember how much character the many varied voices in the early Jagged Alliance titles added to those games? It's a small investment by the developer that goes a long way towards fleshing out a player's team of soldiers.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

So that's what it's called? I used to do that all the time back in the day. I don't do it very much anymore, mostly because most games these days utilize checkpoints instead. I still don't see how it's in any way detrimental to the gaming experience though.

 

[MetalMagpie]

A lot of people still save scum and I used to do it for games that I wanted a certain result on. Now, I just go with the flow and keep playing, it keeps you on your toes rather than charge in and reload if you get caught. Like Deus Ex, the first time I did the first level, the woman lived, but the guy got away. Second time, I learned the way the take him out (without killing him) and saving the woman.

The first (and currently only) time I played the first level of Deus Ex I got both of them killed. I do not play many RPGs with dialogue options. I don't seem to be very good at them.

OT: I used to save scum a lot more than I do now (chasing down the "perfect playthrough"). These days I'm far more inclined to just go with the flow. After about nine hours on one character in Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword, I made a badly-timed mistake that led to me losing all my stuff and getting dragged around as a captive. I almost reloaded my save from an hour before, but decided not to. Instead I sat twiddling my thumbs as the game span in fast-forward mode until my captors finally let me go and I could start my journey to greatness all over again.

It's the only time I've really "got" the idea of roleplaying. Up until that point, I hadn't really been thinking of my little red-head avatar as a character. But after that humiliating defeat, she and I had something to prove. Once I'd built up my strength again, I got revenge on my former captor by assisting in the invasion of his country and burning his fief to the ground.

 

[bificommander]

I haven't tried XCom classic difficulty yet, but my ironman (i.e. no reloading saves ever) normal difficulty run was a lot of fun. My most fun moments came when one or even two of my guys got mind controled, and the controlers were on the other side of the UFO surrounded by heavy gunners. I even managed to salvage the mission on the battleship-ufo, when the game bugged out and decided that my mini-tank was still standing in the only dooropening with indestructable walls after it had passed through. So my tank couldn't go back out, and the other 5 soldiers couldn't go in. One of the soldiers had an Archangel armor and could fly around. I spent the whole mission playing cat and mouse with the huge army in the center of the UFO, luring them into the firing line of the four soldiers on the far side of the door. Won too, no casualies.

Now, I have to admit I never lost an entire squad that game. I never even got close. I think I lost one max-level guy in my whole playthrough (got mindcontroled, which caused the soldier next to him to panik and shoot him in the face, which left me with insuficient firepower to kill the etheral, who then drained the last of my guy's health to heal himself) I don't know if I could have recovered from a full whipe. But I did make a point of having more than 6 good soldiers. You can recover from fairly large fuck-ups in XCom if you don't just bring the same 6 guys on every mission. If you have to train a new squad from scratch after losing your only 6 colonels, then you're probably screwed. And as a side benefit, I was able to perform the last mission with 6 max level guys, 5 of whom were also max level psionics. My other 8 non-psionic colonels could sit that one out. Shame I could only put one in the Gollop Chamber, but hey.

 

[MetalMagpie]

Now, I hate achievements, (that's another story) so I just want to get them all out of the way so I can play my game in peace and quiet.

You could just ignore them. I only bother with achievements that sound fun. E.g. I expended a serious amount of time and energy getting the Borderlands 2 achievement for killing a flying enemy by throwing a gun at them, but I haven't bothered starting a duel with my coop partner just to get the achievement for that.

When doing my first playthrough of a game, I want to enjoy it as much as I can whilst everything is still fresh.

 

[Giftmacher]

X-COM was a bit of a shock to the system for me, it's definitely much more merciless than the original IMO. I don't think that's all down to the tactical missions though. I've had to restart my game from scratch because of the way the panic system works.

My main gripe is the way Alien abductions increase panic. These missions force you to make a hard choice, which is fair enough, but then heap the pain on by raising panic across a whole continent rather than an individual country. Short of buying a bucket load of expensive satellites (and attendant base facilities), there's no way to claw back the panic fast enough. You'll always loose a country somewhere along the lines, and the game outright if you aren't successful in pretty much every mission.

This is a bad idea so far as I'm concerned as it encourages reflexive saving to recover a mistake. I've resisted so far (hence the restart), but I do lament the lack of opportunity to make good after a disaster; the original never got this difficult this fast.

 

[CalPal]

I want to bring up an example of a video game - including expansions - that also pull this concept off quite well: Mount and Blade.

I absolutely adore this game, both for what is possible to achieve in this game and just the general feel of combat and how it works. To transition quickly from this, though, I have to tell you of a story involving one of my characters, a Lady Rose-Lynn.

Lady Rose-Lynn is a Vaegir - which, for those who don't know, are basically the equivalent of East Europeans in the Mount and Blade lore - who is struggling to make her mark in the world, equivalent to the historical Joan of Ark. However, for a massive section of the game that sometimes carries on even when I still play the character, she has consistently been beaten down by opposing armies, captured who knows how many times and has always had to start from scratch, all the while barely able to raise the kind of support needed to raise a proper army. To make matters worse, the fact that she is a lady is almost always often brought up by other lords. In short, she has almost never had luck on her side.

However I was persistent as hell and I tried to find other ways to bring her luck around. Eventually, it did pay off for a good amount of time: she finally had a worthy standing army to fight alongside, she had beaten an opposing lord or two, and she finally had some land to her name. I haven't had the chance to go back to her, but safe to say that, for the time being, her luck has gotten better.

 

[Razorback0z]

Its how you choose to play isnt it ? I mean if you want to take every game you play and turn it into "survivor mode from minecraft" then thats great. At the same time any game that got released without a decent, flexible save feature would be canned from asshole to breakfast time.

I think what you have to keep in mind is your own "goals" as a player. If you want to finish the game some time in your life, hell you may have to load a save every now and then no matter what game and no matter good you are. But if all your focussed on is finishing without saving, well keep in mind it might take a while.

For the longest time I beat myself up over loading saves (playing PC games for over 20 years now). I started to get over it REAL QUICK when I realised sometimes your save game is the only insurance you have against cheating AI and bad programming. When the AI bends the rules, all bets are off in my mind.

 

[Warachia]

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

Because you couldn't pause.

OT:I will not apologize for save scumming in games like X-COM where the computer blatantly cheats (getting a free move as soon as you see them is bullshit) or when the characters occasionally don't go when I point them to go (I wanted one person to take cover behind a wall, they ran outside in the opposite direction and got killed, and the game sucks at multiple heights), but I mostly use saving to make sure nothing glitchy happens, if I place a character somewhere and they get shot I won't reload for that.

 

[Dark Prophet]

It's a game where really have to save and save often unless you are some kind of miracle child, because the randomisation can fuck you up so fast you don't even know what hit you. This one time I was doing a terror mission and I always take my best people on terror mission because rookies just fuck everything up. So I was near the end and had 4 enemies left 1 muton and 3 heavy floaters muton was close to so I thought I'll take it out and try to flank the flotars later I put my soldires to their positions, I had 4 of them at the time 1 heavy 2 assault 1 support their hit % was between 45 and 70 and I used 2 turns and none of them hit the fucking muton. Also the game has a terrible habit spawning aliens behind you or on your side, I think all the aliens should be on the map when you start the mission.

As for the voices, one of the dev team dude was on IW in Game Trailers and he was asked about the voices and I think he said something about there being not enough time and money.

 

[gyroc1]

Ohp, looks like I have to call Yahtzee if I need a voice actor! Just wait for me to learn how to make video games. Look out for me! (in a few decades)

The closest I come to save scumming is when I use save states. I try not to use them anymore, but it makes old games like Sonic 3 easier to complete. I really don't want to replay the whole game just because I missed too many chances to get all the chaos emeralds.

And other old games require memorization. I'm going to foam at the mouth when I try to beat the American Battletoads and have to replay hard stages multiple times just to practice an even harder stage.

Spoiler

 

[Darth_Payn]

Alright, alright, I confess! I save scummed when I lost too much money on pazaak in KOTOR and when shit got too real in my base in Evil Genius. And at certain points in Half-Life 2. There, you happy?!

 

[Strazdas]

I used to save scum back in Mafia.
now i find Iron man the most fun game-way. Only save when you have to "leave" computer. And sometimes i pay for it, when a group of unexpected soldiers makes half of my empire useless its hard to build back up AND fight them off, but that makes games more fun, unexpected, unprogrammed challenges.
P.S. Xcom campaign was too short, not too long!