Save Scumming and You

[Vigormortis]

This culture of shaming "save-scumming" is as pretentious as it is idiotic.

You know, some people don't have endless hours in the day to play through a game. Some people want to play though to the end of the game (and story, specifically) without having to worry about replaying long stretches of the game because of a small slip-up or some coding error.

The fact that we, as a community, shame this kind of saving technique because of some self-deluded sense of "moral superiority" in how we play our games disappoints me.

They're video games. They're the very essence of escapism. Why do we feel the need to dictate how people play them?

 

[DementedSheep]

Occasionally I'll be in a super perfectionist mood and start obsessively saving and reloading. "NO! I missed one head shot. I will reload and play this section 10 times until I can kill them all perfectly without taking or missing a hit" *reload* (this is unfortunately not an exaggeration. I really do that). I tend to save every time I do anything as well. I end up with chronic restartitisc in games without a respec option for similar reason. Misspending two points is the end of the damn world. Games with stealth I usually go the no kill route and reload on being spotted on but I set myself a rule to not reload unless I died and instead run away or fight if caught in Dishonoured and mostly stuck to it. I usually take a break when I realise I'm getting ridicules.
I try not to do it and XCOM: EU ironman, Dark Souls (not being able to reload was absolute torture the first time I played it) and getting more into multiplayer helped break me of that habit so I don't get stupid about it as often.

If you actually like save scumming and it's not a compulsion that actually harms enjoyment there is nothing wrong with it. I've said this before but any game our not playing competitively against others you can do what you like in. It's for your own enjoyment.

I always do it in the Mass Effect games.

I save before every conversation. Because it's often difficult to tell exactly how Shepard will reply, as the dialogue wheel doesn't show you the exact line of dialogue Shepard will respond with.
And sometimes the tone comes across completely differently to how one might expect by looking at the dialogue wheel.

If I don't like the way a conversation plays out, I reload and try again.

I don't really consider that save scumming. Its more making up for biowares shitty design. BAM! sex scene from picking the line "that's it?".

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

The given example is no more heinous than allowing players to play the game through several times. Are you suggesting that games self-destruct once you beat the game or hit a "game over" condition, such that everyone can only talk about their initial playthrough? Well no, of course you aren't.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

I was using hyperbole to suggest that playing a game multiple times cheapens a game's difficulty in the same way as save scumming, and then lamp-shading it to emphasize that I wasn't being serious.

In my example the challenge is survival and/or endurance. If you're saving every 30 seconds and reloading if things don't go your way then you're mitigating that challenge. Each individual encounter may be a challenge but it's not as challenging as surviving all of the encounters in one go. I feel like I'm repeating myself but I don't know how to make it any clearer.

You keep saying that it's not challenging but just time consuming as if the two are mutually exclusive. They aren't. In my example not saving means you're more likely to die and if you die you have to start the level from the beginning. Yes it's more time consuming. Why? Because it's more challenging. It's not the challenge being replaced by time. It's the challenge causing a longer play time because you're more likely to fail.

If I've already mastered the first five encounters of a level, then why should I feel obligated to replay them time and time again just to get to the last few encounters that are giving me a hard time? If the answer is "because you might screw-up once in a while during the first five encounters", okay, fair enough, but it starts edging the conversation towards my point about anti-save-scumming being an elitist notion. At the end of the day, I still have to complete all encounters of the stage in order to complete it. I still have to kill the same number of enemies who have the same potential to deal the same amount of damage.

If I have a level all-but mastered, being able to save before the final encounter that I'm having a hard time with doesn't make that encounter any easier, it just means I don't have to slog through the entire level to practice at the part where I need to practice. If I make a random mistake (or something else random happens that NPCs don't normally do) before getting to the encounter and have to restart from the start of the level, that doesn't make the final encounter any harder, it just wastes the time spent on that particular attempt because now I have to start yet again from the beginning of the entire level rather than the beginning of the encounter I'm working on.

So while I might grant that disabling the ability to save scum might make a level harder in the sense of being an endurance challenge, I would then follow-up by asking if it makes the game more fun. I don't know about you, but having to replay the same 5-10 minutes of gameplay time and time again because the point after said 5-10 minutes is the part that's giving me a hard time, the game isn't looking at a good write-up. In fact, it's usually the kind of thing that will cause a reviewer to knock points off of a game if its built-in check points aren't set-up properly. I couldn't count the number of reviews where one of the things counted against the game is when the most recent checkpoint before a really difficult section was several minutes-worth of easy gameplay ago; requiring the player to have to slog through those same easy bits every single time before they can get another shot at the part that's actually difficult. Situations where, if the player was allowed to "save scum", the game would have gotten better marks.

So I guess in short, removing save scumming either doesn't make the game any harder, or (if I'm willing to concede on that point in the name of "endurance") it does make the game harder, but in ways that are arguably detrimental to the enjoyment of the game as a whole.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

I didn't post any of that, Escapist is borked

No, it was me. I messed up the quote tags. Sorry.

-Snip-

I'm not arguing whether or not it makes the game more enjoyable, I'm also not arguing whether save scumming is "wrong" or cheap or whatever. I was just showing that save scumming can make certain games easier. There's nothing wrong with that. Playing on an easier difficulty or having prior knowledge of the game will also make it easier.

And anyway, if you want to argue enjoyment, well it's subjective isn't it? Dark Souls frequently makes you play through a level to reach a boss each time and I wouldn't have it any other way. Castlevania does the same thing and I've rage quit on more than one occasion because of the hallway (you know, that hallway) leading up to the Death boss fight, which itself is tough as balls. Sometimes I like the challenge, sometimes it can be hair-pullingly frustrating (not bashing Castlevania by the way, I think it's a very well designed game. I just suck at it).

 

[BloodSquirrel]

Save-scumming is the result of a failure of design.

A properly designed challenge should be balanced and tested by the designer. The designer should be setting the conditions surrounding that challenged.

"This is a room with enemies. Kill the enemies in the room without dying"

"This is a wide open world. You have to survive any individual fight that you get into (ie, you can't save during combat)."

"This is a strategic game, where decisions have long-term consequences. You can save at any time, but it doesn't matter because backing up five seconds will very rarely be useful."

The problem is that players will naturally drift toward optimized strategies. Saving immediately after any progress and reloading after any loss is an extremely effective strategy. Without set checkpoints, how is the player to know when he is going to far without saving and when he is simply not playing effectively enough, and should explore more tactical options? The placement of checkpoints is an important piece of feedback. Figuring that out is part of the developer's job, and letting players save-scum around having to explore the game's wider possibility space is a disservice to the player.


EDIT: I notice that this thread is full of the really dumb strawman that being against save-scumming means that the entire game needs to be completed in one sitting. That this is being resorted to is just embarrassing. Where savepoints should be located is an important design decision. That it can be done badly no more supports save-anywhere than bad acting in games proves that we shouldn't attempt narrative.

 

[DeimosMasque]

Well, when I play Xcom: Enemy Unknown, I limit myself to 2 saves per mission. Gives me incentive not to fuck up, but also is a little more forgiving when my top soldier is plasma'd into a pile of ash.

I have a similar thing for XCom Enemy Within. I have autosave turned on and I'm only every allowed to either reload the last turn or go back to the Geoscape save before the mission. As the game has progressed I've found I do it less and less as my strategy and tactics actually improve as I learn from my mistakes and allows me to fix little problems like when I click a soldier into dashing when I meant for him to go to the cover that wasn't.

 

[Demonchaser27]

Save scumming, or "choice without consequence", is one of the reasons I'm against save anywhere in games - the ideal for me is "save on exit" combined with the game auto-saving periodically to avoid too much lost progress if the game crashes or your computer/console loses power. In certain games like difficult platformers save checkpoints are fine.

One really nice thing about getting rid of manual saves is that the developer gets creative in dealing with it - Dark Souls is designed around the understanding that the player will die and avoids over-punishing the player.

The idea of manual saves is that the player never dies because he just reloads whenever something bad happens. This leads to a lack of consequence for actions taken in a game, which in turn helped fuel the popularity of multiplayer games which don't have reloading.

Games where save scumming is nearly a requirement are poorly designed.

I'm a personal fan of Dark Souls and I have to admit I feel that they failed at that. The punishment is often a little too much at times. There are times when its fine and okay. But others I feel like just cutting the game off and coming back later, and sometimes I do.

That being said I don't personally think that "games without consequences" as people call them are a bad thing. Being able to undo a mistake can make a game feel undeniably better for a perfectionist than one that forces you to restart the entire game and do almost trial and error to see the best intended outcome. I honestly don't know what I would do in games with giant dialogue trees and options if I was forced to replay the game multiple times just to see the best ending.

I think its honestly one of those things where I don't see why not being able to save whenever would ruin the experience for either type of player. Just don't use the mechanic if you want that kind of experience. In the best case scenario they have a mode for it, where you can't save and the game just autosaves after every choice and another mode where saves are allowed any time. Then for those who want the experience, yet lack the self control to make it happen, can get what they want and perfectionists/other players can just go about their business using saves.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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?

Well, given that SMB doesn't have manual save states and instead utilizes relatively short levels with a checkpoint style system.. I'm really not sure what you're getting at. Maybe things have changed since I last played SMB, but I don't recall the ability to just hit F5 and save my progress halfway through a level right before a tough jump and then again right after it (not that it would help anyway given that so many of SMBs levels rely on maintaining momentum and save state use would likely clash with that).

I already explained this twice, my posts didn't go anywhere.

No, but they also don't explain your point. SMB clearly doesn't allow save stating or save scumming. Designing levels in a short "one bite" style of challenge isn't equivalent to designing a game where you have to instant save and reload to progress before and after every step. Now, I'm not saying that SMB wouldn't be more of a challenge if it had longer levels or didn't have infinite lives but that's clearly not what's being discussed in this thread.

Ah, but there-in lies my point. The game is designed in a way that in any-other game would be save scumming, but "it's okay", because it was "designed that way", something that you asserted makes it a poorly designed game. Hence my entire point about save scumming being a flawed concept from the get-go. You, nor anyone else, has yet to adequately explain how "save scumming" removes the challenge from a game.

WhiteTiger is right. Challenge and Punishment are two very different things. The willingness with which someone usually puts up with a challenge is mostly based on it punishment. Most players find Super Meat Boys trial and error okay mainly because the punishment is almost nothing. Therefore no one truly cares much about the actual challenge of the game. The punishment is almost always a negative connotation. This is what most players should be debating about. Not to say a game requires incredibly high challenge, but challenge isn't usually the problem. Punishment is. If someone has to spend 5 minutes or more redoing something or suffers ridiculous enough detrimental circumstances they deem the challenge unworthy of their time. Its not that said player couldn't beat said challenge, merely that they refuse to put up with the punishment inflicted by failure of it.

There are still poorly made challenges and well made challenges, so challenge is still an issue. However often times punishment is the biggest factor. One reason that the Souls series is kind of niche is because of its punishment. Its challenge is far from the most difficult a game has ever attempted to be. Its punishment however, can be degrading and eventually make a player not care for continuing. Those who were deemed, by the usually "elitist" community there, not "hardcore enough" just didn't care enough to have to redo sections of the game. Punishment isn't required to craft better skills, just practice of challenging segments of a game. Ask a speedrunner. They exploit "save states" and "save scumming (as we're calling it here)" to practice and master segments of a game. They usually don't just put up with the punishment that the game asks of the player, they alter it to fit their desires for enhancing the development of their skill at certain points of the game.