The Master

[Muspelheim]

Quicksaves..? Bloody hell, no! The Zone does NOT appreciate quicksaves! You put yourself and the very fabric of your reality in danger. One too many quicksaves, and friends become foes. Guns turn inside out. And Bloodsuckers come to sell you sausages.

Hardsaves, my brother Stalkers. Hardsaves. And much stubborness.

I honestly don't think I've played any game on the PC where saving and reloading constantly was a need.
Except STALKER the first time I played it. STALKER was fucking hard the first time, just because you're so used to being able to take bullets to the face. But once I got used to how STALKER worked, I got better able to handle it. On easy mode anyway. I've never even attempted hard mode, because there's a challenge and then there's masochism.

And then, there is Misery 2.0.

I am utterly and irrevocably mad. Whenever I'm not dead, or chased by wild dogs.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111122127/fallout/images/e/e4/Cazador.png

I now laugh at you, puny Cazadores. You call that a stinger? I call it toothpick.

 

[Dr Jones]

30% of XCOM's gameplay summed up in one panel. Also, why hasn't she mapped those keys to left and right mouse? Noob!

That's why, when I bought it, I rolled Iron-Man save. I've a TERRIBLE habit og quicksaving/loading, so a fatalistic approach to XCOM will hopefully fix it ^^

 

[Abomination]

Saving? Everyone knows the best and hardest games are multiplayer.

Can't savescum your way through a Starcraft II match.

Can't quicksave in LoL!

Good luck reloading after an onos crushes you in NS2.

Blah blah blah, get on my level, blah blah blah.

Dark Souls is for kiddies, real difficulty comes from human players.

 

[Yozozo]

I learned my lesson about saving *too* frequently a long time ago, playing the original Half Life. I made a jump trying to get to a certain ladder over a Very Big Drop. I quick-saved after making the jump, assuming I was well on my way to actually connecting to the ladder... but I missed.

I quick-loaded in an attempt to try the jump again, only to discover that I had quick-saved in mid-air, Gordon still hurtling toward the ladder, but again falling short. I quick-loaded like a mad-man, over and over, in my hubris somehow thinking that I could somehow change the laws of physics and *force* myself to connect to that damn ladder. I was so close. SO CLOSE.

Since then, I have reserved frequent mashing of that quicksave button for only the craziest of crazy situations. (I'm looking at you Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's hardest difficulty, in Snipertown. 1shot from a sniper, you dead. And of course they are hiding *really* well. You know. Like snipers. Like a town full of them.)

 

[DementedSheep]

And then you save right as you're about to die with no way out and throw your keyboard out the window.

 

[Darks63]

ahh save scumming without it i would have never gotten to 100 pickpocketing within 2 hours in skyrim.

 

[Arcanist]

Grey, I have one answer to this charge.

Roguelikes. Real roguelikes, like Crawl, Brogue, and NetHack. No mercy, no savescumming bullshit.

 

[Bostur]

In my experience the search for super hardcore gameplay is a rather new trend. Old games were sometimes hard, but we didn't need to brag about it. Maybe because older games had more options and difficulty levels was a personal thing. Silent Service could be played with realistic calculations and dud torpedoes, or with arcade-like gameplay. Competetive gaming was yet to be invented so there was no need to brag.

The beauty of an offline single player game, is that one can use or abuse the save features and the modding/cheating options as much or as little as needed. Personally I save scummed a lot in BG and Half-Life, occasionally in X-Com and practically never in Civilization. Other people would have different experiences.

Those nuances are lost in the marketing departments that invent terms like "Hardcore", "Iron Man" and "Old School".

And then you save right as you're about to die with no way out and throw your keyboard out the window.

And that is exactly why it such a bad idea to rely on F5 and F7 and use proper save slots regularly. It seems Erin still has a lot to learn in the noble art of save scumming. ;-)

 

[ThunderCavalier]

It moves.

IT MOVES.

THE PANELS MOVE.

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN EVER.

(Also, yeah, it's "complicated" until you realize how you can easily trivialize the game.)

 

[Andrew_C]

Grey, I have one answer to this charge.

Roguelikes. Real roguelikes, like Crawl, Brogue, and NetHack. No mercy, no savescumming bullshit.

Heh, all of those you can easily back up the savefile and replace it if things go wrong. If necessary we will write tools to capture the memory state of the game. Nothing will stop us save scumming, you hear me! NOTHING!!!!

 

[LAGG]

Yeah, this basically sums up 80% of the games that people like to venerate as "complex/complicated/difficult"

Just spam Ability/Move X with one hand and Consumable/Ability/Move Y with the other and you're good to go for everything bu the super extra-hard post-endgame stuff (that requires you to wear item/set Z as well.)

Totally missed the joke, what she's doing is Quick Saving and Quick Loading.

 

[ZephrC]

Man, I always thought save scumming meant more than just saving frequently. The way I've always heard it save scumming mainly involves games that rely heavily on random numbers, in that you'd save right before doing something risky and then reload and try the same thing again if it failed, and just keep doing that until you succeed.

Most modern games have protections against that kind of thing though, so I guess I can see why the definition might have expanded.

 

[BlackStar42]

My two most used keys while playing Kerbal Space Program, especially during landings.

 

[Evil Smurf]

This is ridiculous slander. All true PC gaming masters (like me of course) only play games where a single death automatically deletes all your saves and starts you from the beginning again. Then we spend a month dying constantly in the first 5 minutes until the sheer frustration becomes insurmountable, the game gets deleted, the next one is installed and the cycle begins anew.

You fucking casual, when/if I die in a game I destroy the computer afterwards because I am not worthy of beating the game.

 

[Zakarath]

Did that a lot in Deus Ex:HR, mostly because I lack patience. On the other hand, got through SS2 after the summer sale without using anything other than manual saves, and only died a handful of times (90% of which were when I was just starting out)... guess I should've played on hard instead of norm.

 

[Vosgy]

Too many post atm to bother reading them so this has probably already been said, but most of the PC games with quick save on the hardest difficulty it is disabled, Fallout tactics and Xcom on Ironman mode, can't save during missions only in between. So the whole have mechanics that can be exploited to make it easier just goes out the window.

 

[DementedSheep]

I save after doing pretty much anything and teed to reload if I don't win well enough (at one point I was reloading because I missed a headshot in ME, killing every enemy with a headshot is not required to win) although Dark Souls broke me of that habit a bit. I don't do it in combat sections though, most modern games don't even allow that anyway. The worst games for save scumming are one that rely on random numbers since you can just save and reload until you get a good roll. I was very guilty of doing that in BG but then what else are going to do when your shitty mage only has one spell per rest that can't even kill a single gibberling and your being mobed by 6 and later on a single spell can take out your whole party.