The Master

[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.

 

[crazyarms33]

When did saving become 'save scumming' and when did it get thrown around the same way 'gamers' use the words 'casual players'.

Gamers are just trying to divide themselves further to feel superior.

There is a difference between saving after a few hours of gameplay and saving every 3 minutes. That's the real difference, the idea being that you won't lose any progress. Personally if I am spamming my save key, I will just use a cheat. But I dunno if its about division to feel superior as its so much about a "quality save" as opposed to a "random save" for like of better terms. One implies you put in a lot of time and the other not so much. Course save spamming does give you a bit of freedom to play with abandon so to each their own I guess.

 

[Amaror]

If only there were some kind of feature that's becoming more and more popular that only allows people to only have one save and stick with it. That would make the game really hard to overcome. Like it's made of iron or something.

But seriously? I don't really have a problem with frequent saving, as long as developers don't get their shit together and manage to actually release a bug free game. You know, so when you loose, it's because you didn't play well, not because the game teleported a thousand enemies behind your lines.
I am looking at you, xcom!

 

[Lovesfool]

I think this may be the smartest strip you have ever done in this particular series (and I've seen them ALL).

Spot on!

 

[Strazdas]

I am a PC gamer and i never quicksave. But then again im weird.
Also you can quicksave as much as you want, when the game is actually complex and isnt just some FPS where hit chances are random, it wont help you one bit. Try savescumming on Empire Earth and you will fail.

When did saving become 'save scumming' and when did it get thrown around the same way 'gamers' use the words 'casual players'.

Gamers are just trying to divide themselves further to feel superior.

Saving and save scumming are different things. Saving to save a game is one thing. Reloading the game 100 times to get that 1% hit chance and doing that for every move you take is savescumming. Thats why games introduce constant salt to thier RNG, so reloading would give exactly same results unless you change tactics.

 

[Eggsnham]

You're all just mad because you don't know how to bind "walk forward" and "quicksave" to the same key like I do.

I lol'd.

OT: Despite the fact that I've seen the light of PC gaming, my abysmal income still prompts me to play on consoles. That said, I'm always happy when console games make use of quick save functions. Mass Effect 3 and, more recently, GTAV come to mind.

 

[sageoftruth]

So, after reading this, I played Thief 2, forcing myself to use 2-3 saves per level, only to have Garret glitch into a box in the second level and be unable to get out.

 

[Extragorey]

Stop right there spam saver scum!

Nice Oblivion reference there, because Oblivion (and to a lesser extent Skyrim) are some of the worst perpetrators of spam saving. Quicksave-pickpocket-fail-quickload-repeat.

 

[DasDestroyer]

I didn't get it at first, because even though I'm a PC gamer, I don't trust quick saves. What if you accidentally end up having all of you quick save slots filled with saves in unwinnable situations. That's why it's manual saves all the way for me.

 

[Ben Saville]

People talk about QS like its a bad thing...

There are some games that are designed for quick saving, like Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas. I dislike the idea that just losing a day's worth of progress because of a dodgy autosave system is the correct way to play a game. The system was put there for a reason.

Quicksaving also makes games more fun. It's nice to be able to QS before attacking an enemy or objective and experiment with all the different strategies (especially the very, very stupid ones), weapons and mechanics in your arsenal. I can't remeber how many times I QS'd in Fallout just to brutalise a particularly annoying character. With a mininuke. From 6 inches away.

Besides, the comic doesn't make much sense. I can't think of any games that are legitimately extremely challenging in their vanilla state that have a QS button (apart from the Witcher 2). Even then, QS doesn't actually take away the need to have skill. You still need to be able to kill the enemy, you just get more than one shot at it. Checkpointing and hardsaving have the same effect. The QS function doesn't make PC gamers complaining about easy games ironic. A lot of the hardest games around don't have a QS key, or have a harder difficulty that unbinds those keys. The two things are barely related.

 

[Wesley Brannock]

I believe this bias towards one console / system over another is damaging the video game community / industry as a whole. Regardless if you are a pc gamer or console gamer. This is just an unhealthy attitude that is spreading like a CANCER. All it does is spread a type of elitism that makes gamers look immature and childish ( a comparison news stations use to attack our medium I might add ). Could we please stop this so that we could all be seen as ADULT enough to enjoy our medium without degrading to the socially stances of a five year old ?? Please.