/vr/ - Retro Games

Unlimited savescumming is a total cop-out on the developer's part. If you have no idea how to balance the punishment for death, why not leave it up to the player? It's not too different from giving the player a super overpowered weapon which you don't NEED to use. But it's there, and there's NO REASON why you SHOULDN'T use it, instead of being turned into a worthwhile game mechanic.

So the difficulty of these games becomes largely reliant on self-restriction, despite the presence of difficulty modes and the likes. However, leaving that kind of stuff up to the player tends to create wildly disparate experiences. One guy claims a game is totally easy because he saved every five seconds, whereas another guy only saved at the start of each level and said it was pretty hard. But because it's never explained in-game how often you're supposed to save, people think savescumming entails a perfectly valid way to play the game, ruining any semblance of the intended challenge and experience. If people want to play the game on an equivalent of being able to save every 10 seconds, they should be playing on Easy. You then end up having to talk to people who claim they beat a game and think they're hot shit for winning through cheesing.

This is why I'm a proponent of manual savepoints as seen in Marathon, short of disabling quicksaves entirely in favor of only saving at the start of each level. For RPGs quicksaving is fine for the overworld but less so for dungeons. It's up to the developer to regulate difficulty and the punishment for death, leaving it up to the player is the very definition of a cop-out.