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Help Me Break My F6 Addiction
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Quicksaving. Plenty agree is a blessing and a curse in PC gaming. Saving anywhere is convenient but, damn, it's also a huge temptation to break your game in your favor.
Tell me if this sounds like you - you're playing a PC RPG and your character has a mid-level pickpocket skill. So instead of taking the chance you'll upset the town and raise alarms, you press the quicksave button each time you plan to rob an NPC. If you fail, quickload and repeat. Or how about if you see a cluster of enemy MiBs at the end of a hallway and you only have one LAM? You're not sure if just one LAM will kill them all so you whip out your quicksave safety net in case your strategy fails. Or, worst of all, you quicksave before venturing out into unexplored territory, get killed, then quickload fully knowing about the dangers out there. That has to be cheating!
I do all three of these things and I can't stop. Short of taking a chisel to my F6 key, what kind of discipline do you go through to fight that urge to quicksave every step of the way? To stop using quicksaving as a crutch, should more games limit how many times you can quicksave? I believe Aliens Vs Predator was set up so that you could only quicksave five times per level and these were big levels - that made the game ten times scarier knowing your safety net was gone.
Tell me if this sounds like you - you're playing a PC RPG and your character has a mid-level pickpocket skill. So instead of taking the chance you'll upset the town and raise alarms, you press the quicksave button each time you plan to rob an NPC. If you fail, quickload and repeat. Or how about if you see a cluster of enemy MiBs at the end of a hallway and you only have one LAM? You're not sure if just one LAM will kill them all so you whip out your quicksave safety net in case your strategy fails. Or, worst of all, you quicksave before venturing out into unexplored territory, get killed, then quickload fully knowing about the dangers out there. That has to be cheating!
I do all three of these things and I can't stop. Short of taking a chisel to my F6 key, what kind of discipline do you go through to fight that urge to quicksave every step of the way? To stop using quicksaving as a crutch, should more games limit how many times you can quicksave? I believe Aliens Vs Predator was set up so that you could only quicksave five times per level and these were big levels - that made the game ten times scarier knowing your safety net was gone.
emnmnme on
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Maybe this is something I should do
This really bites me in the ass in some games that have terrible checkpoint systems, or none at all.
Hey original unpatched FarCry, here's lookin' at you.
Saves only when you dock. But you can buy salvage insurance and use it to save.
The only problem is that while early in the game this means that if you're saving, you're also taking a sizable chunk out of your wallet, and those saves are valuable, once you have an empire and have a few mil kicking around and a jumpdrive, it's just a minor inconvenience to get more if you run out.
Wizardry 8 has an Ironman setting where you only save when you exit the game. I also think it deletes your characters if your party dies but I'm not certain about that bit.
yeah temple of elemental evil also has this feature, ive never actually had a proper play at it tho and i think im going to use that feature for a first time play and see how i do lol.
ironman is making fallout 1 almost like a new experience to me.
If your ship gets blown up, you eject and go back to a shuttle. If your ship gets blown up and you don't have auto-eject/don't eject in time/don't have an eject, you're fucked.
I reckon you need to replace your F6 key with a thumbtack.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
True, to a point. You should *always* be able to save and leave the game at any point.
And for especially buggy games, being able to save a lot is a godsend.
Fixed.
But seriously, there's good saving and bad saving. If the game does a competent job of check-pointing you, then I don't see a huge problem with eliminating quick save completely (I never missed it in any of the Halos, for instance), but if it doesn't... Then yeah, I need some kind of saving. I don't like replaying things that aren't actually hard.
Since the games are not only hard as balls, but delete you saves when you die. (not sure if Adom does that, actually...)
That said, this thread remind me of the time, that, in the spirit of the Resident Evil "knife-only" runs, I decided to do a "crowbar only" run through the original Half-Life.
...It didn't work out that well.
Not exactly the scenario you described but I would send assassins/spies/etc on missions in games like Rome Total War without saving before hand even if the success rate was like 25% and I had a chance of losing that spy I'd been developing forever.
I did eventually develop the habit of saving at the start of every turn in that game because I had the nasty habit of accidentally hitting the end turn button instead of the open building construction button or some such. :oops:
Also wasn't there some mech game for xbox with the crazy big controller? And if you didn't hit the eject button and died it just deleted your save clean off your hard drive?
This, absolutely this.
But then apparently dying lots is "good game design", so what do I know?
Yeah that's a great system. I would kind of make checkpoints of my own, like "inside the mansion" or "killed secondary target".
I loved that game for doing that, even if i was the only one.
Steel Battalion and yeah, they kept that "feature" in the game.
It's that big red one under the plastic cover on the right.
I loved this the one time I played it. It was awesome.
Haha yes, exactly. "Shit...one lock pick...well, this is a super hard lock...hmm....Ok Ill save and use it, then load until it works, save my last pick AND open this chest"...30 reloads later....."YES! Oh come the fuck on, 3 gold?! Goddamnit!"
As did I, it was really fun, I tipped over a lot at first but got used to it, it was insane, its so...cool, only gay thing is my friends copy ALWAYS froze after you beat the first level for some reason, so I could never try anything past that
I've been tempted to sell it many times for quick cash, but I always hold onto it, even though I haven't beaten it.
I recall getting to the second level, but that was all the playtime I got.
This is the one game that I want an oXbox for, it looked totally badass and I love the controller. Even if I never get a chance to play the game I want to pick up one of the controllers.
It would be one thing if they just caught you and you had to pay a fine or something.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
If you don't want to use them, don't. Most games have autosaves too. Don't blame the game design for wanting to accomodate people who don't let small unimportant things sap their fun.
What about an option to start a game that doesn't allow quicksaves, only timed manual saves. Options, in other words. It could be a difficulty setting. One manual, non quick, every fifteen minutes or so. Other than that you have to rely on your autosave.
For good games, I tend to use a quicksave round about when the autosave does it anyway. Since I like replaying the good setpieces if I die.
But for a game like stalker I quicksave every ten seconds because its so goddam stressful that I can't handle that level of adrenaline rushing through me constantly, I need the psychological comfort of knowing I don't have to kill that particular horrible thing again.
I use quicksaves for the same reason I hoard ammo. Because the level designer probably took the quicksave feature, or those footlockers of 7.62mm jacketed hollowpoints, into account in setting up the challenges I'm going to face later in the level, or later in the game. 30 mins from now, or hours from now, I could be totally screwed in some boss fight simply because I didn't play the game the way they were expecting.
Granted, most of the time I finish games weighed down with unused ammo and items, and with a shitload of saves that I never needed to load. But I know that the one time I pass up the chance, it's gonna bite me right in the ass.
Anyway, there are a lot of games that do things absolutely right in this generation. Checkpoints are rationed out as rewards for getting through tense moments or frantic firefights. Boss fights can often be replayed without going back to the level's beginning. Game design and level design are better in this generation than any I can remember. The toughest challenge I've faced so far on my 360 was one minute of hell aboard a jumbo jet. Replayed over and over. But you know what? I could retry it immediately. I didn't have to do any bullshit platforming or jump over any turtles to get to the tough part.
Yes, quicksave and quickload is a kind of insurance policy against bullshit level design. But is it used to make things easier for the players, or for the designers?
caffron said: "and cat pee is not a laughing matter"
Godhand's level design is beautiful for this. There's no backtracking for any boss fights, they all put you at the start of it. The levels are split into manageable portions and the slightly longer ones have checkpoints.
I do think it's important for developers to keep save game systems in their games, if the game warrants it. In most cases, in today's games, it does-- but some don't, or a checkpoint system/autosave system might be good enough if the game's broken up into little chunks. Resident Evil's typewriter save styles: no, too archaic.