You Can't Prevent "Savescumming" in Stealth Games, and Nor Should You

heywood on 8/8/2023 at 18:19

Quote Posted by Sulphur

Limiting your ability to get better at these games by punishing you for trying to figure them out teeters on the edge of sadism or masochism, I'd argue;

You don't need unlimited save points to figure out a game. And it's ironic to say save limits are sadistic, when right from the beginning, video games had limited lives and hordes of enemies trying to kill you. Stealth games have health bars instead, but still hordes of enemies trying to kill you.

And I'm not asking for permadeath, just better difficulty balancing. You seem to assume that if you limit saves, the game has to be punishing. That's not true. Souls was punishing because the devs wanted it to be, not because limiting saves inherently makes it so.

Quote:

Players adopting ghosting as a way to surmount the player-created issue of save-scumming does not make rational sense. Ghosting is essentially the satisfaction of being what the game is telling you you are - you're Sam Fisher, you're Garrett, you're whoever, master thief, spy, blah blah, and you don't get caught unless you're not a master thief or spy. Quick saves don't break difficulty unless you're spamming F5 every five seconds because your ability to overcome a challenge is essentially stochastic and a quick load is a way to re-roll the dice - if that's the case, I'd say either the game isn't for you, or you should probably learn how to play it better by taking your finger off F5 and observing and learning instead.

Back when Thief came out, I don't think anybody ghosted their first play through just because they were playing as Garrett. The Dark Project wasn't really designed for that, and ghosting wasn't a thing yet. Ghosting developed from people playing again and wanting more challenge.

It's a play style that many games try to support now, regardless of the nature of your character. I even like to play Adam Jensen (Deus Ex) as a ghost, in part because you're overpowered for most combat situations from mid-game on. And the game rewards it. But finishing a mission without being spotted at all is a high bar, and I haven't played a game yet that I can ghost all the way through without some trial & error, and in some situations, rolling the dice. So save scumming goes hand in hand with ghosting: save scumming enables ghosting and ghosting justified save scumming.

I wish it weren't the case, because I don't like having to hold two hands behind my back to be challenged by my favorite game franchise: first by adopting the ghost play style where feasible, and second by disciplining myself not to reload unless I die. It would be better if saves were considered in game balancing. You can have your walk in the park on easy difficulty with unlimited saving & loading, but hard should be challenging and you should feel the risks.

marbleman on 8/8/2023 at 18:37

I don't think the option to freely save being tied to difficulty is a good idea. As I noted in the video, I (and I believe all other ghosters) prefer playing on the highest difficulty so that enemies are challenging and there are more of them. I also noted that my end goal is to play the entire game on this difficulty without quicksaves, as it is inteneded. But how do I prepare for that ultimate run if I play it on the lower difficulty? That experience won't be of any use. So I need to play on the highest difficulty to learn how the game works, but if I have to reset each section 30-40 times, and these sections can last up to 10-15 minutes, it really adds up. The process of learning the game can become utterly miserable in this case, and is it really a price I have to pay so that I can adhere to my preferred playstyle?

This applies to Thief as well. When learning a mission, figuring out what I can and can't get away with, I do, in fact, hit that F5 button every five seconds. But when re-playing the mission and trying to execute all I've learned, I don't do that. I realize that my playstyle is very niche, but it still sucks when it's being inhibited and made tedious, because, as I've also said, taking away the option to freely save doesn't change that playstyle in the slightest. Before the quicksave option was added in Gloomwood, I still reloaded my last phonograph save each time I was caught, so I was effectively "savescumming" already; it just took 2-3 times as long to get through each section of the game, and as the developer confirmed, that was never the intention.

I also want to note that for me, the Souls way of "saving" is the absolute worst. It makes failure an integral part of the experience, and there is no way to have that "perfect run" within this system unless you're willing to restart the game each time you die. No, I wouldn't add quicksaves to Souls games because that would ruin them for everyone else, but I've long settled on the fact that these games are just not for me.

heywood on 8/8/2023 at 19:54

You want to play on the hardest difficulty, and you also want to be able to complete a perfect run. That seems contradictory. I can understand wanting a perfect run, as I drift into perfectionism sometimes too. But wanting to do it on the hardest difficulty no matter your actual skill is just arbitrary and selfish.

The whole point of having difficulty levels in a game is to offer different players a different level of challenge, depending on their ability, experience, and interest. If you insist that the hardest difficulty must still be easy enough for you to finish a perfect ghost run, it ends up being too easy for most players. I can't get behind that.

Starker on 8/8/2023 at 20:04

People certainly do have perfect runs in the Souls' games. Some people even complete them without taking a single hit. Hell, there was one guy who completed all 7 of them back to back this way.

marbleman on 8/8/2023 at 21:24

Quote Posted by heywood

I'm sorry you see it as arbitrary and selfish, but 1) even the official ghost rules for Thief demand playing on the highest difficulty and 2) that's really none of my business. Still, I fail to see how the ability to quicksave makes it too easy for most players. There are many things that go into difficulty: enemy awareness, placement, numbers; the amount of tools the player has; easier routes being blocked off. Why not adjust the difficulty using these factors instead?

In addition, I never said that I want the perfect run being easy to achieve. I don't. Else, there is no satisfaction in it. When I start playing a game, I'm in the same boat as everyone else. I have the same knowledge and skill level as others. The difference is that while the majority of people only play a game once, I'm willing to play it numerous times to get better at it. I don't want to make any game too easy for others. I just want to be able to figure out how to sneak around a tricky guard without having to sneak past five other guards every time he spots me.

And as I noted in the video, I am not against discouraging "savescumming" through other means -- for example locking the player out of in-game achievements and trophies. I think that's fair.

nicked on 9/8/2023 at 08:48

The Souls comparison is an interesting one because it completely throws away the traditional concept of saving and loading the game. In a sense, it's always saving. It's impossible to lose progress, except in so far as the game's systems are built to remove some of your resources as a failure state, but as such it's also impossible to load an earlier save and retry, because retrying is built into the core loop of the game's progression instead.

As such, I don't think it's a very useful comparison to make when talking about quicksaves, because it's just not that kind of game. It would be like decrying the lack of quicksaves in Tetris.

In games where the win state is progression through a story, and the fail state is to reload an earlier save, putting limits on saving and loading means you are forcing repetition on players. Some players may enjoy that repetition and, I suppose, the practice that comes with it. For me, the enjoyment I get from a game is usually the sense of progression, and if a game makes me repeat a section that I am familiar with, I feel like the game is wasting my time. For much the same reason that I don't rewind a film and rewatch the action scenes 20 times before continuing - my goal is not to learn the intricacies of how the film was shot, my goal is to see the conclusion of events.

Briareos H on 9/8/2023 at 09:13

I only savescum to pass all roll checks in BG3 :cool:

Thirith on 9/8/2023 at 09:39

If I were to design a game like Baldur's Gate 3, I would definitely add an option - probably at the cost of certain achievements - that allows players to win all rolls (or at least all winnable ones). If some people will use quicksave to come to that result, why not just give them a more direct option?

Does BG3 make losing rolls interesting, by and large?

Malf on 9/8/2023 at 11:04

Eh, sometimes, but mostly it's just bad results from failure, such as initiating a combat you were trying to avoid through speech, or simply not learning a crucial piece of information, or not revealing a secret door / buried treasure / trap.

It's most annoying when a character's basic bonuses would appear to guarantee success, but a roll of 1 is always a failure.

I did have the idea that in a videogame version of the rules, you could have "virtual" dice that would adapt depending on what a roll's potential maximum is; impossible to implement with physical dice, but the kind of thing computers excel at.
The idea being, say your character has 5 Sleight of Hand skill; they also have some gloves that give them +1 to Sleight of Hand checks; they then have the option of taking a +1d4 bonus from a fellow character's skill / spell; say they are Astarion and also getting the 1d4 bonus from being "Happy"; and finally, say theyre getting another bonus of +2 from somewhere, which would imply their minimum potential roll would be 1 on 1d20, +5+1+1+1+2, totalling 11.

So the difficulty check is 10. Shouldn't that be an automatic pass?
In current rules, no, because a roll of 1 on 1d20 is always, always a failure.

My idea is to instead of rolling a d20, roll a virtual dice where the maximum possible score would be the upper limit. In this case 20 on 1d20, +1 from the gloves, +4 from the first 1d4, then another +4 from the other, and finally the +2. That's a potential maximum roll of 31.
So roll a d31 instead of a d20. A roll of 1 then becomes a 1-in-31 chance instead of a 1-in-20 chance, stretching out the odds of success.
You could still roll a 1 and fail, but I suspect it would "feel" fairer and result in less save-scumming.

Like I say, something that computers can do easily that simply doesn't adapt to the table-top.
But at the table-top, you have one crucial element that you don't have in a videogame: the Dungeon Master.
They're the human element that can choose to ignore the dice rolls should they feel it would suit the gaming session better. They can decide that unless there are stressful circumstances in play, if your overall bonus is higher than the DC, you automatically succeed.

Briareos H on 9/8/2023 at 11:10

Quote Posted by Thirith

Does BG3 make losing rolls interesting, by and large?

By and large I'm too early in the game to really say, for now it hasn't been particularly obvious. But there's a relaxed difficulty option and if you really want to, you can probably make yourself a build that will maximize your chances of succeeding at most dialogue checks. I actually force myself not to reload if I fail a roll during conversation, but I may revert to a previous save if my approach to a combat situation doesn't work out due to me not having learned the game enough.

I was mostly joking to highlight the perverse impact that quick saving can have sometimes, encouraging the player into behavioural loops that go against the core of the game. I'm rather weak-willed and I've occasionally hated myself for savescumming in first-person games although I just couldn't stop myself. That being said, this is a psychological battle I want to fight on my own terms and I don't like games that artificially restrict the ability to save. I couldn't complete Filcher for that reason.