You Can't Prevent "Savescumming" in Stealth Games, and Nor Should You - by marbleman
heywood on 9/8/2023 at 11:58
Quote Posted by nicked
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.
In practice, the opposite is true. The more often you save, the more often you reload, because the "cost" of reloading is less. It leads to more repetition overall, just done in smaller loops.
Think about what percentage of your reloads are forced? By "forced" I mean that you tried your best to stay alive but died and must reload, as opposed to reloading at will to get a better outcome. For me, the percentage is small when playing a modern imm sim or stealth game, because they make it hard to get killed if you know what you're doing, and often reward perfectionist/completionist play styles. I find it easy to get into clearing levels, chasing ghost bonuses, achievements, finding every last item, etc. because staying alive and completing the mission usually isn't much of a challenge.
Thirith on 9/8/2023 at 12:12
Quote Posted by Briareos H
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 understand why it's done like this most of the time, but it's a shame. I wish there were more games like
Disco Elysium, where failing a stat check can lead to different but equally interesting outcomes. But if a failed roll simply locks you out of things, that's not interesting, so I understand people who quicksave before stat checks.
Malf on 9/8/2023 at 12:30
BG3 also doesn't do anything interesting with critical successes (natural 20) or failures (natural 1) outside of combat, as far as I can tell. They're just default passes or failures.
Which is a shame, because those in the tabletop game have often been left to the DM's imagination. A critical failure at opening a lock could jam it, preventing further attempts to open it, or a critical success in a deception check during a conversation could end up with a character literally giving you everything, up to and including the shirt off their own back.
Sulphur on 9/8/2023 at 12:43
Quote Posted by heywood
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.
Hardly ironic if you take a more nuanced look at it. Whatever the reasons for not saving were in the beginning (hardware limitations, game length, mode of consumption [money-eating arcades]), the games we play have evolved to be much more complex since whatever they were in the beginning. Hordes of enemies are still trying to kill you, but alongside technological progress, your environments are now more complex and three- and sometimes fourth-dimensional, and so are your tools and verbs. If we were still playing only Contra today, where a complete playthrough is 1 hour long, I'd still dislike it, but I'd accept that for all practical purposes getting better at it is fine, manageable, and not something I have a huge problem with.
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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.
Addressing the second point first, Souls doesn't limit saves, as everyone has pointed out. Its saves are technically always happening, as it saves your game state the moment you quit. The control mechanism is the bonfires, which are essentially dev-mandated hard checkpoints. Next, if a game isn't punishing, then the only purpose saves can have (besides the convenience of revisiting an earlier level) is to rewind you to decision forks - in which case, limiting them is actually a punishment forcing you to live with a choice. This is actually fine if it's a story-based game that wants you to feel consequences (Undertale does something like this, but not by limiting saves), but not for any sort of game that encourages experimentation like an imsim.
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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.
Exactly: ghosting is only that, a method to add more challenge, hence why you're essentially roleplaying your character. My real point is, if you're someone who's abusing quicksaves throughout a game because you can't stop yourself, and ghosting is a way to alleviate that by ramping up the difficulty regardless of F5-ing all the way, that's a player-created problem. Ghosting is a playstyle that exists independent of your ability or inability to quicksave, and the causal connection between the two is weak at best, and certainly drawing out that player-created relationship between the two (which you did in your earlier post) isn't borne out by a rational look at it. Ghosting is supported by quicksaving, but by no means did save scumming
create a need for it. I can see the argument for the reverse, but quicksaves have existed well before ghosting did.
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...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.
I agree that good difficulty balancing is where a game doesn't make you feel like completing it without save scumming is impossible. I'm all for designing a game that can enable players at every difficulty to get better at them - though this is obviously an enormously difficult task. I simply disagree that forcing (instead of allowing) players to lose progress they earned from time spent on the game is a good way of teaching a player to, as we say, git gud.
heywood on 9/8/2023 at 17:57
It's not about forcing people to get good. You can get good through lots of repetition.
It's about playing the game as it unfolds, thinking on your feet, deciding to fight or run, improvising to get out of situations, letting yourself be vulnerable and taking risks. More important, it's about keeping you in the flow of the game so you get immersed.
I've been playing the System Shock remake this summer and I've been sticking with the surgery beds and reconstruction bays and not reloading. That's effectively one save point per level, which is a little too stingy and leads to some long backtracks, but that in turn provides the motivation to get security to 0% and clear levels, so you don't have to fight on those backtracks. It's been a refreshing change.
Earlier in the year, I played Mankind Divided again and it's chock full of scummy temptations even though it's very easy. You don't save scum to stay alive in that game, you save scum to hack, collect loot and XP, win conversation battles, to survive jumping from rooftops and ledges, to try out weapons and augs, to play non-lethal, and especially to ghost.
My point about Thief is that it draws you into to save scumming by virtue of its design. It's the first game I can remember noticing myself doing it, and I felt guilty about it at first because it seemed like cheating, but then I got over it. I don't think the LGS devs anticipated that exploitative use of the save system would allow so many experienced players to top out on difficulty. Ghosting came from that. So I'm not saying that save scumming directly caused ghosting to emerge. More like it enabled ghosting to emerge, because we had already accepted save scumming in our Thief play styles.
WEI on 9/8/2023 at 21:23
I never really got why there is an actual argument about it in the first place, to me it's like saying the blackjack in Thief is too much a hindrance to ghosting because each time you see guards you have an urge to hit their poor little heads.
To me, if you are too tempted to break your own self imposed challenges then it means the challenge in question isn't so fun to do anymore for x reason, so why force yourself and have less fun ?
I guess I am in a minority here but this is how I do it, be it ghosting or any other self imposed rules : either I don't cheat or I renounce my goals when I've had enough. If I really want to do something I am not gonna cheat.
And I find it even weirder when people argue about this with games like Thief, where you are supposed to play however you choose...of course you would get the ability to savescum, it gives you room to experiment a LOT : like making burricks and undead fight each other, make an npc fall to his death, try and see if you can trap one in a room, it's not just and only a stealth game.
Personnaly the only save system I ever got annoyed at are checkpoints : checkpoints being too far, checkpoints where you can die, checkpoints not working, they are so many issues you can have with checkpoints simply because it's a restriction and it has to work well with the level design.
And why, why disable the ability to save rather than get the incentive not to save ?
Jason Moyer on 9/8/2023 at 21:28
Using dice rolls in conversation is so bad. I'm genuinely surprised anyone still does it. It's like the Fallout 3 thing where you could pass every speech check by savescumming with 0 skill in speech.
Pyrian on 10/8/2023 at 05:46
The one thing conversation rolls have going for them is that it allows a smooth progression, while flat skill gates tend to be very "Guess carefully exactly how much Speech skill you need here, because if you invest too much that's wasted points and if you invest too little that's ALL wasted points" which is IMO very obnoxious. Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall had one (one!) mission where the higher your Charisma, the further you could get into the mission before being forced to fight (and with enough of the right skills you could talk your way through the whole thing), but games generally just don't have enough speech gates to make a smooth progression even possible.
Thirith on 10/8/2023 at 05:51
Disco Elysium is pretty much all dice rolls in conversation, but the rolls aren't really gates, and a failed roll can be as interesting as one that succeeds.
marbleman on 10/8/2023 at 10:59
Disco Elysium might be the only game that made me wanna roll with whatever was happening because it was so entertaining. If for some reason I had to load a save after a failed check and this time succeeded on it, I loaded again to intentionally fail it. :D
