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

demagogue on 10/8/2023 at 16:48

That's right. In Disco Elysium you weren't really rolling to succeed or fail in making progress; you were usually rolling for which path you're going to be taking down the road to progress, the easy way or the hard way; but really, the kind of story you were going to get. I think other games with the system do that as well, but DE was just well designed with that in mind.

I think the issue is that you have to figure out the nature of your game. Some games are more skill games and some are more storytelling games, and good devs should try to fit the mechanics to the nature of what their game wants to be, and a game often gets into trouble when the devs want to put every genre trope into it and it loses its own character. I think that's the issue underlying this debate. The savescumming part is just a symptom.

Like marbleman was saying, it wasn't really an issue in DE because usually you'd want to play out the failed rolls, and even re-take them if you did have to reload, because that's your story. But that was the nature of the game. Not every RPG needs to do it that way if they're on the side of gaming stats or skills and that's their nature.

EvaUnit02 on 28/10/2023 at 10:26

Where's the opportunity to savescum? Checkpoint saving has been the norm for most mainstream games for like 15 years now (i.e. when consoles became the lead platform for most games, starting with the 6th gen). The issue of consoles having no permanent storage has been solved since at least 2013, yet SAVE ANYWHERE is still a rarity. The rare non-indie exceptions like Bethesda RPGs are usually grandfathered in because the series/design formula began on PC and they're still using the same engine tech, with much of the same creative staff.

I'm currently playing Sniper Elite 5 and was surprised to see it has quicksaving. Turns out it just saves your most recent checkpoint in a separate slot, not affected by autosave overwriting.

Kamlorn on 7/11/2023 at 17:32

Cheers!
Your video has been mentioned recently. (https://youtu.be/PHh5Mh-BjXw?si=S0BkI1nK-PDE1PRM)
18:57 timecode. Used as an example of gameplay style where savescumming is an essential part, because without such a feature it will be boring to start your new attempt right from the beginning.