I’ve recently been playing about with the Aspyr developed Tomb Raider I-III Remasters of the CORE games of the same name. During my playing, I was reminded of the famous (or rather infamous) save crystals that featured in the first and third releases in their initial form. Tomb Raider was one of the earliest games my dad and I played together, and the limitations to saving added a huge amount of challenge to what was already a very challenging game for us. The implementation of this kind of saving just seemed like the norm however and while we always wished for more crystals, we carried on regardless. Other games we played back then, such as MediEvil, or Crash Bandicoot only allowed saving on the completion of a level - although the latter had checkpoints and both featured a lives system (with MediEvil utilising resurrections through the use of potions, and Crash having a more traditional take). Most games were like this, and death in games meant restarting, or at least losing a good deal of progress, and we were fine with that then, but likely because there was no other choice, unless you used cheats...
From my early fourth and fifth generation days I eventually expanded my repertoire to PC gaming, and it was there that the concept of quick saving entered my life. It was a breath of fresh air, and served to make the more mature and challenging games I was playing on the platform feel a little more manageable (especially with certain shooters or RPGs). There was an edge that was dulled with this feature though, and while I was more than happy to use it, the term save-scumming, which describes the act of reloading every time something happens within a game that goes against your desires, conjures up a slightly distasteful practice - whether or not you think the actual act of doing it is harmless.
Some games get around this with clever design choices, perhaps by making either outcome interesting. Baldur’s Gate 3 does this successfully, as even failing to achieve your goals can result in an interesting outcome regardless. Not all games succeed in this regard however, and for the most part, if a player has the option to reload to make a different choice, or retry a combat encounter, or try their luck for a better roll at some loot or something, they likely will. It takes some willpower to play a game through without doing this though - especially with something like X-COM, for example, where your well trained soldiers can die at the hands of an unfortunate dice roll, sometimes derailing an entire playthrough. I’ve reloaded plenty, and will do it again, and it’s that point that had be typing all this rubbish to begin with….
In my most recent playthrough of Tomb Raider, I’ve found myself copiously utilising the quick save feature (hundreds of times, in fact). For the most part it’s for silly things, like the game not responding to an input, or accidentally walking Lara off a ledge, or facing a particularly cruel piece of level design. These mistakes or difficulties could set us back hours when the game first came out, and in a world so lacking in alternative entertainment, that wasn’t so bad, but I’m no longer a school kid with unending free time and a very small shelf of games. Nowadays there are so many games I want to play, books I want to read, and more projects than I’ll ever have time for that I want to complete, not to mention all the other time that is taken up with general life stuff - how often have you had to stop laying a game because something has come up? Would you want to lose your progress then? No, of course not. It’s because of these factors that I really can’t be doing with repeating the same bit of a game over and over a dozen times until I get it right (more so for a game I originally completed almost thirty years ago). Yes, the challenge is stripped considerably, but more often than not, I’m not playing a game for the challenge alone, and the kind of games that I do enjoy are perhaps challenging in other ways. I’d much rather make my way through a game I’m interested in, explore its virtual world, take in its story and art, and enjoy it to completion, rather than be put off by any inherent frustrations caused by a challenge that I’m not up for. There are plenty of games that cater to that kind of thing anyway, and if I am up for that kind of challenge, I like to pick a game that is made for it, rather than the difficulty being a function of it lacking in quality of life improvements (such as quick saving).
Many people will argue that saving at any point ruins some games, but, as with using cheat codes back when they were a thing, it’s at the behest of the player to utilise as they see fit. If you want, you can restrict yourself to only saving where the original crystals were, or limiting yourself to a certain number of saves per level… Or you can save every five minutes… There is a culture of comparison, it occurs in every walk of life, but perhaps more audibly amongst gamers, some of whom think that if you’re not doing it the way they say you should, you’re doing it wrong. Certainly, that’s a load of bollocks - I think as long as you’re enjoying games in whatever way suits YOU best, that’s all that really matters - unless you’re cheating online, then you can fuck off.
Another example of a game I’ve recently played, Kingdom Two Crowns (I wrote about its predecessor here), has no such feature, saving things as is when exiting the game. It can be very frustrating when losing hours of progress, and I can’t tell if the satisfaction upon beating it is worth the frustrations in the leadup… it didn’t put me off playing it to completion, but it did feel like it was artificially elongated because of it. Another game where a challenge of this sort is inherent is the Freelancer mode in Hitman World of Assassination, in that game, the frustration is baked in and expected, and the overcoming of the challenge is the experience. It just depends on the game, and the person I suppose…
What do you think about save scumming or utilising quick saves to inoculate yourself against time wasting? Also, it took a surprisingly long time to kill myself so much to get these screenshots - hope you appreciate the effort in getting Lara crushed by a boulder, Dan incinerated in Lava, Agent 47 shot, Crash lost down a pit, and my entire X-COM team killed by aliens.
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Jamie B
In the Oblivion Remaster, rather than backtrack and get more lockpicks, quick save and load if they all break. Kind of value my time more than the “ethics” of using an in built game mechanic.
There's arguments to be made on both sides, but these days there's so many ways a game sesh can be interrupted that being able to save when I need to is a QOL feature I can't do without.