On abusing saving in doom

[Zulk RS]

I remember I did a challenge run once where I allowed myself to save only after picking up a key. It's way less frequent than how much I normally save but... well that was the point of the Challenge Run.

[ApprihensivSoul]

Spam F5 (or whatever other less civilized key you set to Quicksave, got a friend who uses tilde,)  in every fight, before every shot, and whenever in cover.

 

Less hyperbolically, I find Doom at its most fun in blatantly unfair ambush scenarios where I'm leaning on the F5 just to get through fights. I'm not very good at Doom, and if I ever get even half good at it it will stop being fun. 

[TheSlipgateStudios]

I'd say to save before a hard upcoming fight, usually before grabbing a key.

[Mr. Alexander]

Play how you like, and don't worry about "getting good" unless you want to get good and derive enjoyment from building mastery. You can play FDA-style if you want, but you can also practice with saves and build up to beating a map without them, if that's how you like to play the game.

 

If you don't want to abuse saves, then save before & after fights and replay the fights until you can beat them mostly consistently. Don't save mid-fight, or only save at important stages of the fight, such as when a new monster horde enters the arena, or what have you. Some maps are more conducive to this style of saving than others, since some maps play like one single running melee, in which case there's never really a safe place to catch your breath, where it feels appropriate to save. You have to play it by ear.

 

DSDA-Doom's rewind function is great, but if you use it too often to correct minor mistakes in the middle of a fight, then you might lose sight of any larger strategic errors you may be making. Again, you have to play it by ear: No one else can tell you you're doing it wrong. If you think you're pressing your Rewind key too much, then don't press it, or consider unbinding it altogether and using normal saves and loads. I have it unbound, but I always regret it a little when I die in a stupid way and my last save is a fight or two ago.

[Hasamnas]

If you want to limit your saving you can impose some rules on yourself.

What I do is saving only when I'm at or above 100% health, and never save mid-fight.

[TheShep]

save whenever wherever. who cares

[Arsinikk]

I will say I like that DSDA Doom has a rewind feature, but I do think that it has made my general Doom playing worse. I don't think that's the fault of the source port dev nor do I think they should remove it. I think that's just a "me" problem in that the rewind feature has become very convenient and has led to me being much less careful and more risky. That's why I try and rely on actual saves instead, because then there are more incentives to restart fights in their entirety or to make strategic saves.

 

While it's cool to be to beat a map without any saves whatsoever, I don't think that kind of logic is well placed during blind runs of maps and/or fights. In my opinion there's no shame in saving in a map when you have no idea what's coming next. Just let people enjoy Doom in the way that they like, whether it be saveless or save-scum.

Edited August 3, 2023 by Arsinikk

[Daerik]

10 hours ago, Plut said:

Also, AFAIK the overwhelming majority of highly skilled players and speedrunners usually play without saves (at least I haven't seen them write about playing with saves that much).

 

I use saves quite often in casual playthroughs, most often before starting a new encounter, granted I tend to play maps where encounters are more defined and there's less incidental exploration > filler combat.

 

Repeating the same segment over and over doesn't really make you improve, it's more time efficient to analyze the mistakes you're making in difficult fights and fixing them.

 

4 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

I will say I like that DSDA Doom has a rewind feature, but I do think that it has made my general Doom playing worse.

 

You're not alone in thinking this, and there's some truth to it imo. People use it way to liberally to rewind when they eat a max damage rev missile and the like.

[BigBoy91]

It all depends on how you wanna approach Doom.

[Carmelo]

If you save more than 5 times during the same fight, Zeromaster will enter your house and shut down your electrical power.

[Lucius Wooding]

5 minutes ago, Carmelo said:

If you save more than 5 times during the same fight, Zeromaster will enter your house and shut down your electrical power.

 

This is a common misconception. Zero Master doesn't actually enter your house; he can press the switch through a wall or from out of bounds. This is called a Zero Press.

[jmac]

The idea that anyone would care about the saving habits of anyone else is mind-boggling to me. I play Doom entirely because it's fun. And I save regularly, because using my limited free time to restart the same level from the beginning again and again is not fun to me. If it is for you, then cool, do it that way. I don't care.

 

But if you're looking at people casually playing a 30-year-old game in the comfort of their own homes, and telling them that they aren't really beating any maps because they're using a feature that was built into the game from the beginning, you need to sit down and think about your life.

[Kinetic]

If you want to get better, build consistency, best way to do that is to use saves, doesn't matter if it's a lot or a little, until you can do larger and larger sections consistently. You will sometimes need to use saves to build consistency, and other times you won't, doesn't really matter how you get there, just use saves if need be to build consistency, use less when you're more consistent.

 

Spoiler

I originally had a long post about consistency and skill development and practice progression relating to usage/frequency of saves, but nyah, poorly written and structured. If you play a bunch of different things and get consistent at beating them and/or playing them fast, you are probably getting better.

 

[Mr. Freeze]

Pressing F5 should insta-kill you. Quicksaving is a mockery of all that is good and holy. 

[Zulk RS]

1 hour ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Pressing F5 should insta-kill you. Quicksaving is a mockery of all that is good and holy. 

 

And that is why I save scum manually!

[G19Doom]

Maybe it depends on how you started as a gamer but for me I never got into saving much beyond saving at the start of levels for a long time because before I played Doom I mostly played NES and SNES and practically every game didn’t have saves, some didn’t even have infinite continues. It meant a lot of replaying the same stuff over and over and for a time I sort of was that way even with PC games. 
 

Now I have way less free time so saving is often done to not only save my place within the map slots but to save when I need to fuck off for a bit and can’t return to the game for hours, days, weeks, or longer. Though, if enough time passes I tend to start from the beginning anyways because I would’ve forgotten most of what had happened prior. 

[LadyMistDragon]

I sort of have to play lots of wads so not saving frequently would be foolish. I still forget a lot though, which is annoying. I'm just glad rewinding exists in DSDA though. It makes some things a little (or a lot) more possible.

[Stroggman]

58 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I sort of have to play lots of wads so not saving frequently would be foolish. I still forget a lot though, which is annoying. I'm just glad rewinding exists in DSDA though. It makes some things a little (or a lot) more possible.

I never go back to gzdoom since I have DSDA

[Carmelo]

Just now, Stroggman said:

I never go back to gzdoom since I have DSDA

 

What's DSDA advantage for saving?

[LadyMistDragon]

You can rewind, which is probably necessary if you want to play the most difficult stuff, although you still need some skill, especially where BFG spamming's required.

[Carmelo]

holy crap I had no idea you could rewind, I've been using normal saves like a scrub 

[TimeOfDeath666]

Even just one save can be abuse. Saving is great for casual play, but if you literally never take off the training wheels then you'll always be riding a kid's bike.

[DeafPixel]

Not saving WILL make you better at doom, but you don't have to be a doom god to enjoy the game.
As someone who enjoys playing very long maps, not saving at all isn't really something I do often, but it can definitely change the experience of playing a map a lot. Minimizing saves gets you in a different mindset, but I can also quickly get frustrated when I don't save for a while and die and have to repeat a fight or two
Ultimately it's all up to what you personally like best

[Maximum Matt]

You know what's fun?? Sabotaging your brother's progress through the Doom II campaign by saving right before a cyberdemon rocket hits him.  

[Zulk RS]

9 minutes ago, Maximum Matt said:

You know what's fun?? Sabotaging your brother's progress through the Doom II campaign by saving right before a cyberdemon rocket hits him.  

 

I don't have a brother so I had to sabotage my own progress through Doom II by saving right before a cyberdemon rocket hits me.

[KickAss]

Hell yes that sucks! Nobody wants to know or watch such thrash or even wants to play like that :-(. All the modern source ports save automatically between the level changes afaik and that is way far enough saving ... . I prefer continuous play without any saving at all in the game.

[Tiramisu]

I'm personally in the "saves only as checkpoints" camp myself. If you want to improve (especially in the relative beginner stages), I think it's best to take on each fight as a whole and come up with strategies to beat it without relying on mid-fight saves or rewinds. And if the fights get too tough, you can always lower the difficulty level - that's what the skill options are for, after all!

 

As for how often to use checkpoint saves - that really doesn't matter. Whether to save after each fight, or at certain milestones (such as collecting a key), or simply just every now and then, is entirely up to individual preference and should be calibrated to what one finds the most enjoyable.

Edited August 3, 2023 by sq. Tiramisu

[MAN_WITH_GUN]

My personal experience from Doom comes from console ports where saving was either limited or disabled at all, so i think the pressure that was given me for my first time playing this game made me better player, the lack of saving your progress gives you strong feel of danger in maps and the sense of you're not immortal, ofc it comes with thing like "high risk - high reward" and if player not a challenger (at some point at least) he would like be having less chances on survival. I testing my maps saveless always so it will be possible for almost any type of player and i never judged anyone using saves constantly lol, it's just like shit-talking about preferences in general, there's no point at all.

[Astar]

Save as long as you need.

I wish I didn't save scum that much, but since I don't have that much time as youtubers like, for example, decino... I choose my way :)

 

Doom is all about having fun and there's no right or wrong way to play it

[Altima]

I personally like challenging myself to complete a map without saves but you bet your ass if it's difficult enough for me I'm going to use saves. They didn't have a checkpoint system and you could save anywhere or as often as you see fit, so why not take advantage of that if you so choose? At the end of the day, Doom's meant to be fun and if you get more enjoyment out of saving 5 times between every single enemy, then more power to you. If you want to improve, saving can be seen as a crutch yes. What helped me was studying other people's playstyles and strategies and then learning from those demos (this is before a world with YouTube) and applying it to my own playstyle. Practice and repetition really does help.