Is using SAVES in Doom bad?

[Egg Boy]

40 minutes ago, Finnisher said:

Tying another topic into this: pistol starting was meant to be a penalty for neglecting saving as was said in the og. manual, not an intented way to play.

All the maps are designed for pistol start and not necessarily expecting you to be there with any particular weapons/amount of health, so in a way, it is intended in that all maps are balanced for pistol start. Play however you want. 

[Wavy]

Yes. It is commonly known that each time you save, one year gets taken off your life span. Count your days save scummers!

 

On a more serious note though, saving is a feature. No reason to feel bad for using a feature provided by the developers, even if you use it excessively (this goes for all games).

Edited December 16, 2023 by Wavy

[IHave10Shells]

2 hours ago, Azafran said:

 

From the 1993 Doom™ game manual:

 

Oh sorry, I meant to say that MOST people in the 90's used it. I wasn't saying that DooM was only intended to be played with a keyboard.

Edited December 16, 2023 by IHave10Shells

[Razza]

Saving is good and cheating is based. just play the game, who give a shit

[bobstremglav]

People who say that saves are bad probably as big fans of pistol start, as using lifes system in wolf3d

 

I think it was nice that even with lifes system you could choose your difficulty even further: play with saves or play with lifes. Same applies to doom. Why not just use what you want?

Wanna play without saves - play with pistol start

Wanna play with saves - leave pistol start for those who want it

[Azafran]

23 minutes ago, IHave10Shells said:

Oh sorry, I meant to say that MOST people in the 90's used it. I wasn't saying that DooM was only intended to be played with a keyboard.

 

I know I know, I just was trying to be funny "lawyering" over the Doom manual lol

[Finnisher]

42 minutes ago, Egg Boy said:

All the maps are designed for pistol start and not necessarily expecting you to be there with any particular weapons/amount of health, so in a way, it is intended in that all maps are balanced for pistol start. Play however you want. 

 

All (original) maps have been designed to be completable from a pistol start too yes, so you are not completely screwed if you forgot to save.

Still pistol starting was not the recommended or intended way to play.

 

Yes modern mapsets are different, some are balanced for pistol starts, some for continuous, but just wanting to point out that neither saveless nor pistol starting are the so called correct ways to play as far as the original games go.

 

Anyone is free to play however they want but claiming saving (or playing continous) is wrong is just not true.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Finnisher

[Finnisher]

As far as playing saveless or pistol starting goes for skill improvement I'd say that too is a double-edged sword.

 

Do you actually push yourself to manage tough encounters better or are you relying on safer tactics because of the penalty of death?

Food for thought.

[Zulk RS]

11 hours ago, droopy said:

I experimented with saves and at some point found an approach that worked for me until I understood I was focusing too much on it instead of simply enjoying my Doom time. What I did was saving after I pick up a key or shoot 100 monsters (whatever happens first). For most of the maps I played, it helped to challenge myself enough without frustrating too much after I died. But eventually I dropped this idea because I found myself playing too carefully and slow.

 

Funnily enough, I had the opposite effect. I saw Doomtubers playing without saves and thought "This was the proper way to play" and so I tried to cut down on save-scumming. Especially since when I play Doom, I save like multiple times every minute. I am not even exaggerating. I might have saved/loaded 10 times within a single minute. I thought that my not saving, I the Doom videos I would end up making would be better for the viewer to watch. At the end though, I found myself not really enjoying Doom when I wasn't saving frequently. So I just went back to extreme save-scum. I have now turned mid-fight save/loading into its own game mechanic.

[TimeOfDeath666]

6 hours ago, RHhe82 said:

Maybe someone should make a source port, call it TrueDoom or something of the sort, that prevents bad playing; that removes cheat codes, removes load and save options from the main menu, has only Ultra-Violence and Nightmare as difficulty options, and exit linedef does not work (or gibs the player) if the player hasn't reached 100% kills and secrets.

Vanilla doom already has some of those features: cheat codes and save/load are disabled when recording a demo.

[Burgish]

Of course its bad.  Shooting a gun is bad.  Pushing buttons is bad.  Everything you do is bad.  You're in hell, you're a bad person, objectively speaking if you're doing it that's proof its bad.

[Novaseer]

It's nominally a single-player game. How you play the game is not unfair to anyone else (unless you're speedrunning competitively, but even then saves aren't exactly congruous to beating a level as fast as possible), so who cares?

[Uncle 80]

Saving is ok. Remember, even Jesus saves!

 

edit: Damn, Rata beat me to it!

Edited December 16, 2023 by Uncle 80

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

"Jesus saves. Doomslayer reloads."

 

Spoiler

But Doomguy doesn't even need to reload like all you fucking zoomers so fuck you r/doom and Youtube comments section!

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[Jayextee]

I've actually voted 'yes' to the poll. Saving *is* bad.

I don't have an argument, I just see a complete lack of nuance in the scattered discussion in this thread on the matter and I thought I'd perturb the waters a bit.

[Finnisher]

2 hours ago, Jayextee said:

I've actually voted 'yes' to the poll. Saving *is* bad.

I don't have an argument, I just see a complete lack of nuance in the scattered discussion in this thread on the matter and I thought I'd perturb the waters a bit.

 

Well perhaps add to the nuance then and share your thoughts in detail.

[Pegleg]

Of course saving your game in Doom is bad.
 

EVERYONE knows that the ONE TRUE RIGHT WAY to play Doom is keyboard-only Nightmare Tyson reality, blind and without saves.

 

Honestly, if you can’t beat a map, mapset, or megawad in one try without taking a hit, then how can you call yourself a real gamer?

 

If you’re not deleting wad files as soon as you finish them (because playing them a second time wouldn’t be blind), then how can you even look at yourself in the mirror?

 

Oh, but I need saves because I can’t possibly beat Eviternity II in one sitting. Oh, how could I possibly get through Sunder without taking a hit? Oh, there’s no way I could find optimal routes to speedrun maps without playing them multiple times. Ha. Get good, losers.

 

So, to summarize, yes, using saves in Doom is bad and, furthermore, anyone who saves their game should feel bad for doing it and not call themselves a “good player” or “real gamer” or anything like that.

[OniriA]

21 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I voted "yes" since the poll is anonymous.

I heard Sylvester Stallone never saves.

 

He's an all or nothing kind of guy.

Edited December 16, 2023 by OniriA

[Naarok0fkor]

It's bad to the bone...

[The Doommer]

On 12/15/2023 at 10:17 PM, Downcologo one said:

The other day I had seen people saying that using saves was wrong

There will always be people with frankly dumb takes (no offense to anyone)

Because if it's bad, why is it an intended feature in the game?

 

I know Civvie did a mostly no-save run from the classics (except Plutonia iirc) but I'm pretty sure he's also not the type to shun players away from saving and only did it as a flex of his expertise on the game.

Edited December 17, 2023 by The Doommer

[Firebert]

looking forward to next week's regular "how to play doom" opinion thread. Maybe we'll see something like "Is ultra-violence the correct difficulty?"

[The Doommer]

2 minutes ago, Firebert said:

"how to play doom" opinion thread.

Honestly that's also my biggest gripe with opinions like this

If you wanna do a no-save Nightmare playthrough of every WAD by default, power to you, but it's not the "correct" or "incorrect" way

 

[fruity lerlups]

you should never play with any features the developers put in the game, playing on difficulties less than UV-Fast with the Snake Eyes mod (its only a real run if you eliminate RNG and always roll lows and get 80 Rev rockets to the face, otherwise you just got lucky) basically means you punched my grandma. And don't get me started on mouselook, don't listen to the copers saying "mouselook was always intended!", you should be playing with an original 1993 IBM Model M keyboard plugged in via PS2 port, on DOS, with framerate capped to 35fps 3:4 ratio 320x200 resolution with low screen size.

[fruity lerlups]

On 12/17/2023 at 9:59 AM, Pegleg said:

Of course saving your game in Doom is bad.
 

EVERYONE knows that the ONE TRUE RIGHT WAY to play Doom is keyboard-only Nightmare Tyson reality, blind and without saves.

 

Honestly, if you can’t beat a map, mapset, or megawad in one try without taking a hit, then how can you 

Oh, but I need saves because I can’t possibly beat Eviternity II in one sitting. Oh, how could I possibly get through Sunder without taking a hit? Oh, there’s no way I could find optimal routes to speedrun maps without playing them multiple times. Ha. Get good, losers.

IMO you're basically cheating if you play custom wads anyway, ohh you're a "doom god" tell me more about how you UV Maxed God-Machine on a limit-removing port. Limit-removing? that sounds like cheating to me pal.

[D4NUK1]

The real way to play it's with checkpoints like Doom Eternal intended, make a save when you find a keycard or a hub that conects various areas.

[idbeholdME]

On 12/16/2023 at 2:10 PM, Finnisher said:

Do you actually push yourself to manage tough encounters better or are you relying on safer tactics because of the penalty of death?

Food for thought.

Even better one - are you actually getting better or did you make it through only because you already died 5 times in the level and know where everything is beforehand and just had to tediously replay nearly the entire thing several times?

 

Also, saving is not a problem. It's when you obsessively load because of every single mistake. The proper term should honestly be load-scumming. Doesn't matter if you make 100 saves a second when you never load one.

[Egg Boy]

52 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

Even better one - are you actually getting better or did you make it through only because you already died 5 times in the level and know where everything is beforehand and just had to tediously replay nearly the entire thing several times?

Not everyone plays Doom to get good at it. Also, learning a map IS getting better. Speedrunning is built around that concept.

[Fonze]

1 hour ago, idbeholdME said:

Even better one - are you actually getting better or did you make it through only because you already died 5 times in the level and know where everything is beforehand and just had to tediously replay nearly the entire thing several times?

 

Also, saving is not a problem. It's when you obsessively load because of every single mistake. The proper term should honestly be load-scumming. Doesn't matter if you make 100 saves a second when you never load one.

 

Idk if it's fair to judge skill based purely on situations lacking foreknowledge. You can judge your "how well can I guess what this particular mapper is going to do before it happens" skill based on this, maybe your fluidity/reaction time, but otherwise your findings will be heavily distorted by a lack of foreknowledge, especially with how differently demanding encounters can be based on where you are going into them and what you're expecting. Different mappers have different styles, and even among the same mapper there can be different styles and different expressions/executions of the same style.

 

Also, all of this flies in the face of the decisions we as players make to get through encounters (including aversion to perceived "cheeses") and how we quantify "a good job." Is "doing good" beating an encounter without taking damage, beating an encounter quickly, beating the overall level quickly (which may require taking some encounters slower or leading them into a new area, etc), beating the map under some restriction, or something else? How much of an incomplete picture do we really have when we concentrate on one of these, how much weight do we give them all, and what else is missing from this analysis of one's skill? Given everything is relative, do we then need to quantify all of that by comparing against each other? Or maybe we replay maps to see our improvement, but wait now there's foreknowledge and the comparison is no longer relevant. Point being: there are many different skills and to lump them all up into one, non-retestable, non-falsifiable category makes the resulting data an unusable mess, especially when there are too many variables to account for and too many individual skills being tested at once.

 

I mean, I also get that with the abundance of content the focus shifts towards fda play, but many things are skills and boiling them all down to what can become "how well can I game/predict the mapper" doesn't do a good job explaining why results (perceived skill gaps/improvements) may differ.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Fonze

["JL" was too short]

Quickloading lets you learn to beat an encounter by replaying the parts of it you're having trouble with.

Restarting the map lets you... learn to beat an encounter by replaying the parts of it you're having trouble with.

 

The question is just how much of a time and frustration tax one wishes to pay in order to learn whatever lesson one needs to learn.

Unless one is getting down to TAS-level use of savestates, saving and loading don't alter whatever degree of mechanical skill you need to acquire in order to not eat that cyberdemon rocket or whatever.  It's not even clear to me that they alter the RNG factor the way savescumming would in some games, because of how Doom's "RNG" works, though I'm not an expert so I stand to be technically corrected on this point.
 

[Dragonsbrethren]

From a game design standpoint, I vastly prefer a checkpoint system over being able to save anywhere. A complete lack of mid-level saves can be infuriating, though. Play however it's fun for you!