Lack of mid-game saving is ruining Doom 64 for me

[Guest Unregistered account]

On 7/4/2016 at 8:53 PM, Pencil of Doom said:

So, Doom 64 lacking mid-saves ruins it, yeah right, don't make me laugh, if you fell into a inscapable pit, then it's your fault, not the developers, think you can just simply run around and blow the shit outta them demons?
Well shoulda think twice, sonny jim, cuz' not having mid-saves or whatever is part of the challenge, learn with the mistakes and accept that it's your fault for falling to your death or go home and be a family man.
This is why classic games will be always superior to these easy ass difficulty modern games.
And that's cuz' nowadays, developers don't care about fans as much as they did back in the day, money now is all they care.

 

On 7/5/2016 at 4:05 AM, Wild Dog said:

This is another case of younger people trying to play old games and missing the point of how things worked back then.
IThey had a lot of limitations in the early 90's. For example Zelda Ocarina of time, you can save whenever you want, YET when you load the save, you will start at the starting point of the game and not in the same spot where you saved.
 

Part of the experience is able to beat the game like it was mean to be played. In this case beating the whole map without saving.

Well that's how it worked back then. Hell even in some games you had to start over if you made a single mistake. That's why games lasted longer, they were much less forgiving.

These have to be the most boomer posts I've ever seen on Doomworld. Way to miss the point and run with your own narrative holy shit

Edited February 3, 2020 by Unregistered account

[Nine Inch Heels]

I get that not being able to save and then having to restart a map from scratch sucks eventually. Doing stuff you can do easily several times over only to get another shot at a fight you don't know how to do yet just isn't very fun, and it's also not a good way to learn anything new, due to the time sink that is involved with getting back to "where you still need to learn".

 

That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea that saving anywhere and anytime is part of a game's "mechanics". It's for convenience, sure, but an integral part of a game's mechanics? I don't necessarily see it that way, because it's also part of a game's mechanics to "punish players" if they die, so these two things are always and inevitably at odds with one another. You kinda need to have consequences that players will want to avoid, if you want for progress to feel like an "accomplishment™". The question is how tolerable these consequences are to the individual, rather than what is or isn't "good game design" wrt when saving should or shouldn't be possible.

 

What is indicative of "subjectively good or bad design", however, is how much fun re-doing parts of a map is. I can forgive loosing a few minutes of progress, if doing these few minutes again is enjoyable enough. When doing something several times over isn't enjoyable at all, then I'd argue that part of the problem is that the game doesn't cater to the respective player in a manner which makes the lack of saves "sufferable".

 

When you look at games like the binding of Isaac, or enter the gungeon, where dying once means the run is "completely dead", and you consider that both games are well-received overall, there's certainly a case to be made in favour of "punitive" death mechanics, especially since both games usually take more time to "complete" than your average Doom64 map.

 

As for "savescumming", there are a few distinctions to be made from my point of view. It's one thing to save prior to a new fight you wanna figure out more efficiently, and it's another to use saves to somehow, often in rather tedious manners, make it past a hurdle in map you never even understood how to approach at all. The former isn't something I'd consider savescumming at any lengths, but the latter is something I find somewhat problematic in general. It's maybe not so much of a deal in Doom64, or most other IWAD maps out there, but the moment people use saves as a means to "brute force" their way past a problem (often instead of finding a solution, asking for advice, or lowering the difficulty - which is also part of the game's mechanics) is where I'd argue that it isn't doing anybody any good to spam saves every few seconds, or reload a mid-fight save "rapid fire" to somehow (while dying several times over every couple seconds) find the one gap that at least suggests a chance at surviving a mistake that would normally be way past the point of recovery. Point being: Saving isn't wrong, but using saves to "win" despite not doing anything close to what's required is ill-advised, because you're going through the "meat grinder" again when a similar problem occurs at a later point in the game (doubly so when the difficulty is still curving upwards). Hence my gripes with considering saves an "integral game mechanic", rather than a means to learn faster or avoid overly long and boring stretches of doing the "trivial stuff" over and over.

[ickda]

My point, why I feel that a save sector, or somthing, perhaps a number of save's- allowed in a map or somthing. 

My thoughts anyway.