OP: Making a bald statement of fact that the game is “too complicated for permadeath” put people on the defensive from the start, that was a really bad way to start your argument.
Following up with, “in order to lower the barrier to entry” wasn’t any better. An appeal to populism in one of the most niche gaming genres isn’t going to get you far.
“satisfy their masochistic desires.” was a masterstroke of self-sabotage.
Bad rhetoric aside, your requests:
Quick Save: sure, this was removed for performance reasons that have since been addressed.
Quick Load: no.
Hardcore mode: unnecessary since it’s the default.
Load last save on death: not just no but hell no.
No autosave on death: sure-ish.
In my opinion quicksave and auto-load are a blight on modern gaming, they neuter risk and make intelligent decision making pointless since it’s far easier and just as effective to just run in guns blazing and repeat until it works. It’s a cheap gimmick that feeds power fantasies and desire for invulnerability. It’s used to set up a tight action response feedback loop based on the highly cynical fear that the gamers have too short an attention span to handle a serious setback.
I have a rather higher opinion of my players, they can cope with setbacks, learn from what went wrong, and do better the next time. They can actually learn how the game works and beat it on its own terms rather than memorizing 5 minute chunks of the game and practicing it until they get it right. I take the players seriously, and they seem to be enjoying it so far.
/rant
On a more game-design-y note, permadeath is simply incompatible with quicksave/quickload. If the game is hard enough to be not boring with quicksave/quickload, it’s simply going to be impossible with permadeath. It’s hard enough to make a game this complex remotely balanced for one scenario, having both is absurd.
As KA101 pointed out though, we have no desire to fight people that want to resurrect their player or manipulate their saves and I see no reason to punitively delete the player save file on default, which was how whales set it up. My plan is to move the player save file to a graveyard, where the player is free to resurect it with some light editing and copying it back to the save directory, the thing is a text file for the most part, you can put your HP back positive, remove diseases, and teleport away from the horde that just feasted on your entrails. We’re not going to stop you, but it’s simply not supported by the game.
Scoring, I’m not even sure how that would work.
I’m all for achievements as far as neutrally observing accomplishments, and I’d like to tack one on, recording how “difficult” your starting options were for personal or public bragging rights.