We can quibble over which was intended, but the OP clarified his position succinctly when he said this in a follow-up post:
I never said anything about making a non-perma-death style the default.
Maybe you didn’t read the follow-up post. Maybe you are interpreting the OP. That’s fine. But you’re still arguing against something which the OP is, by their own words, not suggesting. So it’s a moot point.
I’m not in favor of making save/load the default either - though I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t matter whether option A or B is the ‘default.’ Both are options. The game will play identically regardless of which is the default - what matters is what option you choose. At that point it’s a matter of, well, personal vision.
It’s fairly plain what the developers of the game see in Cataclysm. Having been the curator on large projects, I understand how easy it can be to obsess over small details and raise their importance to world-crushing status.
The notion of perma-death as a game mechanic is a sticky one. I don’t think it’s a game mechanic, I think it’s a playstyle. Gunpoint’s circuits are game mechanics. You can build a game around a playstyle, sure as you must build a game around the mechanics that feed into it. But you cannot ‘break’ a game by playing with a different playstyle. What results is a divergent experience of the game, not a broken game. When you change your playstyle you set your own rules, your own expectations, and your own definition of fun. This doesn’t break the game. You can, however, ‘break’ a game by changing the mechanics.
I can choose to play ‘ironman’ or ‘hardcore’ in any game, really. Sometimes those games offer the option to enforce that play-style, or some permutation there-in. The new Thief has the option to not allow saves inside levels. Basically making each mission its own self-contained ‘ironman’ mode. You don’t lose the entire game, but you have to restart the level. Again, that’s not a mechanic, it’s a playstyle. A mechanic would be something like the shadows reducing the AI’s ability to see you.
If I decide to play Skyrim with additional rules imposed upon myself (either through mods or my own self-imposed guidelines) then I am not playing the same Skyrim that someone else is, but my experience of Skyrim is subjectively superior to anything the original developers could have prepared in advance. There are multiple schools of thought on whether or not strictly enforcing/regulating play-styles is a good idea or a bad idea, but one thing you can definitely say about the practice of enforcing play-styles, is that it does more to serve the designer than it does to serve the player. Given that this is a labor of love, I don’t think anyone could be criticized for making exactly the game they want to make.
Diverging from the design document occurs on a regular basis in game development, and with good reason. Sometimes those ‘rules’ are arbitrary, sometimes they outline a play-style more than they outline a series of mechanics which support a play-style. Sometimes you need to let go of some of those rules because they arbitrarily restrict play-style in a way that doesn’t actually improve the game so much as they grasp to a vision. In this case the vision is essentially ‘Cataclysm is a roguelike.’ I think that’s meaningless. Cataclysm is whatever you make it to be. If you want it to have the features of a roguelike then it will have the features of a roguelike, but ‘being like a roguelike’ is not an excuse for ‘being like a roguelike.’ It’s mere circular justification. ‘It needs to be like a roguelike because it is described as a roguelike.’
It could also be a game that is very similar to a roguelike, and indeed, is identical in every way to the game it was before… with one exception; permadeath as a playstyle isn’t actively enforced. If your concern is that some things would be easier with saving/loading, welcome to every other game. Just like every other game would be much harder if you enforce an ironman play-style on it.
It’s not world-shattering, believe me. Projects have undergone much, much bigger divergences from their initial design than simply changing the way the game deals with the death event of the player character. I would argue that virtually every single game design project has gone through a much larger shift in design than what I would consider to be an overblown play-style disagreement.
My position is that enforcing play-styles is counterproductive. People will play the game the way they want to play it, given an opportunity. I think the best thing a developer can do is… let them.
… you never make a bridge “just to show off statues” … that is ridiculous man, really. 