[quote=“BeigeSand, post:100, topic:5464”]Opinions:
This argument is a non-starter, it’s precisely carving out what the player is and is not allowed to do that defines a game, and making that decision is one of my biggest responsibilities. “Allow all the things” is simply not an option.
Yes, it’s somewhat inaccurate to refer to all non-permadeath games as consequence free, but that also doesn’t even to start to make a case for why, in a survival game, you should be immune to not surviving. “other consequences exist” isn’t an argument against permadeath. It’s still the case that your character dying and having to start over is more or less the ultimate consequence that a game can impose, taking that off the table or making it optional changes the tone of the whole game.
That’s simply wrong, you keep insisting permadeath/non permadeath is simply a play style, it’s not, it’s a rule of the game, it’s one of the things that defines the game. Take mario, automatically assign infinite lives, and it’s no longer the same game. It’s very similar to mario, but it is in fact a different game. Similarly DDA without permadeath isn’t the same game.
It’s precisely because it happens outside the game, it makes it clear that you’re subverting the design of the game.
Except for that part where they see the option every time they look at the options menu, telling them that it’s a valid option.
Life doesn’t need to be easier when testing things, you can kill every monster in sight with a command, you can wish in unlimited weapons and ammunition, you can teleport out of danger, you can turn yourself into an effectively unkillable martial arts demigod. And finally, you can backup and restore your save, just not from within the game.
Just out of discussion:
Some have fun playing a PERFECT character, even if that means to save-scum. I put those in the category: too much WoW.
Others have fun by just playing. Just the casual player.
And others have fun by taking everything as it comes. The real players.
I think it’s fun to screw up bionic installments, put a whole science lab supplement of mutagenic serum inside the body one by one, no matter what brutal death may follow or what obscure or maybe even crazy powerful combinations of mutations you get. It must be terrifying to look at a bionic monster with 2 large horns and padded feet. Or having stockpiles over stockpiles of mea, but over night mutating into a herbivore that hates fruit, has lactose intolerance and all the other ‘good’ stuff.
The game itself becomes ‘boring’ after a while. At the point when you’re settled and nothing can stop you. Then you reach the point where there’s nothing to do anymore.
My 2 cents.
It’s not hard for the devs to make it right for everyone. Give those a quickload/quicksave that want it, give those an hardcore option that want it. All settled. It’s not a game changer, it’s just different approaches by the players. There is no how to play it ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, just play it. It’s a game, with rules … and some rules the player can change as he or she wants.
I don’t get the fuss about, seriously.
The fuss is because the game already accommodates people who don’t want to die via an easy debug menu and files you can save scum without any difficulty, yet Hyena Grin is insisting that we make it even easier, when it goes against the very fabric and goals of the game.
As Kevin put, the Roguelike argument is a red herring. It doesn’t matter about that, it’s about what the developers/community has decided the game is made up of. I’m not against a Mod though, by all means do that, but why have the dev team work on something they’re completely against?
Optional permadeath with a built in option in mainline is simply a not going to happen. Sorry Hyena Grin.
No. But a quick-load/quick-save system removes a lot more consequences than just death, and Cataclysm, as designed, has very few consequences that a quick load system doesn’t completely mitigate.
Such systems make a game into a puzzle game. And Cataclysm would be terribly as a puzzle game, in my opinion. Too much random chance, too much built around a lack of knowledge, and not nearly enough difficulty.
Here’s a question, since I don’t think you’ve mentioned it yet:
What actual benefits would players receive from such a system? What sort of player benefits from this, and how?
Perma death is not even severe in this game. You can just start with a new character and find your previous characters and their stuff, which is a huge help.
There’s no story or in-game objective or main mission other than survive, so loading a game after dying or making a mistake is just pointless in a survival game, IMO. It usually makes games get boring faster since you take away some of the challenge and the fear of taking risks.
Actually, they are. Spawning items is a readily accessible feature from within the game. A lot of work has gone into making it convenient, as well. The reason is that there are plenty devs who like to use it. There are also quite a few devs who agree with adding a savescumming option, for similar reasons. But it’s not going in because kevingranade says it won’t. In other words: The discussion in this thread is kinda pointless at this point.
Starting new character in the same world is for pussies… 
Some time ago i started to delete the world where my last character died D:
No, they aren’t.
It requires editing files, outside the game, to do, and is explicitly labelled, once enabled, as outside the game. I actually wouldn’t mind sticking a “create backup / load backup” in the debug menu. But that is a VERY different beast from the topic that has actually been discussed so far.
You seem to be conflating the tools that we use to develop the game with actual in-game mechanics.
That debug menu that you use to spawn in items? If you’re not testing a new addition to the game, you’re circumventing the usual rules of the game. It even tells you on the debug menu.
Now I’m of the opinion that one can’t really ‘cheat’ at a single player game (who’s getting cheated? the player?) but by the same token the game has a set of rules and when you bypass those rules, you’re not exactly playing the game as it’s written and thus ‘cheating’ in the common meaning of the word.
It’s not just KG that’s opposed to built-in savescumming. In case you’ve not noticed by this point, the other developers (including me) are against the inclusion of such a feature.
If you want to savescum, then do so, but don’t think that demanding it be made easier to do is going to change our minds on the topic.
Yeah, when I realized my character stumbled upon a dead character’s stuff I immediately quit that character and found and changed the setting in options.
Anyway, why don’t the people that don’t want their characters to die just create a mod in which the character cannot die.
Starting new character in the same world is for pussies… :)[/quote]
Of course it is!
I’m not being militant about preventing save restoration here, I’m in favor of both
quicksave and disabling save deletion on death by default (instead moving most recent save to a graveyard folder).
The thing I object to is integrating save restoration into the game itself.
Finally, I’d really like to hear the an answer to GlyphGryph’s question. What is the argument FOR save restoration anyway? Unless I missed it, there has been nothing specific stated on this topic as far as what it would be used for and why that would be a good thing for the game.
I strongly suspect these fall into one of:
traditional savescumming (abusing save reload to get only good outcomes out of the RNG), in which case you should just give yourself the stuff you want instead.
recovery from accidental/unfair death, which should be covered by restoring from the graveyard.
replaying long stretches of the game after a bad outcome (xcom-style savescumming), which you can support with quicksave and save backups.
recovering from a crash, which should also be covered by the graveyard.
Feel free to give a use case I haven’t thought of.
Actually, recovering from a crash should be covered by the autosave. It won’t save if it crashes, now would it? So you just reload the last autosave and go.
Thanks, but no, I get that entirely. And I’m not going to rehash what I’ve said already.
My suggestion was to have the option to not autosave on death.
You don’t even have to go into the folders to savescum in Cata, you can make a save, do something, and if it doesn’t work, just ‘End Program’ Cata and it won’t save on exit. Can jump right back in. What you can’t do, however, is predict sudden random deaths while sleeping or from falling down a hole or stepping on a landmine and blowing yourself to pieces. The game autosaving after these events doesn’t add to the game, in my opinion. In my opinion, it is forcibly subtracting from it.
What benefits would they receive?
Preserve a time investment. If you spend a lot of time on something, simply losing all of that effort is not always entertaining. Some people like to continue forward rather than restarting. They make a mistake, they learn from that mistake, and they move forward, rather than spend the next X amount of hours getting back to roughly where they were when they last died.
Lower time/learning curve. In a game with a very large amount of content and features, particularly one full of dangerous content that can easily kill the uninitiated, permadeath creates an exponential curve in how long it takes to learn the game’s various mechanics and nuances. You spend 4 hours getting to a point, you encounter something new, it kills you. You spend another four hours getting to the same point, you encounter the last thing but this time you are prepared, so you survive. Great, you feel good about it. And then you encounter something new and die. Rinse, repeat. Some people don’t enjoy that.
It allows you to more thoroughly explore the world and its content. As with many roguelikes, the nature of the game means that much of the content never gets seen by a large portion of the people who play it. Some will give up, some will get tired of it, some will never make it far into the game because they’re just not very good at it, and some will simply avoid certain content due to its high risks. And while this degree of ‘rarity’ imposed by the system has its own benefits, this rarity does not appeal to everyone.
Countering the RNG/Code. Consequences are one thing, but occasionally the game just straight up fucks you. Let’s not pretend otherwise. These moments can be very frustrating. And they often precede a long ‘vacation’ from the game, at least in my experience. Games which punish players for events that occurred through no fault of their own are generally not widely considered to be fun, whatever people here think.
What kind of player does it benefit?
People enjoy different things about games. Some people like the risk aspect of games. That is currently what Cata primarily attempts to appeal to. Other people are after exploration, crafting/building, power fantasies (say what you will about this, it’s a common thread in games for a reason), story, simple immersive experience, whatever. Some people play games on easy mode because they are more interested in the whole experience than the challenge of mastering the mechanics of the game. Some people just watch Let’s Plays and don’t even play the damn game. There is more to gaming than mastering mechanics and weighing risk. And there is more to Cataclysm, also. There is a very deep crafting/building system, a huge procedurally generated world to explore and immerse yourself in. What it really comes down to is whether or not the player is empowered to identify the things about the game that they most enjoy, or powerless in the face of a mechanic they have little control over. And in a huge, multi-faceted game which provides so many different features to explore and enjoy, it is baffling that anyone is surprised that some players may play Cataclysm primarily for those aspects and not the risk aspect - or alternatively, avoid playing it and enjoying those features because of what they perceive is a masochistic risk factor.
And while I have no doubt that someone is going to come back and try to argue that true enjoyment of some (or all) of that hinges directly on permadeath, I can preemptively demonstrate that is wrong: because I am one of those people, and I don’t give damn whether it’s permadeath or not. It does nothing for me. It is at best a fitting end for a story, and at worst an inconvenience that erodes my interest in playing. So whatever special enjoyment you get out of permadeath is simply lost in translation. The ‘risk’ feature is not part of what makes the game fun for me. It is a non-issue beyond its inconvenience. What I, personally, get out of the game, is a sense of progression. I like exploring and building and telling a story about a character. If I don’t like the way a character’s story ends, if it’s anti-climactic, then the entire thing is a waste of time.
I have played Dwarf Fortress for ages, and there has never been a point where I didn’t think permadeath (in either mode) was a needless obstruction for my enjoyment of the game. I still play it. I still play Cata. Obstacles are overcome, but they are not always enjoyable. Permadeath is not always enjoyable.
As it goes, I’ve already said that the graveyard thing is fine. I have said as much, at least twice. I don’t know why anyone would assume I am ‘insisting’ on adding something to the game. I am not insisting upon anything. I just think the arguments against an in-game option are - in my view - basically nonsense. I feel like if we are going to actively exclude a group of people, even when not excluding them would do absolutely no harm to the game that we are playing right now, then the justification needs to be pretty good. And repeatedly stating that it is the ‘core of the game’ when it’s clearly, objectively, demonstrably the core of your Cata experience and not necessarily everyone’s Cata experience, just doesn’t cut it. You are excluding play-styles that do not share your core element, because they do not share your core element. It is circular. It is nonsense.
That is why I have repeatedly asked why, why are we doing this specifically.
Ultimately, I will simply be happy to have the graveyard option for when I feel like Cata has been unduly harsh.
Holy wall of text, Batman.
Don’t read it if you don’t want to, it’s no skin off my back. I won’t be offended, promise.
Ask a question, get an answer. I put in the effort because I care.
See what I always thought that Cata was built around surviving in the apocalypse for as long as possible and therefore permadeath is kind of required. Am I wrong to think that?
I think that is a perfectly valid and well-supported reason to play the game.
Do you think that other ways of playing are necessarily invalid?