Thanks, but no, I get that entirely. And I’m not going to rehash what I’ve said already.
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:105, topic:5464”]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?[/quote]
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
