[quote=“BeigeSand, post:130, topic:5464”]1) People like preserving their time investments.
Agreed. Maybe they should be more careful.[/quote]
This is not an argument against choosing to play without permadeath. However I do know what you are getting at; risk increases value. For some people. My point is that this isn’t true for all people, or all situations. Not everyone likes to gamble. Doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be allowed to play a game of poker without throwing in a fiver. A dyed-in-the-wool poker player would probably think they weren’t getting the real poker experience without the risk. But if the ‘real poker experience’ is unpleasant for someone, why would they want it? Maybe a friendly game of cards with some friends is more than enough for them. That’s sort of my point. ‘Value’ changes depending on the scarcity of time, money, etc. And once the value of time exceeds the value of the gameplay, the ‘risk’ factor just makes it unpleasant.
2) Permadeath creates a long learning curve/ the absence of it promotes a smaller one.
That's the beautiful thing about cataclysm, for all it's difficulty, it is extremely fair to the player...
I am not arguing that this can’t go both ways. I am by no means saying that the longer learning curve doesn’t directly contribute to some people’s enjoyment of the game. What I am saying, however, is that it can take away from the enjoyment of the game as well. That is the circumstance I am speaking on.
3) allows you to explore the world and content more
This time you didn't actually explain how the ability to reload/save would accomplish that, and I personally am not seeing it.
A significant amount of content in Cata is more or less content locked. You really can't experience portions of it without spending time in the game raising skills, getting good gear, etc. It's not like you can walk out of the emergency bunker and into any area of the game and expect to survive more than a few turns. This does get a little muddy, of course, since you can preserve your world (as you will talk of later), so in theory this one is a bit grey. But suffice to say, you do have to survive for some variable non-zero period of time before you can explore everything that Cata has to offer. And if you have trouble surviving that long, then you will have difficulty exploring everything you want to explore.
4) Not having absolute power irritates you
What's life / games without a little bit of chaos? And aside from a very few (rare) occurrences, (JABBERWOCKS) the game doesn't really just straight up instakill you.
A smoker murdering you in your sleep by stopping outside your shelter. Granted I think they fixed that one, but suffice to say, these things do crop up. If you fall down a hole into a cave, as far as I am aware, you are just dead. I think you need a rope to get up. Frankly I've only fallen into one and had no rope and just ended up starting over.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone is against a little chaos, but random events that undo hours, even days worth of work, are not a light smattering of the unexpected. Some people quickload a game every time they don’t perform something perfectly. That’s fine, I think that’s perfectly fine. Some people quickload when circumstances are bad enough that they’ve lost some progress. That’s fine too. Some people quickload when they think that their circumstances are likely to end in their death inevitably. Totally fine. But all I am advocating is the sensibility of an option for the game to not tell me that I’m done playing a character, when I’m not done playing a character.
The rest) People enjoy different aspects of the game, let them play it how they want.
Definitely, the whole reason I started playing cataclysm was because I was so enthralled by the crafting system..... If you truly feel that dying in an anticlimactic way makes everything a giant waste of time, there's not much I can do to argue that point, but I feel like debug mode would help you much more than the save system you are talking about.
All I can say in response to that, is ‘What if you simply didn’t have the time to play 17 characters to get to that point?’ How much extra time do you suppose it took to accomplish one personal goal? Maybe it was a lot, maybe not that much. But my point is, that time might have been worth it to you, but it’s not going to be worth it to everyone. And playing on the same world may not appeal to someone for a different set of reasons. I always regen a new world for every character, myself, because the character’s story and the world are tied together. Starting over again breaks the continuity of that story. I’d rather just come up with a new character in a new world. That’s just me.
One thing I want to point out is that I understand all of these arguments because on some level I agree with them. This is, in part, a devil’s advocate argument because even in other games I occasionally impose upon myself an ironman rule. Not very often, but sometimes. On a fundamental level I enjoy risk and it can be a useful one-off storytelling tool. What I don’t like, is a game essentially forcing me to play that way, when there’s not (in my opinion) a good reason for it to do so.
Also, thank you for your well thought out response. I appreciate the actual effort to engage on this stuff.
