"It’s time to accept save scumming as the best way to play RPGs"

[kane_magus]

The page/tab HTML title for this article (as well as the headline displayed in the Google News app, where I first saw it) is "Baldur’s Gate 3 players are save scumming, which I always do in RPGs," and that is actually more accurate to the gist of the article, which is essentially, "Yes, I save and reload when I get bad outcomes I don't like in games such as BG3 and Disco Elysium[1], and that's okay. I'm tired of being shunned for doing so, and you shouldn't feel ashamed if you do the same, either." I don't agree with the assertion in the headline that it is the "best way" to play RPGs and that we have to "accept" it, but I absolutely do agree with the main thrust of what the article itself under that headline actually said. (And that's not even the first article on Polygon alone about save scumming.)

So, of course, obviously, half or more of the comments under the article are just more or less verbose variations of "buhbuhbuhbut yOu'Re DoInG iT wRoNg!!!1!!1`!!~!"

Fuck off. I will save scum all day if the alternative is having to stick with a shitty result thanks to a shitty random number generator arbitrarily deciding "oh, but nah, actually." But even beyond that, hell, I will even save scum a Mario or Metroid or Zelda or similar game that doesn't normally even allow for save scumming, if I happen to be playing that shit on an emulator or something that has save states. And for anyone whose fingers may curl into fists of rage regarding any part of the previous sentence, they can kiss my ass.

Oh, and FYI, the term "save scumming" originally came from my most favoritest genre of all time ever: roguelikes. The first of those games like Rogue and Nethack and such were ones that were intended to be played as "do a run->die/win->start over from the very beginning, regardless." The only time you were allowed to save the game was when you quit out of it entirely. So, it was considered by some to be "scummy" if you exploited the quit-save to prevent yourself from dying in that type of game, and then the term just started being applied to all games in general, and it got mutated to mean, simply, "frequently saving and loading, before and after every decision or event or combat in a game."

In any case, the big brouhaha over the whole thing is super dumb. Play games however you fucking want to play them. (Unless you're playing a multiplayer game in which your "lulzy" shit actually does affect other people. In that case, you can eat shit and die, for all I care. Of course, that's why I almost never play multiplayer games anymore. And that whole digression is mostly irrelevant to the topic of save scumming, regardless. *shrug*)

[1] - It's just that Disco Elysium regularly goes out of its way to make even the "wrong" or "failed" results equally/more entertaining as/than the "right" or "successful" ones. Sure, you definitely can still save scum in that game, though. I did, on occasion, though not as much as I have in other games.

Comments

[goldpseudo]

To be fair, savescumming is a pretty shitty way to play roguelikes since the whole point of roguelikes is to throw like _everything_ to the whims of the RNG. I mean, yeah, play your games however you like, but if you don't want to deal with the vagaries of the RNG then roguelikes are probably just not the games you want to be playing in the first place.

However with most games, especially RPGs, if your player is ending up unsatisfied while playing the game _exactly as it's designed to be played_, that's just bad game design. Know your audience, game.

[kane_magus]

It's weird because, on the one hand, I kind of do want to agree with saying what's even the point of playing a game like Rogue or whatever if they're just going to save scum it. But, on the other hand, it does me no harm whatsoever if, instead of going to the trouble of backing up and scumming a quit-save, they instead just wanted to use a trainer/editor/cheat program to give themselves infinite health or attack skill or whatever to prevent dying in the first place, either. If it's not a multiplayer game in which their playstyle (or lack thereof) is directly affecting me, then I don't care how they play it.

The complaints I've seen about Baldur's Gate 3 and similar games, as far back as the original Baldur's Gate or even before, is mostly about the RNG and how it makes you fail things, mainly combat but also dialogue skill checks and such, at which your characters should, realistically, have little to no trouble succeeding. I can definitely see why people (including myself) feel the need to save scum in such games, because it's intensely frustrating to be playing such a game and then, say, having your highly trained warrior killed by a level 1 goblin or whatever, simply because you had the really bad luck of your warrior missing five swings in a row while the goblin got five crits in a row, all because the RNG decided that's how things were going to play out in that particular instance.

It's another reason I like the way Disco Elysium handles things, because in that game not only does it eschew traditional RPG combat entirely and handle everything through the dialogue system, it also establishes from the very start that your player character, regardless of whatever skills you may give him during character creation, is an utter mess of a guy. As such, it's more believable that he's likely not going to necessarily succeed at everything he tries. Not to mention that it's probably going to be really funny when he does fail. (And yet, even then, I still found myself save scumming in DE occasionally, which is a bit more tedious to do in DE than it is in BG3 since BG3, apparently, allows you to save even in the middle of dialogue, which DE doesn't.)