Take these benches in FF7 Remake. They were clearly meant to be Save stations, they even have the original FF7 save icon on them. But actually you can save anywhere in FF7R with no penalty. You can basically savescum the game. The same thing happens in RE4 Remake - no typewriter ink so you can basically save whenever even on hard mode. Emulated games are the same with Savestates. Are gamedevs really so afraid of offering players a challenge that the thought of playera having checkpoints is alien to them?
>The same thing happens in RE4 Remake - no typewriter ink so you can basically save whenever even on hard mode
damn just like a certain game I can't remember, oh yeah, the original RE4
You know what OP meant.
Not even OP knows what OP meant
Save stations is like stamina or encumbrance, everyone hates it but they are needed for a balanced and enjoyable game. It's like how everyone b***hes about the ink ribbons or type writers being removed just because they were a staple in early RE games but if they were put in today people would b***h about that
>you'll enjoy it more if we include something you hate
You're moronic.
Modern devs forgot that saving wasn't just a convenience feature but an actual part of balancing the game's challenge and difficulty. What they don't seem to realize is that with modern consoles you can just let the player SUSPEND their game whenever they want, which offers the same exact convenience WITHOUT messing up any balance in challenge.
a lot of devs are dogshit at determining when a good pace is.
Also in today's culture, people prefer to not waste their time.
>power goes out
sorry bro
>jrpg
>challenge
>difficulty
Nothing challenging about having to slog through going from point A to point B to read some meaningless dialogue if you for some moronic reason forget to save before turning your game off.
If you try and punish the player by making saving a frick game progress as part of difficulty you are a fricking moron. Go back to playing your archiac NES shit you fricking moron. I just want to save my fricking game and go to sleep so I can pick it up back tomorrow, I don't want to keep dying just to do that.
NES didnt have saves you low attentionspan homosexual lmao
Kingdom Hearts had save stations that healed you. Its a long running Nomura thing. Its clear the benches were also meant as save stations as well but it was removed from the game by zoomer devs who got mad at having to redo a section they failed at.
>Its clear the benches were also meant as save stations as well but it was removed from the game by zoomer devs who got mad at having to redo a section they failed at.
But you get to re-match anything you die to right off the bat. There's no "re-doing sections" at all.
lol FF7 wasn't hard, 99% of JRPGs aren't hard.
and those that are hard, arent really hard but they are just level checks, basically you have to grind in order to proceed since the game is so simple that you dont have viable strategies to beat it low level
yeah im looking at you fricking lunar 1, i hated the swamp boss shit
All the hard ones were made in the 80s
and they suck
>The game isnt hard
>Thats why I need to be able to save anywhere
Actual toddler logic
Unerrail is an example that turns this on its head, the dev metagames around players savescumming and every encounter becomes kinda bullshit without the handful of builds he feels are acceptable
Original re4 didn't have typewriter ink.
You can save anywhere on the map screen in FF7.
Resident Evil 4 never had limited saves.
At least play the games you're talking about you braindead moron.
>You can save anywhere on the map screen in FF7
Yes, on the OVERWORLD MAP. Not in any actual locations dumbass. You need to play the games first.
Checkpoints were an tech limitation in bygone ages. It's actually pretty non-negligible to recreate a complex save state when you're limited to 8 bytes (the average size of a PS1 save file). Now a days, you can just write -everything- to a file with no problem, so devs don't stress them as much. Limited checkpoints for gameplay reasons though is something I think more games could leverage to create intentional tension in a game, but I can't say I miss the days of a 10 minute cut scene before a boss fight that you'd have to rewatch if you lost.
>8 bytes (the average size of a PS1 save file)
Kilobytes, my good anon.
forgive me, I just did a quick google search for the number
> Each slot had a size of 0x2000 bytes, and the save file had a header of 0x84 bytes, so the total file size of a single-slot save file was 0x2084 bytes (8.324 bytes)
point stands though: "ridiculously small by today's standards"
Because autosave is the norm for the past 15 years at least. Pretty much ever since consoles always had hard drives to save to.
Being able to save anywhere is a modern convenience. The benches are a way to replenish your hp and mp. In hard mode they are a godsend.
OP probably doesn't look beyond surface level stuff so he misses the details like this
good thing OP will never design or have a hand in making a video game
>In hard mode they are a godsend.
In hard mode they only restore HP. The only thing that restores MP in hard mode is certain abilities like MP drain and finishing the chapter.
Hard mode was so fricking close to being good but they decided to not let you use the 99 ethers you didn't use in normal.
I really liked the hard mode. I was shocked how good it was.
>This casual Black person is complaining about a hard mode being hard.
>I would bet he has not even beaten Wiess.
If i had my want the 7R hard mode would have been the normal mode and Normal would be renamed Games Journalist mode.
>>I would bet he has not even beaten Wiess.
Yeah I didn't buy the DLC, is that gunna be the hill you die on, moron? If it matters to you I got the gotterdammerung in the base game.
>Admits to not mastering the game.
>Bitches about one of the mecanics that makes hard mode hard.
>If it matters to you I got the gotterdammerung in the base game.
Looking at your sperging, i am going to press a big fricking X to doubt over that claim. You sound like the unskilled Games Journalist Dean Takahashi with your b***hing.
Damn dude you really just shit and pissed your pants because of a small complaint. Is squeenix paying you, Black person?
Hard mode only seems moronic at first but its actually great that you cant use items. I'm very surprised Square Enix of all companies made a great hard mode.
Not everyone is an able-bodied cisgender white man. Save stations are exclusionary of black, brown, poor, and disabled folks who don't have the time or attention to remember to save.
>TFW all of Undertale's praise revolved around save points actually being important
You may be onto something here OP
I don't understand what people see in Undertales story, its kinda trash.
How about the fact no other game has done a story like it, ever? No game used saving or pacifism to change outcomes
MGS3
MGS3 doesn't acknowledge saving dummy.
if you need characters to literally talk about the concept of saving in-universe, then mgs1/2
"Psycho Mantis mentions your PS1 memory card" is not the same as "the save and load function is an in universe property".
>No game used saving or pacifism to change outcomes
Probably not the thing you're looking for but saving and pacifism most definitely affect the outcome in the metal gear franchise, in that how often you save and how many people you kill affects your foxhound ranking.
NTA but Undertale seems to have taken some understanding into the concept of a player having the ability to rewind and alter time. Making it a canonical power, instead of a wacky videogame quirk, had its upsides.
Undertale is basically a webcomic, the gameplay is a formality and the actual appeal is the character dialogue and drama.
The gameplay was kino too though?
no that doesn't count because I have a bias against undertale.
>Undertale is basically a webcomic
i kinda hate that i can't entirely dispute that outside of pointing at the like, maybe 3 fights that are actually somewhat difficult.
yeah yeah yeah limited saves whatever that's nice and all
but you know what's a real frickin problem? some of these rpgmaker h-games that that try to do be 'oldschool' with this locational save stuff, but it becomes supreme bullshit when the game is also both incredibly grindy AS WELL AS unstable, so if you mashing Z too fast you have a good chance of crashing the frickin game, and you need to kill a hundred random encounter goblins outside of town to get enough skill points to unlock the next skill; that shit is infuriating. half the time enough to make me drop it after I lose 15-20 minutes of grind to a crash and the rest of the game wasn't that good, or to actually 'mod' in (or rather 'flag' save enabled) the ability to save anywhere
never really had this problem with standard production value games, but this shit is annoyingly common and absolutely rage inducing with a lot of hrpgm games that try to do this 'cannot save anywhere' shit. and it's a purely stylistic choice, I've fricking used rpgm, you need to intentionally disable the ability to save everywhere, and most of the frickers that do it are too lazy to even remove the save option from the menu so it's just always there and greyed out and you can only actually save by talking to crystals.
Savepoints are a hold over bandage when games were still designed like arcade games.
Which were designed to frick you and make you spend money.
You're an idiot if you think save points are great design
>Are gamedevs really so afraid of offering players a challenge
I feel like you're conflating real challenge with artificial challenge.
Take FF7R as an example. If you fail an encounter you can start that encounter over right from the start of said encounter. Would forcing the player to backtrack since the last "checkpoint" just so they can fight the boss again be a "challenge"? No. That's just artificial timegates and otherwise meaningless punishment that doesn't provide the player with anything meaningful.
Most awful checkpoints of the past were built around
>arcade games and eating quarters
or
>memory issues with games requiring memory cards to save
There's literally no reason for games now to not be riddled with checkpoints so that if you fail something, you can get right back into the action.
People seem rather protective of the Souls games with their bonfires etc. that make you walk minutes at worst back to the boss you died on, instead of next to the boss. Why?
>that make you walk minutes
Maybe the original ones. The majority of the more recent souls games usually have a bonfire pretty close to the boss or they have shortcuts going right from the boss back to a bonfire.
Usually once you know the route from the closest bonfire to the boss, you can just skip all the enemies and sprint back there fairly easily.
does any of them taking minutes actually if you run? wasn't the longest bonfire to boss run like 1:30ish and it was midir in DS3
i can't think of any checkpoints over 60 seconds off the top of my head unless you are going slow on purpose
Right off the top of my head, the site of grace right before you fight the dog in the magic school in ER
I guess it's a minute if you run past everyone, but if you fight everyone it's easily 5 minutes
I was assuming there's minutes of difference between a speedrunner / someone who knows the optimal path vs. a casual player possibly playing for the first time
>reddit morons who like to feel "special" make a big deal out of their shit game having artificial difficulty
Whoa, no way
The entire game is built around it. You gain souls on the way to the boss meaning you increasingly have more and more incentive to go back to fight it without fricking up. Saving anywhere removes this entire pressure.
>Would forcing the player to backtrack since the last "checkpoint" just so they can fight the boss again be a "challenge"? No. That's just artificial timegates and otherwise meaningless punishment that doesn't provide the player with anything meaningful.
play dark souls.
or ninja gaiden.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying it doesn't add any additional challenge like OP is implying.
once you die once or twcie in dark souls, you already master the challenge and just repeat meaningless bullshit until you get to the boss again.
This. Fighting the boss is the challenge. Getting to them when you die is just busywork.
Resource management and attrition is one of the main challenges of rpgs. Or it was, until they fricking murdered them to make moronic movie game shit.
>Resource management and attrition is one of the main challenges of rpgs.
Maybe for roguelikes, everything else has always been a boring back and forth to base to refuel and then slog through boring encounters that were only there to burn your fuel.
Thankfully modern resource management philosophy is about the actual fights instead of how many potions you bought.
>Resource management and attrition is one of the main challenges of rpgs
I dunno. I get what you're trying to say but that just hasn't ever really been the case in JRPGs. Or at least any that I can think of. Almost every one (except some with weird scaling like FF8 or Last Remnant) can just be solved through attrition. Resource management doesn't mean much when you can spend 4 hours killing a bunch of goblins so you can buy copious amounts of potions / ethers / etc.
>savescum
Literally only low IQ subhuman morons use this phrase
each time i replay a fallout/elder scrolls game the number of saves easily goes into the thousands
>Why is saving so cheap in modern vidya?
Because modern day target audience of the AAA vidya is the ADHD casual crowds who think that getting punished for poor performance or having to plan your saves = bad thing.
These entitled, noisy children think that the devs owe them the full experience with no stops or penalty.
It's the same crowd who HATES exploration (cries about "muh backtracking!") and replay value ("lol why'd u play same gaem twice?? :^)")
There's only a few select games that benefit from a selective save system, usually survival horror game or something like Hitman.
If game doesn't have quick save and quick load button it's a shit game. This has been the case for 25+ years now.
No, running 10 minutes from the "bonfire" or "bench" or "typewriter" is not a "challenge" it's a waste of time, consolekiddy.
Nier Automata did it the right way.
Dead Rising did it best
Where you don't save for 2 hours because there is 0 challenge and it autosaves at story points but then gives you a game over in a dialogue choice?
Difficulty via tedium has never been a good thing
FF was never challenging, save points were always just lazy and outdated tech, SaGa let you save anywhere since the fricking GB and it's on another level of both complexity and challenge compared to FF, which is precisely why they want you to save anywhere.
Save anywhere is a design decision that is largely tied to complex games having a lot more variables and bug potential, so you could save anywhere, anytime to mitigate the effects of some bugs, savescumming is largely a meme and only really a thing in very old CRPGs if you wanted to metagame and force dice rolls, something FF never had anyway.
>modern Ganker defends savestates
its over for this board
I understand what you mean, but there arent many games that actually do something with teh save stations as part of the gameplay instead of just being "save stations".
For example, fromsoft actually did something with that and created limited "save points" where going back to the boss or moving around is part of the experience.
My point is that: if FFVII remake used the same save points system as the original, or viceversa, you dont really change anything other than wasting your time doing something you did before. They dont take this save points IN the gameplay, they are not really safe heavens because theres no much danger anyway.
FF7R did use the save benches as a part of the gameplay, it just only matters on the Hard difficulty that's unlocked after beating the game.
It doesn't allow you to use consumables so it becomes more similar to a souls game where you're going from bench to bench as your only source of healing (once you run out of MP that is).
thanks for reminding me to replay FF7R on hard mode, normal was already difficult near the end
I rarely ever bother to replay games in hard mode but FF7 remake was fun as it was a very different experience from normal mode due to no way to regen mp in a chapter so it requires more planning so I had to use materia I didnt use in normal mode
Because it was my first ever final fantasy game, i had no idea how difficult it was meant to be, i often heard people say the final bosses of say, ffx took them 5 hours.
I was surprised the game is harder than some but it teaches you very very slowly how to do things, they are good at that, and i felt i wanted to try hard mode after being confident with the materia and battle mechanics
Copying and inputting a save password in Metroid was harder than starting a new game.
fixed savepoints were always just a technical feature, same reason they would often fully heal you. save files on old games like ff7 were just a text file with all the relevent values that the game then uses to recreate where you were/what you had in the game instead of a true save-state. by having a limited number of places you can possibly be in they can keep the number of values the game has to keep track of down, which is handy when you can fit like 10 saves max on a ps1 memory card
any sense of challenge that came from having to go through large chunks of the game again on a game over was just a side effect, and so many developers feel like there's no reason to artificially design a game to recreate this style when it takes more work and "I can't believe I have to do all this shit again" was one of the biggest complaints people had about later SD era jrpgs like persona 4
>fixed savepoints were always just a technical feature
No they weren't "always" just a technical feature. Games as early as Fallout 1 allowed you to save anywhere. Savescumming is objectively bad game design and kills a game's challenge and replayability. An area full of hard enemies? Fluke one group then save scum. Fluke another group then savescum. Fluke a third group then savescum. You have to make a really hard moral choice? Its ok, just savescum before the choice so you can see what happens if you picked option B. Its outright bad game design.
>Games as early as Fallout 1
which was a PC game that didn't have to care about how big your save file was, unlike ff7 or resident evil like the OP mentioned that were both PS1 games were memory was a premium
Hard mode was actually pretty hard in FF7 remake as you dont regen mp and cant use items
People need to wagecuck more and more these days which is why they need to be able to save anytime they want so they can work for their israelite boss.
>long dungeon without save points
>game crashes during the boss
>have to redo the entire dungeon
Ah, yes. This is a very challenging video game very fun challenge I will feel rewarded for overcoming this challenge.
how many times this actually happened to you, Black person?
It isn't usually a whole dungeon's worth of progress but it's happened enough for me to be mad about it.
People cry a lot if you have save points or require a save resource based on KCD's reception.
There was never a need to force save limitations onto players. It's always been a deliberate decision by the developers to shape how people play the game.
Limited saves are just a crux for lazy developers. Rather than produce more content, they artificially increase the playtime by making the player repeat the same stuff again upon death. It's why speedruns of older games (where people never die) are extremely short.
This. I also know some friends who constantly make up excuses why they keep restarting very long games over and over again until they get bored of replaying the first 5 hour stretch and drop the game entirely.
Nah. Its good game design. Bad game design is letting the player bypass all sense of danger or challenge. Thats bad game design.
naaaahhh man you're just a b***hy child.
Games need to be 100 hour amusement park attractions you stumble through ass first
Because limiting saves is one of the least fun things in video games, and everybody with some amount of sense understands that what you gain from it isn't worth the cost.
>Because limiting saves is one of the least fun things in video games,
You can challenge the player plenty without resorting to limited saves. On top of that, its entirely up to the player when and how often they save, so its on you if you end up savescumming.
>b-but they shouldn't be able to!
You're not the one playing, the frick do you care?
That bench is a good example of why FF7 Remake is fricking awful
Its great and made perfect sense as a savepoint. Theyre closer to each other than bonfires/grace is Dark Souls or Elden Ring.
>The same thing happens in RE4 Remake
It's actually more restrictive than RE4 original because in original autosaves still existed in Pro. There is no ink ribbon mechanic in RE4 in any of the versions anyways.
Because i want to drop out of the game whenever i wish. I appreciate the feature.
back in the day it wasn't unheard of to play a single game for 6 months or more. A game had to have artificial difficulty built into it. That's why adventure games existed and were so prominent on PC. Games were expensive and a lot less accessible. Now you've got thousands of games you can play on almost any device. Respecting your time is just common sense nowadays. If it's a game I really like (Yakuza) then I don't mind having to use a payphone to save. but not for some worthless cash grab like FF7R
>If it's a game I really like (Yakuza)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
triggered.
No player should be left behind, this is the modern aaa game design philosophy. Save point were restrictive, added some tension and forced the player to use brain