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Memfis

Explain the appeal of playing with saves

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How can some people enjoy playing Doom with saves? If after death you can just load a savegame and instantly retry the same fight, that pretty much means that you can't lose and there's nothing to worry about. Where is the fun then? I'm sorry if this sounds like a crude attack on "savers", that's not the intent. I'm just genuinely curious.

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Depends on level size, on how often you save, and on how often you reload.

If you save every five seconds and reload every time you take a hit, then yeah there's no much challenge.

But if you're playing through a level that takes over an hour to complete and you get killed midway through, skipping a replay of the previous 30 minutes seem fair.

Also for reloading it tends to depend on how you die. You get killed by hitscanner attrition, maybe it's better to retry from the start, see if you can't play a bit better, catch the zombies before they shoot you, better use cover, etc. Die because a you got caught on a candelabra while circlestrafing a cyberdemon and its rocket sent you to an inescapable acid pit, maybe just reload from the start of the cyberdemon fight.

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Fun is tied with challenge and excitement, but also with comfort. Having to replay a part of the map after screwing up is uncomfortable. From this point of view, it's a good thing that any player can decide how often to save / reload, to have a comfortable play with appropriate challenge and appropriate punishment for failing. Saving allows you to set your own standard of this punishment (and partially also the challenge, due to gaining foreknowledge for the next try), while difficulty settings allow you to directly modify the challenge itself.

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scifista42 said:

Having to replay a part of the map after screwing up is uncomfortable.


This, especially if you haven't kept saving regularly and have to replay 5-10 minutes, if not more.

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Savescumming is for scrubs, yes, but when it comes to longer levels with multiple instances of ridiculous/tedious battles of attrition lasting 10+ minutes each then there is no fucking way that you'll stop me from saving progress after each one.

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The first version of Doom I had was on the Atari Jaguar where the game saved the level you are upto but not your health, weapons etc so if you died or quit the next time you played would be a pistol start.

This seemed like just the right ratio of preserving a challenge and punishment for failure without the frustration and time consumption of re-covering too much old ground and I still sometimes play this way.

Problem is, PWADs are almost always much harder than the original Doom and in many cases the levels are longer as well, which throws the ratio out. In these instances I re-balance by allowing myself mid level saves such as after keys, locked doors or particularly tough fights.

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Well generally speaking, I only use saves for when I'm playing megawads. I rarely, say, sit down and play through 30+ levels all in a single sitting (actually these days, I've gotten lazy and rarely make it through 30+ levels in general - hell I've been sitting at MAP09 of a vanilla Doom II runthrough I recently attempted for a long time). But I almost never save within a level.

There is one exception, though - if a level is particularly long, and I keep dying at the same spot, I'll save there and I don't think that's a huge deal. If I can consistently get to a certain spot, I don't feel the need to have to replay that part of the level over and over again just to get another chance at completing it. I mean after a while, if you know you can beat half the level with no problem, that half becomes tedious - there's no fun in having to repeat it if there's no challenge to it. So yeah, I'll save it at the spot where the challenge actually starts. Now it's very rarely that I'll do that, but I think it's totally justified if I've played through several times without issue.

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i imagine a lot of mappers test/balance their maps for saves too, when i'm making a longer level i dont expect the player to play through the entire thing after every death

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Saving during mid-level is bland but I'm ok with it when quitting a 32-level wad.

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ASD said:

Saving during mid-level is bland but I'm ok with it when quitting a 32-level wad.

Hahaha, yes, this of course. :)

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Beats having to restart a hour-long map because you screwed up at minute 37 or something.

It's all about finding a balance between COMPET-N runs (no saves by definition) and scum saving (which is what you probably had in mind).

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Dicktraps. Don't get me wrong, they're valid from a certain "philosophical" perspective and I can enjoy dying on them when it's entertaining enough, but if I just repeatedly lose all my progress to unfair scenarios that require preknowledge, I'm gonna start saving before entering a room with a key. I don't play Doom to emulate stupid console games based on memorization and sequence training. (*hides the rocketjumping wads*)

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Memfis said:

How can some people enjoy playing Doom with saves? If after death you can just load a savegame and instantly retry the same fight, that pretty much means that you can't lose and there's nothing to worry about. Where is the fun then? I'm sorry if this sounds like a crude attack on "savers", that's not the intent. I'm just genuinely curious.


Saving isn't just for screw-ups. Not all of us have the time to play through a big multi-level WAD in one sitting. This allows us to come back to the game later.

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ASD said:

Saving during mid-level is bland but I'm ok with it when quitting a 32-level wad.


What if the level is Memorial.wad, the single map that is literally made by pasting all 32 levels of Doom II into a single map?

What if it's a giant level that easily takes over an hour to complete, like Ogdoad or Vrack2? Why is it more acceptable to save once you reach MAP06 of Scimitar after playing for about 20 minutes, but not after playing for 50 minutes of playing ZDCMP2?

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also: i have more fun when i'm playing with saves, so i do it for my own enjoyment. if i'm streaming i'll save more to make it less boring for other people i guess

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ETTiNGRiNDER said:

IMO, if a level is too big to be reasonably completable without saves, it's too damn big.

I, for example, don't think so. I can enjoy playing very long levels too. I admit, I'm not always in a mood for them. But otherwise, I don't take length as a criterion of enjoyability for itself. The map just should be entertaining (in gameplay, etc.) for most of the time to be worth it. I mean, preferably.

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Admittedly, I'm a bit guilty of save scumming when playing a new map, but I feel it's justified as it's a feature of the game.

I never save more than once when I've played through it, though.

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Dave The Daring said:

I'll give up my right to save scum when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!


And then you'd simply restore anyway ;-)

On a more related note, in vanilla Doom saving had an inherent "scumming" element to it, as monsters lost their targets and stopped chasing after the player (unless they were facing you when you saved). So simply by saving & reloading a game, you "calmed down" most of the monsters. That's an obvious gameplay manipulation.

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Hmm, then how about a map where there are way too many monsters to fight them, so your only hope to get through is by abusing that vanilla bug? Could be interesting, some very unique situations would be possible.

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It's just a matter of what's fun for me, coupled with time constraints. I'm the guy who takes 15 minutes on an IWAD map because I want to check every nook and cranny for secrets and items, etc., and with all these WADs to play, I simply don't have the time to replay 10-20 minutes of level because I died halfway in. That's just not fun for me. I try to treat it like a checkpoint system, where I'll save upon clearing a packed room, or just before entering a suspicious area. (Slaughtermaps are a completely different beast, where I have no problem saving any moment I can catch my breath.) What I don't do, though, is reload a save after I take major damage, even if it leaves me close to death. That's just cheating. :)

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Maes said:

So simply by saving & reloading a game, you "calmed down" most of the monsters. That's an obvious gameplay manipulation.


With a simple comparability switch, this can be prevented, providing a true resume to gameplay.

Of course, that's assuming you're using a source port, but I don't think something that strict would be straying away from 'vanilla' play otherwise.

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Fwiw, you can replay or warp to any map you want without saving, so you can't really lose that way either.

out of personal experience, I've spent the last 3 years not saving a single game. I pistol start everything unless I lived through the previous level and carry my weapons over. Then if I die I restart that level from a pistol start.

to be frank, I've been seriously considering loading and saving again because I unfortunately miss out on a lot of wads. Many of the slaughter fest wads for example, haven't been played by me beyond the starting room. Speed of Doom and Plutonia Revisited are a bit of a chore sometimes. Just recently I started replaying memento mori without saves, retrying each map from pistol start until I beat it, and in four days, with an average of 3hours of game play a day, I've only made it to map28. This could have been reduced to a single evening with saves because I wouldn't have to keep retrying the easy parts just to get to the parts that were killing me.

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I use saves all the time: for casual playing, for map testing, and for preparing to record a demo. Pretty much the only time I don't use saves is while recording demos.

Gez said:

What if it's a giant level that easily takes over an hour to complete, like Ogdoad or Vrack2?

vrack2 only takes 22 mins to max :)

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I've never understood why using saves is seen as wrong, or cheating, when it has been specifically built into the game. I don't see a doom map as an overall challenge, I see it as a collection of challenges, and if I've played the first half of the map without dying then I don't see why I should have to do it again because of something that happens in the second half. I guess there is also the tactical element of avoiding a bad save, but in the end doom is all about setting your own difficulty. If you are playing a hard map then how well you do is judged on the number of deaths rather than the number of saves, and you are only competing against your own abilities so there is no real reason to insist on completing any map with zero deaths or not at all. Because then there will be maps that you will never be able to beat, and so will never play.

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40oz said:

Fwiw, you can replay or warp to any map you want without saving, so you can't really lose that way either.


But pistol starts, just like COMPET-N style play or "first time, no death" runs are not for everyone.

Some maps are even designed to be part of a set, where you're supposed to carry ammo and even weapons and ammo from previous ones.

Of course, since other than those elements Doom doesn't have a true inventory system, any "story" that's supposed to encourage the player to go through a set of maps in one go will be pretty weak. Only Doom 64, out of the "official" Dooms, had some incentive (finding the pieces of the Unmaker).

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Pwning the "Inferno" boss in five seconds with the BFG is an incentive, I think. :p

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To play devil's avocado: I'd played with saves until I read a thread on here several years ago, in which myk was discussing not saving. Anyway, I gave it go, and found that the experience of playing DOOM became markedly more engrossing for me; more concentration required, more thought put into decisions, and more tension/intensity. I don't tend to mind when a late death forces me to start again - I get to know maps better that way. It runs the risk of being tiresome only when the map is such that getting back to the point where I died requires playing in exactly the same way - I like to alternate play-styles with deaths, or take different routes, or handle things in different ways, but if there's only one sensible way of playing the map then having to do it again can be a chore (though not always). I certainly don't think that saving = cheating, or anything silly like that, I just find it more fun when I don't save.

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I've never understood why using saves is seen as wrong, or cheating, when it has been specifically built into the game. I don't see a doom map as an overall challenge, I see it as a collection of challenges, and if I've played the first half of the map without dying then I don't see why I should have to do it again because of something that happens in the second half. I guess there is also the tactical element of avoiding a bad save, but in the end doom is all about setting your own difficulty. If you are playing a hard map then how well you do is judged on the number of deaths rather than the number of saves, and you are only competing against your own abilities so there is no real reason to insist on completing any map with zero deaths or not at all. Because then there will be maps that you will never be able to beat, and so will never play.


It seems strange to me to insist it's not a competition while on the other hand expressing concern when other people see the practice as cheating. Surely if you only care about your own experience in a vacuum, then it shouldn't bother you one bit what the rest of the world thinks about it.

On the other hand, for those who do care about performance on a global scale, if nothing else as an element for discussion, then limitless saving obviously poses problem, as the ability to rewind time infinitely and inch your way to progress step by step trivializes just about any challenge; a point of view expressed in this topic with the numerous distinctions made between savescumming and "reasonable" checkpointing.

Of course, even said "sensible" checkpointing is still widely different from player to player. Some people will save every minute. Some people will only save twice in a thirty minute map. It doesn't always work when you're trying to make comparisons as objective as possible.

Frankly, while I can't speak for you personally, most of the time I don't think the attitude you express is so much a lack of understanding as a purposeful refusal to acknowledge that different perception. Person A speaks for himself and says X is wrong. Person B gets offended because he does X and reacts stubbornly. Misplaced gamer pride serves no purpose. I have fun playing MOBAs or deathmatch shooters against bots and I don't see the point in pretending I "don't get it" when people call playing against bots retarded. They're getting different things from the game than I am. Nothing wrong with that.

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