Can a game with unlimited quicksaves ever be considered difficult?

If I scum save too much in a game I sometimes feel the urge to quickload whenever I fuck up in real life. Is it autism?

Difficult? No.
Frustrating? Yes.

Not having to replay a bunch of shit when you die means you're actually allowed to make the game harder so long as you balance it under the assumption the player will be savescumming

>because being able to save every time you want doesn't make you better at the game nor does it make you more powerful in-game.
But it does, if there's a boss you can just quicksave after every hit you do and load every time you get hit. Your skill is no longer being measured at this point.
>used
Aqua is pure, PURE
But user it's fun.
NO

>Your skill is no longer being measured at this point.
It is by the fact that you suck enough to have to save scum.

Nope, just your standard Tetris Effect. I feel it myself sometimes.

Name 1 game that does this.

Imagine if it cost 25 cents every time you do it.
"game is so easy because you can use continues! it only cost me $40 to beat it!"

Try playing Touhou 15 in device mode which is pretty much that and see if it's easy.

Aqua is best girl and best goddess.

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Well, you have to land a hit first in order to save.

There are games that quicksave right before the enemy is about to kill you. Bethesda games do this for example.

They aren't hard but imagine if they were.

Fallout 4 let's you take damage while the game is still loading the area. I died an unhealthy amount of times during the quest you had to take some npc loot and it was guarded by a bitch and two other guys using flamethrowers and gattling guns because of that.

Aqua is the second worst girl and the worst goddess
only useful as a nopan slut and party tricks

Rather than give you unlimited quicksaves, I'd rather a game that is very difficult in terms of what it calls for you to do have very generous checkpointing that sends you only back to the start of the challenge you failed on.

Very difficult games that are very kind when you die >>> Average or even Easy games that are very punishing on death. Easy, generous games are for either times for relaxation or games for children, and hard, punishing games are for hardcores that want to force their skills to the max just to complete the game.

Is difficulty reconciling losses from failure?

>best goddess
Aqua is best goddess and VERY useful. She's also very fun, would party with her desu.

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Irrelevant, game is still easy to beat and that's all that matters.

Unless the game is keeping track of how many times you load a save, and this somehow affects the ending of the game or disqualifies you from unlocking something then no, you're getting the exact same end result as someone who didn't save scum.

Yes, quicksaving is mostly just a time saving feature

>skill is no longer being measured at this point.
Sure it is, if you're too shit to avoid being hit anyway, you won't beat the boss no matter how often you quicksave. If you're too shit to hit the boss without also being hit, you won't beat the boss no matter how often you quicksave. A well-designed game will be adjusted such that its save mechanism is taken into account. It's only a time-saving measure.

Touhou 15.

I'd call her wife material but I'm afraid for the intelligence of the offspring.
The hell with it, I'd marry her anyway.

That only matters if you're trying to brag to other people. You yourself still have to accept the fact of how much you suck.

>offspring
You're infertile and you know it

Yes if you specify that you mean it's difficult when you're not abusing quicksaves, or if the games feature systems and mechanics that punish the use of quicksaves, otherwise no.

So the game isn't difficult at the slightest, gotcha.

Well at least someone has right idea in this thread.

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It does make you more powerful, being able to undo your every mistake at a moment's notice is a superpower.

This. I'm not about to play through an entire level ontop of a gauntlet that I already beat just to get a second shot at the boss I didn't know how to fight; That's just tedious.

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What difference does it make if you start where you died, if clearly everything you passed already can't kill you anyway? All it does is save time, and time isn't really a factor of difficulty.

This is only true assuming getting a single hit in is so difficult that despite being able to try over and over again within milisecinds you can't just do it by a fluke.

Arcade games are a good example of having cheap shitty systems like that while also having mechanics to discourage abuse, on top of being balanced around a 1 credit clear. Quicksaves aren't even acknowledged by the game, and not using them feels completely arbitrary nowadays, because games are so rarely segmented into levels.

> if clearly everything you passed already can't kill you anyway?
And why would that be?
If you barely got past an enemy and lost 80% hit points, you can still improve and lose less next time.

KAAAZUUMAAA-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN TASUKETEEEEE

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>on top of being balanced around a 1 credit clear.
Arcades are balanced around NOT being able to 1CC them. That's the entire point.

Yes, see also Kaizo

>if clearly everything you passed already can't kill you anyway

Why, because you beat it once? That's not how it works, beating something once doesn't mean you've mastered it. And even if it can't kill you, it can damage you lowering your chances of success in the later segments. Fact is you can trivialize any action game challenge by quicksaving at the right time. Even challenges that would otherwise be near impossible to do like an extremely long series of frame perfect inputs.

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If you already saved then you're stuck that way unless you made an even older save. This is actually an argument against saving being anything other than a time saver.

qucksaveniggers btfo holy shit

How difficult it is is a matter of skill. Maybe the boss attacks you when you get close and in order to get a hit in without being damaged you need to execute some sort of mechanic (dodge, block, parry, attack chambers, magic, whatever else). Quicksaving won't help you if you fail because you suck too much. It's not like quicksaving will make you able to parry if you cannot.

You can save just before that enemy and save again every time you get a hit in, quickload every time they get a hit on you. That's not a challenge.

dumb aqua poster

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Not first try obviously, they're meant to be something you practice but they're always balanced so that you can 1cc them reliably if you get good even down to how many resources you get, and where. You have a clear standard to aim for, so credit feeding will always feel cheap. Unlike quicksaves where developers often give no indication about how much and when to save, so any limits or lack thereof will be on you.

That makes saving less helpful, not more. If you save then you're stuck with whatever screwups you already made. Some games even lock in randomization so that you can't save scum better results.

>Quicksaving won't help you if you fail because you suck too much. It's not like quicksaving will make you able to parry if you cannot.
You can just keep blindly trying over an over again, even if you stop looking at the screen you will eventually pull it off by pure chance, then you can just quicksave.

Who actually wants to do that aside from autismobots?

That's just men's it's theoretically possible, not balanced around.
You can beat half life 2 in 5 hours if you "get good" enough, doesn't mean this was in any way intentional.

Yes it will make you be able to parry if you cannot, it's called dumb luck. Don't believe me?

humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

Keep trying to predict when it'll turn green until you luck out and get an absurdly low time (sub 100 ms), eventually you WILL do it. Do it for 10 minutes and you'll likely get a ton of these lucky attempts. Now try to get that low time 10 times in a row and restart if you fuck up once or twice. Suddenly it's near impossible. And this timing is far harder than anything you'll find in video games, yet you can still do it with luck.

You need help if you actually do this.

Someone who sucks at the game but still wants to beat it, ie someone who doesn't want the game to be difficult, someone who wants to use all the game's mechanics to their advantage.

Hai hai, Kazuma desu.

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But the game isn't hard, remember?

>you need help if you use mechanics the game shipped with

Max Payne is one of my favorite games of all time but save scumming isn't out of necessity, it's a CORE gameplay mechanic. There's so much shit in MP1 that you couldn't have ever seen coming without having played the game beforehand or died at that part. Still an amazing game but it's pretty cheap at times.

Yes, because it has quicksave that trivialize what might otherwise be a challenging encounter.

Those can't be compared. It was intentional in arcade games, with very few exceptions. The developers playtested all the levels to be doable without dying, they balanced things like health drops, extra lives, bombs, and so on so you get them when you most need them, they made every attack dodgeable and they had in-game incentives like higher scores, 1cc endings and even hidden levels/bosses. It was also the result of the natural incentive of players to waste less money. Some games like Gradius didn't even have continues. Not just that, but arcade game difficulty varies wildly depending on developer preferences, some games you can 1cc after a few hours of practice, some take hundreds. Like beating any other games.

more like trashuma

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That's just a shit mechanic then, stop defending it. This alongside the borderline experimental "adapting difficulty" ruined the game for me.

>quick save
>still get wiped by enemy encounters
Yeah

Starting and quitting the game is a mechanic a game ships with but there's something wrong with you if all you do is start the game and then quit over and over.

Yeah. Pure execution tests can't be overcome by infinite tries or RNG rerolls. You have to git gud and execute eventually.

>quicksave in the middle of an encounter

That's just poor saves on the player's part, not an inherent part of the system. If you're doing it right you won't even screw up to begin with.

>have to repeat 20 times
>trivial

Quicksaves can actually fuck the player over and make the game more difficult. If you continuously quicksave and older ones are overwritten, you might have made a decision earlier on that screws you down the line and have no chance to reverse it.

I'm not defending it, MP2 clearly is a lot easier probably because the devs realized their mistake. Adaptive Difficulty is retarded too I admit but if the difficulty actually ruined MP1 you might as well be a fucking plebian.

See >implying those are comparable
one allows you to progress easier and the other is pointless

Starting to sound less like an easy out and more like a hassle.

>game only lets you save if you've had sex

If itit's within the span of 10 seconds, yes.

Progression at the cost of turning it into a job that you're doing for free.

What are you guys even talking about? There's a few ambushes throughout but pressing spacebar + direction literally turns you invincible for a good second, combine that with slow-mo and strafing and everything in the game can be avoided with ease.

Only the grenades and explosions in that burning bar level fit your description.

It often feels like I'm the only person on Yea Forums who knows how to play Max Payne, I swear.

Name one example where that actually happens

Be quiet, chuuni.

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@everyone
Try flipping a coin so that it lands on heads. Unless you practiced this, the chances should be 50/50. Now try flipping the coin so that it lands on heads 5 TIMES in a row. At this point you'd have to practice to pull it off, look up a guide online or something. Now imagine you can quicksave between every throw. Suddenly you don't practice or learn, just flip at random and quicksave whenever it lands on heads.

Megumin best girl.

That's the worst part about savescumming, not only does it take out all challenge from games but it's also tedious, frustrating and encourages impatient dumb playstyles. Many players don't even realize that things would be much more fun if they stopped that shit and learned the games properly.

>what are grenade stairs
>what are enemies that spawn out of nowhere and kill you in a shotgun blast
>what are enemies positioned behind corners they shouldn't be in to fuck you over

Probably not, but why does it matter? All it means is that you've got built-in easy mode. You don't have to use quicksaves.

Yeah I know because I've tried it and it's the worst shit ever. That's why I say it takes literal autism to do it.

>but if the difficulty actually ruined MP1 you might as well be a fucking plebian.
I clear through levels no problem until I hit a wall where the enemy ai "adapts" to the point where they have lightning reflexes. I die 2 or 3 times and then the game becomes trivial for a level or two, I don't die once, the game becomes fair and the cycle starts all over again.
It's all so tiresome...

The game is so short that isn't even really a problem. Yes, savescumming and adaptive difficulty is a problem but the story and writing more than make up for it

As I said grenades fit the bill, but there's only about 8-10 of them in the entire game. Enemies don't spawn out of nowhere, they're standing waiting in levels, usually running out when you hit triggers (make sure to lock the game at 60 FPS, more than that breaks many of the triggers). There are a couple that hide, but they're not a problem since you have invincibility, as soon as you hear an enemy just roll, or just roll when going into suspicious rooms. You will always be safe.

>but the story and writing
I liked it but it might as well have been a comic book if it has to carry the rest of the game.

Max Payne a shit.
The Punisher? Now THERE was a game...

these

Rolling would be much useful if the game actually let you stay on the ground whilst shooting instead of forcing you to get up. I will always find it hilarious how Remedy tried fixing this in 2 and failed.
>Now THERE was a game...
What game was there?

The Punusher

can an RPG without strictly limited enemy spawns ever be considered difficult? People could just grind the start until they're overlevelled.

can a game with multiple difficulty settings ever be considered difficult? people could just set it to super easy

can a game with mods ever be considered difficult? people could just use godmode.

>chance
You can only get it done by chance if the mechanic is extremely simple and you know what you need to do in the first place, but cannot execute it correctly. You may not know what you need to do at all or you may need to execute a more complex sequence of interactions in order to succeed. Getting something like that by chance will take an extremely long amount of time and you will have to repeat it a whole lot until you actually win against a boss. On top of that you will likely have to handle multiple different attack patterns from the boss, thus compounding the issue even more.

Winning a hard encounter which is designed properly by quicksave and pure chance is possible in theory in the same way that bruteforcing a password by repeated manual tries is possible. It might be possible in theory, but it would take such an extremely long amount of time that it isn't a viable approach in practice. In any case if a boss encounter which would normally take on the order of a few minutes to complete with appropriate skill instead takes tens of times that amount by quicksave cheesing I'd say the extreme increase in time taken is appropriate punishment for failure in the game.

>Rolling would be much useful if the game actually let you stay on the ground whilst shooting instead of forcing you to get up.

See this is what I meant earlier, I am NOT talking about shoot dodging. I am talking about the roll, press space bar + A/S/D and Max will roll to the side giving you invincibility for a full second or more with next to no recovery frames. You can keep rolling over and over and you'll only get a few frames of vulnerability between rolls (during which you can let off shotgun shots to kill enemies). Maybe if you stopped beating your head against a wall while quickloading and experimented with the game mechanics you would have realized this sooner.

So this doesn't apply to puzzle games, gotcha.

I don't get it, what's the pun?
My bad. I will admit I didn't ever use roll in MP1, I only ever used shootdodging. If I ever replay MP1 I'll make use of what you said. Another thing, is there any reason to use Bullet Time only?

You'll have to be more specific, I don't know any puzzle games which benefit from savescumming anyway. If puzzles involve coming up with logical solutions then quicksaving won't really help you get past a puzzle you cannot find the solution for, nor will it really help you with puzzles you have already solved, as those become trivial after you find a solution.

>You can only get it done by chance if the mechanic is extremely simple
No, even sequences of inputs like a fighting game combo can be pulled off more with luck than skill, and that's how it usually works, before you spend some time properly burning the combo into your muscle memory to the point of being able to pull it off consistently. But that's besides the point anyway, action games don't require these kinds of inputs to win, they're always optional. Random boss attacks don't matter and if anything make things easier because luck plays a bigger factor since you only need to dodge/counter those attacks once to move on, instead of learning how to deal with every permutation. If you disagree then name some specific examples from games instead of talking about something abstract, and I'll tell you how you can trivialize them. Only puzzle games are safe from savescumming to that extent.

>hardest difficulty is actually kinda hard in the first few hours of the game
>worldmap opens up with hundred is quicksave campfires that trivialize difficulty
>eventually become a god thanks to gear and abilities anyways
every time. I hate difficulty starter guns that never give you a challenge beyond the first portion of the game.

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Yeah, you should only use manual bullet time and rolling, shoot dodging looks cool but it should only be used when you're already good and want to show off. Otherwise it's not efficient because it leaves you vulnerable by limiting your mobility during the dodge and after it. The only good use for a shootdodge is when you're about to die, you can't die mid shoot dodge so if you can use it to get to safety it can come in handy. Besides that a good trick is to do a roll, turn on slowmo, let off some shots during your short recovery to kill an enemy or two, do another roll and turn off slowmo.

>no, but the difference is that grinding is tedious, so instead you're encouraged to get good and beat the boss at the lowest level possible. With quicksaves, it's the opposite.
>no, hard mode would be hard (probably), but not the game itself
>yes, because modding isn't originally part of the game
When looking at how hard it is to do something, you consider the easiest, legitimate way. You don't say walking to your job 100 meters away is hard because you could potentially travel all around the earth before getting there.

I know it's a meme at this point but we can hopefully all agree dark souls is at least moderately challenging.
Now imagine you could load before every attack.
That's what I said, it doesn't apply to puzzle games. They can have quicksaves and it won't matter, unless you're on a timer.

If you don't know WHAT to do then yes, sure, quicksaves don't helpnyou much unless the challenge is to do this thing before time runs out or while say, dodging enemy attacks. Once you figure out what to do however (in 99% of games this means hitting the enemy until they die) it can absolutely be trivialized by quicksaves.

Aqua is for cum dumping only.

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>yes, because modding isn't originally part of the game
Just to clarify, the game itself could still be hard, but not the modded game.

What the fuck is even happening?

Ghost dicking

>It might be possible in theory, but it would take such an extremely long amount of time that it isn't a viable approach in practice.
I'm personally not a savescummer so I don't know which games are particularly vulnerable to or safe against savescumming, because I have never tried to save after every hit. If you want to look at games which take quicksave into account with their level and encounter design you can look at old shooters which will often have extremely deadly or punishing encounters which come up as traps or ambushes that cannot reasonably be navigated with a generally favorable outcome without knowing about it beforehand. The games are clearly designed with the idea in mind that players can and will save at any time, as such ambushes are used as a tool to make it so the player will die and be challenged once in a while anyway, while still remaining challenging and possible to navigate for skilled players who don't save often.

In such games if you're too trigger happy with the quicksave you can actually fuck yourself by saving in a very bad position mid-ambush which makes completing the encounter much more difficult or impossible, thus forcing you to replay much longer sections or the entire level.

You'll have to watch Konosuba and find out!

As soon as I can get my headphones I will.
if this is true Konosoba is truly the best anime of all time

OK baka you can do what posters here have described in doom when fighting multiple cyberdeamons, obviously not saving after every shot but say every 15 seconds or so and load after every DMG taken

You try fighting multiple Cyberdemons by bashing buttons at random and quicksaving when your 'chance' gets you a favorable outcome and come back to tell me how long it took compared to fighting them when you actually know how to approach the encounter.

I used to savescum like a motherfucker in my teens, ESPECIALLY in fps like Doom, Douk, Blood and Quake and the stuff you're talking about can work a couple of times but anyone abusing quicksaves will quickly catch on and scout ahead a bit before committing to a save, or have "hard" saves as backups.

Besides that one of the main reasons I savescummed is because of the resource hoarder mentality, so I'd reload until I cleared encounters without spending too much ammo for the better guns and without losing much health, so eventually I'd have a huge amount of resources saved up that would help me deal with any kind of poor quicksaves if they did pop up. It really isn't a big deal.

Some true bosses can't be brute forced with continues, e.g. Hibachi. He gets a shield every time you get a shield, i.e. every time you die, so every time he kills you he becomes invulnerable which means to even do damage to him you have to be good enough to survive. If somebody is bad enough they can literally credit feed for hours and not beat him, if they somehow reached him in the first place.

Hibachi's invincibility lasts shorter than yours does so you can point blank him between constant deaths and eventually he will die. The bigger issue is actually reaching him, a credit feeder won't be able to meet any of the second loop requirements, those actually demand you to git gud.

>anyone abusing quicksaves will quickly catch on and scout ahead a bit before committing to a save, or have "hard" saves as backups
Yes that's the point, the games are designed to make you do that unless you're very good. That's what I'm telling you, the games are designed in such a way as to make the (normal/average) player use the provided save system, that's not "abuse". If you're so shit at the game that you're pushed into actually abusing the system by saving after every shot you won't actually trivialize any encounter, what will happen is that your lack of skill actually gets punished by taking much, much, much longer to beat a level than a player who is capable of adapting and learning and uses the save system as designed.

I stand corrected, didn't notice his shield was shorter since I was too focused on living.

Checkpoints amd Save points will always be the superior save system. Quicksave / Quickload is garbage.

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No

That's not true though. I rushed through Blood on Well Done (before the ports were a thing) in no time when savescumming, while my legit playthrough where every time I died I just respawned took substantially longer and was much more difficult to play. It's ultimately easier and quicker, but you don't actually improve that way. Also what do you mean "use save system as designed"? The games don't tell you anything about how you should use the saves that's the problem. Using them at all is kinda cheap since the games have built in punishment systems for dying and restarting the levels that you bypass by loading.

Literally me in ARMA 3

LITERALLY me in COD 2

Get good, faggot.

cope

I did once I dropped savescumming and it was fun

This isn't what I described. Actually read and reply appropriately.

Do you think the save system ended up in the game by accident, or what? The same people who made the game put it there and allowed its use. They didn't have to do that, they deliberately chose to make it available to you. Again, if you're pushed to actually abusing the save system by extreme amounts of saving and loading you won't actually get ahead of a player using it normally. It's there to be used, or else it would not be there. The save system isn't a savestate in an emulator for games which most certainly weren't designed with save states in mind or something.

No, it's what has been claimed in these posts, earlier in the reply chain and the subject of discussion in the chain:
>you will eventually pull it off by pure chance
>it's called dumb luck
To those points I responded that by relying on dumb luck and game saves you will actually take much, much longer to win, thus this 'abuse' of the save system by relying on chance to win is actually punishing to the player since it takes a vastly longer amount of time than playing normally and without 'abuse'.

balance it by having it fail based on how bad you're doing

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And thusly, since anyone can beat the game even on the hardest difficulty, it's not hard.

I don't think it's accidental but there is also absolutely nothing in the games that suggests and kind of recommended amount of saving, any number you pick will be arbitrary and baseless. Besides maybe no reloading after dying which is suggested by built in punishments for dying, or as much saving/reloading as you wish because the system is there.
>you won't actually get ahead of a player using it normally.
You literally will. I can guarantee that almost nobody would beat Blood if they couldn't savescum and actually had to restart each level after dying, but with savescumming it's no big deal. It makes sense too as demonstrated by my reaction test example, consistency is a difficult skill to build and it's wholly unnecessary when you quicksave.

Get good faggot.

And you wouldmt have to saveor load at all if you were actually good, so your skill is being measured.

What's the appeal of konosuba

The game has no metrics for that kind of thing, as far as its concerned a player who barely got by abusing saves is equal in skill to a player who did it legit, or even better because the savescummer is likely to have more health and ammo saved up. It really does just come down to how the player feels.

For me, it's yunyun.

The game has no metric for who is playing it so you could literally just get somebody else to play it for you and it would still count by that reasoning.

This

What point are you even trying to make? The discussion's about whether or not quicksaves make games easy, which they do. You could say otherwise if there were systems that punished you for quicksaving and made your playthrough less legit, but there aren't. Getting good at games and beating them are very different things

Yes if execution itself is the hard part rather than endurance. Almost like there's more than one way a game can be hard or something.

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>quicksaves into unwinnable situation by accident
Never again

Game execution demands endurance and pressure to be a real challenge, otherwise even frame perfect inputs become no big deal. The best you can do is make quicksaves inconvenient, like for examples rhythm games are too constant and fast for you to be saving and loading non stop without getting into a flow. If the set of challenges is more discrete though, then execution won't be a problem.