Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>
No, not really. The human trading caravan doesn't show up until the second year--that's hours of playing time. Please explain to me why, if I want to see what the humans fight like, I have to waste hours getting a game to the point where humans show up.</STRONG>/quote]Well, you don't. If your intention is to see what they fight like, then save your game and exit out as per usual, load back up, do it, and then exit out without saving. The idea that there should be hotkeys to make saving and loading easy so that you can test the game like this in every situation makes the game not really last. All you have to do is make some basic conditions and then you can pretty much experience everything without ever taking risk.
If there's no reward, or if it's impossible to kill the humans, then I'd agree. But if you defeat the humans, you should be getting all the goods they had. That's a big bump. So should you be able to save right before the caravan comes, try to kill them, fail and reload, try again, fail and reload and repeat ad nauseum? No. But if you save once, give it a try and fail just to see, well that's playing the game and you're perfectly able to do that under the current system. However, a "quicksave/load" is a different beast all together and ruins the challenge. You can try everything whenever you want without consequence. With having to exit to save, you can still "cheat" but it's more time consuming and discourages such behavior.
<STRONG>Is the experience of watching human swordsmen gleefully butchering a bunch of dwarves really so special that you shouldn't get to see it unless you're willing to throw several hours down the toilet just to see it? </STRONG>
Again, you miss the basic idea that there already is saving in the game. It's not like you can't ever go back. But, there's no quicksave so you can't just try things and reload whenever they don't go your way. To compare, it's like you're playing Nethack and you have a wand of wishing. Now, everyone knows that just because you wish for something doesn't mean the mean ol' RNG is going to give it to you. She's a harsh mistress after all. So, playing the "Iron Man" way would allow you to save and exit so you have your backup incase something bad happens (even that I concider spineless, but it's a game so it's not supposed to be completely masochistic and therefore should be allowed) and then you make your wish and live with what happens unless it ends your game. The other way, the carebear way, is to have F5 reload so that you wish 100 times, reloading after each failed wish, until you get exactly what you wanted.
<STRONG>The idea of "no pain, no gain" gaming is fundamentally flawed. The goal of a well-designed game should be to provide novel experience continuously; if you can send the player back to an early point and have it play differently this time, that helps the game deliver more gameplay. But if you send the player back and they have to just redo exactly what they did before with nothing new to see or do, that adds absolutely nothing to the experience.</STRONG>
Are you arguing that the game doesn't provide novel experiences? The game's not linear, so there's no reason why something not working is going to hold you back. In a game like Half-Life, where you have a start and an end and nothing branching in between, a quicksave is useful. I HATE jumping puzzles in FPSes. Remember those trip mine sections where you had to move around boxes to get over them? I would have killed someone if there wasn't a quicksave. But in a game where taking a major risk could have HUGE rewards requires that those risks ACTUALLY MATTER.
Another example, and the final one for this post at least, is Europa 1400. In it you play, pretty much, one of the dwarves in this game. Only your goal is to run your business well enough and then ?. You can become king,
marry rich chicks, etc. But if you want to marry the rich girl, it takes most of the beginning of your game courting them because you're poor and she's wealthy, then you have to spend tons of cash on presents and stuff. If you try that and it doesn't work, well, you have to play again. But if it works, you've pretty much won the game now. There's almost no way to lose.
Now, imagine that your dwarves have a 1% chance of killing that cart, and if that 1% hits, the next ~5 years of the game are going to be cake. It's like finding a warp zone in Mario 3. Sometimes, if the game's not going well, you might think to yourself, "1% is good enough since I'm not going to make it otherwise" and you make take the chance. High risk, but the reward might save the game for you. It's exciting! Now, if I could save and reload quickly enough that it took ~2 minutes to almost garontee that I'd beat the humans just because I've tried enough times, there's a huge reward and zero risk. So, to then balance the game, either the humans have to be invincible (this is what most games do, when the reward's too much because the game doesn't have real risk, you can't allow players to ever get the reward) or you have to have real, actual consequences. You should be saying to yourself "do I REALLY want to do that" whenver the reward's bigger than something that'll save you 4 minutes of time.
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Topic: Optional Options or Do you have the willpower not to be (Read 5583 times)