Reply To: No saving in combat?

#3496
Avatar photoAlesch
Participant

If saving in combat is implemented they could make it save on exit, with an autosave before the fight. That way you don’t have the constant reloading problem and people can still take a break from playing without having to restart the battle.

you don’t have the constant reloading problem

constant reloading problem

reloading problem

problem

Who exactly is this a problem for? That is ridiculous. It’s absurd. Battle Brothers is a single player game, and as far as I can tell there are no plans to change that at all. Player A’s playthrough has no bearing whatsoever on Player B’s. So even if Player A prefers to reload his game after making a mistake, while Player B does not, there is still no reason for Player B to find Player A’s practice objectionable. The two will never meet. Their games will never interact. The players themselves will likely never interact. What possible business does Player B have in this case to so much as comment on Player A’s decision to save?

Is Player B offended by the fact that Player A is not “as skilled a player”? Again, their games never interact, nor do the players. That argument is ludicrous. If Player B’s concern is that the addition of a saving feature might somehow undercut his own play style, then it’s still baffling as to how that might be. Will the ability to save tempt Player B into setting aside his moral superiority by reloading after an in-game misstep? I am personally confused as to why that would be a problem at all, but even if it were then it would seem to me that the fault would lie in Player B him or herself, rather than with the game for offering the function.

Forgive me if I’m setting up a straw man here, but that honestly seems to be the main argument against implementing a save feature, and it’s nonsense.

If there is a save mechanic inside of combat it will end like every not-ironman xcom game. It ends in uncounted reloads until every strike you do hits and your guys don´t get hurt. This is neither intended nor should it ever be possible in my opinion.
Though the save on exit seems like a very good idea and would deal with the no-time-issue.

First of all, I can personally attest to having never spammed the reload feature in a game of XCOM until “every strike do hits and [my] guys don’t get hurt”. I wasn’t even aware that this was possible in XCOM. It doesn’t need to be. Lots of games spawn a randomization seed at the beginning of each game that determines the outcome of actions, and a good many games save this seed as part of the save file. This means that save/load spamming would accomplish very little, because the outcome of an attack, let’s say, is predetermined. The only possible influence is that it might allow you to move a character to a different position to strike, or to know in advance that a strike will fail and so take a different action instead. Again though, it seems to me that the fault here (if indeed there is a fault at all, and no one has put forth any convincing arguments that there is) must lie with the player, and not with the software.

Again, my apologies if this isn’t what you meant to say, but it seems to be your argument. If it is, then it makes little sense, and I must disagree.

Personally, the idea of being able to save in battle seems like an obvious feature, and the OP had some legitimate reasons for it. Sometimes, things happen, and you need to step away from a game. Always, losing progress in a game is frustrating. Therefore, a feature that can accommodate the former while reducing the later seems like an obvious thing to have. Arguments about it compromising some perceived Ironman difficulty seem strange, as Ironman difficulty settings are generally set to be special challenges, rather than the norm in gaming. The arguments about save scumming so far have missed the point I’d say. Games like Nethack, ADOM, Angband, and what have you, where the term “save scum” originate from (I believe it began with NetHack, but I could be wrong) might have come up with a derogatory term for the practice, but what they were really experiencing were players subverting a feature (or making up for a lack of features perhaps) in order to better enjoy the game.

A major difference between, say, NetHack, and Battle Brothers is that Battle Brothers is a paid product. NetHack is free. They can take users, or leave them. If people want to undo game-ending mishaps by reloading a save game in NetHack, and it runs counter to the game’s design, then by all means call them names for it. If a player doesn’t enjoy NetHack, and tells their friends that the game is rubbish as a result, then the good folks making NetHack lose nothing. If the same happens to Battle Brothers, then our friends at Overhype Studios might potentially sell less games. Sure, bending over backwards to sell as many copies as possible might leave a bad taste in some peoples’ mouths, but Battle Brothers costs about as much as a mid-range pizza. Is denying people the ability to save in battle and maintaining the… I don’t know, the “purity of hardcore gaming” perhaps? Is that worth even a single pizza? No, no it is not. Pizza is delicious.

How saving in battle is implemented matters very little to me. At will, on exit, after spinning three times widdershins, who cares. The idea that a basic feature might be left out entirely to satisfy a small group of players that seem to be worried that the game might be easier for it somehow, is madness. Mount and Blade has been brought up before, and sure, it didn’t allow players to save in battle, but a battle in Mount and Blade is generally much, much shorter than a battle in Battle Brothers is. The argument that “the tactical battles are the fun part, why would you want to save and deny yourself the fun part of the game” is as absurd as anything else. Ideally, the entirety of the game should be “the fun part”, and in practice players will enjoy different aspects of a game more or less than others. Telling someone what they should enjoy is certainly far more arrogant than believing that one’s time is worth respecting.

Why anyone would be against being able to save the game at any point seems utterly alien to me, but I’d certainly love to hear a good argument against it. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any arguments that don’t boil down to “but I am a hardcore gamer, and if you let me save whenever I want then I might not be hardcore anymore!” Seriously guys, what the heck? Please tell me that I’m misunderstanding your arguments, because that is a sad attitude to have.