[Hotfoot]

Originally posted by PvK:
Of course, using the saved game system to gain pre-knowledge of places you haven't been yet, could be considered cheating itself...

PvK

Frankly, I was expecting the game to randomly generate new equipment when it loads from a save game. Instead, if I want to do that, I have to restart the entire game. Then all the places get new inventories and it's all good. So if I completely clear out a planet of all their good equipment, I can save, quit the game, restart, and there will be more stuff for me to buy.

If I die, reload and I want to go back to a planet to try getting either the equipment I lost or new equipment, I shouldn't be penalized because of the "quirks" in the trading system. Either reset the shops with the save games to what they were at the time of saving, or re-generate them. I can understand wanting to keep savegame filesizes low (hence why saving the contents of the shop in a savegame is not being done), as well as loading times, but come on. The game already regenerates the shops every time you level or every time you launch the game. Putting in another call to do it whenever you load a saved game would be a simple, elegant solution, remove the problems I had, and remove the duplication bug.

Edit: As for considering saving and reloading "cheating", fine, feel free, but given the nature of computers and games, it is entirely unrealistic to assume that people are going to be willing to play a game that has no save feature whatsoever. It's frustrating and annoying, and makes the game not fun, especially if the game is very hard. Very few people have the ability to sit down a play a game through to completion in one sitting, especially if the game is long, hard, and/or buggy. Imagine playing Starfury, having just gotten a nice, shiny battleship, when suddenly...BAM! Crash to desktop. Well, no savegame to reload, let's start all the way back at the beginning of the game, only to CTD again after having bought a battleship. Or let's say you have what most people commonly refer to as a life, and you play games in your spare time. Well, too bad, you'll never make it past your little Mk1 Destroyer, because you can't save your 1-2 hour game sessions. Oh yes, that's fun.

[ October 03, 2003, 16:02: Message edited by: Hotfoot ]