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October 12th, 2006, 02:18 PM
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General
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 3,327
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Re: Problem Saving Games
I agree.
I think it does change the feel of the game. It's part of the game and shouldn't be changed lightly. While individuals could always ignore it, that being the accepted default would change both the game and the community around it.
The game does many things against the conventional wisdom. This is one of them. It's a niche game. It will always be by nature a niche game. It's also the largest pre-order Shrapnel's ever had. (Which will hopefully translate into the highest sales as well.) It must be doing something right.
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October 12th, 2006, 02:51 PM
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Colonel
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Kansas, USA
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Sadly, I have no willpower. For example, Rome Total War has a save feature. I quit having fun because I became obsessed with saving & reloading between assassination attempts because I just couldn't bare the idea of losing my high level assassin. If a battle went poorly, I was immediately frustrated and would hit the reload button. For myself, the addition of a handy in-game save feature would be a bad thing.
Maybe a nice compromise would be a command line switch that would allow a user to enable/disable an in-game save feature... then if I could just resist the urge to enable it. 
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October 12th, 2006, 03:27 PM
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Captain
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Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: Problem Saving Games
You would see pro-permanent death posts on every forum for every MMOG that ever proposed this idea. All of those games have failed. If we couldnt save in our backward sort of way like we do in Dom2-3, I dont think many people, that like playing SP games, would buy it. All I asked for and will continue to ask is that Save could be made an ingame option so that I dont have to go outside the game, and could even play in full screen mode. Flame away.
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October 12th, 2006, 03:32 PM
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Second Lieutenant
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Argentina
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Well mainly saving a game and reload does not make much of a difference due to the scale of choices you make in DOM. Consequences you pay in the current turn are of decitions made several turns ago.
And mainly you donīt loose a game just because you mismove 1 army. but saving last turn in backup could be useful for this cases of mismove or forgetting to give orders you already decided.
and for the save-reload mechanic or cheats like "research all" or "1 million bucks" are pointless and I donīt see why some people cheat. What point is to win a game that way?
If I cas Haruspex searching sites in a province and detects no sites I could reload and search elsewere. AI would not have a chance to this kind of cheating. Reload if a fire destroyed my lab. etc
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" Jefe, le presento a Manuk, el hombre de la sonrisa de hierro "
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October 12th, 2006, 04:00 PM
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General
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Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: Problem Saving Games
MMOG/TBS :: Apples/Oranges
I'm curious though. How do you usually use the save games? How often do you reload? What circumstances? Just to the last turn or farther back?
I tend to not use saves often in strategy games, even when they allow it, so I really am curious (I'm bad about remembering to save in games that rely on it, too.)
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October 12th, 2006, 04:15 PM
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Major
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Salt Lake City
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Games like Jagged Alliance and Call of Duty would be ridiculously hard without save/loading. But games like Dwarf Fortress and Dominions encourage you to experiment, make mistakes, but then recover from them. Even if your god or prophet dies, you can always call him back or appoint a better prophet. The only true death comes after a long series of mistakes or bad strategies, so you might as well learn and have fun making a comeback. If you are so compulsively perfectionist that you have to reload after a horror kills one of your mages... well, you are a different person than I. Save/loading doesn't make you a very good competetive player either, if that's what you're into.
You do know that you can go back and forth between fullscreen and windowed with ALT+ENTER, right? And if you have a Mac, you can make Applescripts to save individual turns with a hotkey, I think. I don't think you can tell the devs that they screwed up because they didn't make it easy to cheat. I did reload games when was experimenting with tactical battles now and then, and it's really not much of a hassle.
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October 12th, 2006, 04:34 PM
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Major
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Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Budapest, Hungary
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Lads, I think that we gotta agree with new newbies. I don't see anything bad with having a save function, since you can backup your games anyways. That way they wouldn't have to do it.
Everyone who says that saving is cheating...well no comment. Now that the game is much better for SP fans also, a save function should've been added if you ask me. [Actually this is weird, I never thought that a save function would be so necessary, but that is probably because I am not a Doms newbie, but I try to "see" this from their perspective, so I can understand that they would like to see a save function in the game..]
Just my 0.02 
__________________
Dominions 3. Wallpapers & Logos
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"Training is principally an act of faith. The athlete must believe in its efficacy: he must believe that through training he will become fitter and stronger, that by constant repetition of the same movements he will become more skillful."
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October 12th, 2006, 05:20 PM
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Corporal
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Join Date: Mar 2006
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Putting it there makes it so much more tempting, besides I'm of the forces them to learn side. Maby I'm wrong and experimenting is the key with easy backed up saves but my instincts say living with your mistakes is the only way to learn not to make them.
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October 12th, 2006, 05:22 PM
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Sergeant
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Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: The Urban Wilderness
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Failing to support saving/loading is a huge mistake. One of the reasons dominions is so difficult to learn is because you can never revisit a decision and observe how different actions yield different results. Experimentation is discouraged in a game with the knowledge that, if something bad happens, you'd need to replay for 2+ hours to reach that position again. Everyone I've showed Dominions off to has found it incredibly backwards that a game with such a huge learning curve is so unforgiving about mistakes. I know I've wished for the ability to go back a turn and undo a game-destroying minor mistake or fluke (e.g. that newly summoned group of Summer lions got default-placed in the middle of my force and they burned 20 friendly mages to death with their auras on round 2 of combat) way too many times. You're essentially playing the entire game in Ironman mode- and while that's fine for hardcore fans, it's anathema for anyone unfamiliar with the system or less serious about the game.
If this were a democracy I'd place my vote for a real save/load mechanic. Because it's not, I'm just going to urge Johan or Kristoffer, if they're reading this, to DEFINATELY put in a save/load. People will love you for it. 
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October 12th, 2006, 05:17 PM
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Second Lieutenant
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Join Date: Jan 2004
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Re: Problem Saving Games
Quote:
Manuk said:
and for the save-reload mechanic or cheats like "research all" or "1 million bucks" are pointless and I donīt see why some people cheat. What point is to win a game that way?
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Some people have fun using saving/loading or using cheat codes, some people have not, the only thing that is certain is that having access to those things does not adversely affect the gaming experience of either of the two groups whereas not having access to them certainly hurts one of the two groups.
The whole "I don't see the fun in feature X, so I choose to believe that others would not, despite their protestations to the contrary, have fun in it either, so I argue against it on the basis of it having no point" is reminiscent of the worst of early 1980'ies game programming and has been abandoned by just about everybody: People have different ideas of fun and the only people who are not worth listening to as a developer are those who argue against features that others would find fun but which wouldn't affect the one arguing or worse, those who argue against it on the basis of others "not playing the game as it ought to be played" (there are always a certain amount of such deadwood in any forum of fans for a game but they really aren't worth listening to as a developer once they begin arguing for limiting other players' fun rather than enhancing their own).
Quote:
If I cas Haruspex searching sites in a province and detects no sites I could reload and search elsewere. AI would not have a chance to this kind of cheating. Reload if a fire destroyed my lab. etc
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If you had fun playing like that, great! The game would be more fun for you than if it lacked a load/save in-progress feature. If you did not have fun playing like that, great! The game wouldn't in any way, shape, or form force you to play like that even with the best load/save feature invented enabled.
And if you'd make a stable save every 5 or 10 rounds or as the fancy took you [or how about automatic autosaves with different nations every fixed N rounds to go even further  ], just in case the not-particularly-bug-free game engine decided to corrupt a save, such that you could return to a previous save in case of corruption and keep playing on, instead of having to abandon a game in progress, GREAT!
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