Four_Candles wrote:
Couldn't agree more - the lack of a manual save bugs me too. I can live with it, but the reliance on checkpoints to autosave aren't ideal. Presumably there are technical and/or gameplay reasons why it's like this .......... ?
It's really starting to get on my tits, as far as I can tell there's absolutely no technical reason not to allow saving at will, the best reference I can find is that they 'want actions to have consequences', which is all very well and good but I'm quite happy with my actions having consequences in the real world, without a game dropping that shit on me too.
It bugs me on several levels:
1) If I'm playing late(ish) at night I don't know how long I'll have to play to (a) get to a checkpoint and (b) If AE Jnr will wake up and therefore end my session for the evening. The checkpoints aren't exactly generous, and if you're a real 'explore everything' sort of player like I am, it's possible to be a good 15-20 minutes of play away from a checkpoint at any given time. To mitigate this I therefore find myself stopping play before I otherwise would, in case it gets to the point where I need to go to bed or have to see to AE Jnr, because I have no ability to save at my own 'stop point'.
2) It fucks up the game, part of the joy of the original Bioshock (and a lot of games IMO) is trying to do the same section in different ways. Bioshock Infinite gives you all these toys to play around with, but then basically says 'Yeah but I'm only going to give you one chance to use them per event'.
3) Linked to (2), it removes the ability to practice and really get a feel for the mechanics of the game.
4) Accidents can fuck you over. I accidentally killed a friendly NPC (I was still getting my mouse button mappings sorted out), so not only did I miss out on some story that he could convey to me, I'd made a 'bad decision' that could never be undone.
5) Little quicktime events where you have to make a choice in a few seconds and the choice is permanent seems like an unnecessarily harsh game mechanic at the best of times, but you know what, hey, my mobile just fucking rung as I triggered one, so I didn't even get to the make the choice because I was distracted.
I sometimes wonder if the people who decide on game mechanics like this actually think about how people out in the real world might react to some of their decisions?
Anyone who doesn't want to save and experience the game in a 'pure' fashion could simply decide for themselves
not to use the fucking save functionality, or just build it in as EXTRA mode like X-Com did with Ironman.
Taking save functionality out of a game seems both mean-spirited and a very poor design choice to me, and it's actively lessening my enjoyment of the game.
Hopefully someone will mod proper save functionality in. (There's already a bit of a clunky workaround for it.)