Since I am still very much in a holding pattern waiting for Horizon Forbidden West to drop, I decided to check out another newly released game that I had not actually given a spin. Last week Dying Light 2 released and since I really enjoyed the first game, I had picked up a copy when it launch but for various reasons had not tried it yet. So far the story is interesting enough, even though at least on a surface level the story setup feels pretty similar. In both games you are an outsider traveling into a politically fraught area controlled by many competing factions, and in the process you find yourself infected forcing you to deal with keeping from turning. The core difference this time around is that a generation has passed since the events of Harran and now you are entering one of the last city states that is still functioning after the fall of society.
All was going smoothly right up until the point where my wife mentioned that she was ready for bed. Generally speaking after decades of raiding and indirectly forcing her to conform to that schedule, I try my best now to cut out whenever is reasonable. So my natural instinct was to hit escape and look for a way to save my game… only to find out that there is none. Dying Light 2 is one of many games I have played recently that has removed the ability to manually save the game. Instead it relies on a series of auto checkpoints, and so far I have not discovered a clear means of being able to force one of these events to happen. So ultimately I bailed out of the game hoping that I would not have to repeat a large sequence of game play when I come back… because there are few things I hate worse than having to replay segments I have already finished. Knowing there is no manual save process greatly hampers my enjoyment of the game because I find myself always searching for the optimal time to bail out.
This is not a problem that young and/or single gamers probably even have. The worse thing that happens is you end up staying up a bit later and suffer from little sleep the next day. For me I have been married going on twenty four years now, and in that time I have learned to temper my own game-play in the benefit of maintaining a sense of equilibrium. Control honestly was another game that worried me because similarly it does not have a manual save game system, however scattered throughout the levels are control points. I learned early on that much like a Final Fantasy save crystal, I could interact with any of these to trigger a forced save point allowing me to regain a certain amount of “Control” over my gaming schedule. Maybe Dying Light 2 has a similar mechanic that I have yet to discover but for now it is “doin me a concern”.
When a game however is diametrically opposed to save games, or even the ability to trigger a save point… the truth is I end up bouncing from it. I love Arkane games in general and was really looking forward to Deathloop because everything about that setting interested me. However there is zero way to save progress while in the middle of a loop. You need to be able to make sure you can complete a loop of the game or you might as well not be playing it, and truth be told the week this came out I sat down three times attempting to play through a single loop and each time I got interrupted by something that needed my attention. Each time I had to bail out of the game and found myself retreading the path, collecting items I had already collected, and effectively not having a good time doing it. The truth is that I have not played the game since September of 2021 as a result because I know that it does not really fit my gaming patterns. I can go large amounts of time without leaving the screen, but when I need to bail I need to bail at a moments notice.
So why do companies do this? Ultimately it is protection against a practice known colloquially as “Save Scumming”. If you are not familiar with that term, it is effective saving a game before any major decision and then reloading your save if things did not play out in the way in which you wanted them to. This happens a lot in heavy decision based games, and quite honestly… I hate it personally but have no problem with other people doing it. The last thing I want to do is replay a single sequence over and over until I have arrived at some “optimal” state, and instead am super willing to let the dice rolls fall as they will in order of moving forward and seeing new content. However some game developers appear to REALLY hate “Save Scummers”, and build in systems to thwart their efforts while also fucking up people who have busy lives outside of the games that might need to leave them quickly.
When long form RPGs started showing up on handheld consoles, they had to adapt to the transitory nature of playing games on the go. There are going to be times with a handheld where you absolutely need to get out of the game quickly, and won’t have time even to find your way to the nearest save point. In this scenario the concept of “Save and Quit” was introduced which allows you to take a temporary save point in memory and bail out of the game, allowing you to continue exactly where you left off when you boot the game up next time. Ultimately I think this is the solution that needs to be implemented in those situations where for whatever reason the developer is dead set against manual saves. This solves the problem of needing to get out of the game quickly, but also keeps you from using this save point as a way of rolling back changes as when you load a quick save like this, it destroys the save file.
I am hoping to spend some more time in Dying Light 2 and maybe figure out how to manually trigger the game to save my progress. However that said it already has one pretty hefty strike against it. I firmly believe that games should bend to my needs… not the other way around. Any time you purposefully take a tool away from me in order to manage my game time, it is going to end up frustrating me. Every game is a tug of war between the joy that it brings me and the frustration it causes, and it is pretty easy for that balance to tip…. and cause the game to get chucked into the dustbin. I don’t want that to be the case but lack of save games is a major trigger for me, and it seems to be something that is in vogue with game design currently. Here is hoping that they either stop that shit, or start implementing temporary volatile saves. This is going to become all the more important when the Steam Deck rolls out and effectively ALL PC games become handheld games.
One of my favorite things about the Xbox is Quick Resume. It works on most games I’ve tried it with. You just hit the Xbox button and the console saves the state of the game until the next time you want to play.
A few older games seem to get unstable using it, but generally it works really well. It’s a lot like putting the Switch into Sleep Mode only it works for multiple games at once.
Not saying I don’t agree that devs need to do better at catering to the player’s schedule, but until they do, Quick Resume is a decent band-aid.
Yeah I love that about both of the new consoles. However given that I am MOSTLY a PC gamer, I guess I should have clarified that my core problem revolves around that platform. Steam needs to create a quick resume system imo.