Video gaming is such a complex industry that you might not even think about some of the “necessities” that many would be mad about not having in a title, and then what those “necessities” do to the developers that attempt to make the games great. For example, let’s talk about saving the game. For a time, that was an impossible and unnecessary task due to how games were built and the point of playing them. Then, they became a necessary part of gaming due to the complexities and length that games soon had. Yet, Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer sees manual saving as a bit of a…problem.
He voiced his opinion over on Twitter, where he referred to them both as a “mistake” and as the “chicken nuggies” of gaming.
Now, there are levels of “manual saving,” so we need to be specific here. There are manual saves where you go to a certain spot and have to activate a save point to get the data saved onto the system’s memory. He’s not referring to that kind of manual saves. Instead, he’s talking about the kind where players can just open up the menu at any point and save the game.
This is known as “save scrumming,” and players use it to help ensure they don’t make a massive mistake or take a path dialogue-wise that they didn’t mean to. Some, like Sawyer, clearly view it as “cheap,” and yet, it’s something that many people like to do because it can save time, and doesn’t make them feel like what they’ve been doing is a waste because they have to start all the way back at the beginning of a section.
Elsewhere, another director from a Bethesda published title noted:
“I don’t disagree, but I let the gamers decide how they want to play, some just can’t play without it.”
That’s true, there are many games out there that are so deep and layered that making a simple mistake or wrong choice in dialogue or path options could lead to a totally different result. A certain game from Larian Studios comes to mind on that front.
For Fallout New Vegas players, they might save scrum because they might not be ready for a fight that’s about to happen, so they’ll save before it, see what’s going on with it, and then if they can’t win, they’ll start over and come back when they’ve got better gear and higher levels.
So, developers may not like it, but gamers definitely do it.
