Let's All Hate Lucasarts Day to become Let's All Hate Lucasarts, Period?

[A Black Falcon]

(this isn't on the main subject, you know, so you can read it...)

I would like to resolve the minor issue of quicksaves (first, anyway...). I see plenty of common ground here for a resolution there at least. Fine, in quicksaves you can save anytime and if you mash the button without fail every two minuites it's the best save system. Quicksaves mixed with some form of autosave (at area entries?) is the best system probably, though... it's got the advantages of quicksave, but without the issue of losing massive blocks of time if you forget to save for a while and die (depending on the size of areas...). Now, I don't think I ever lost lots of time in, say, Eternal Darkness, but if I hadn't been so faithful about saving a lot it'd certainly have been possible. I know it's in a completely different genre but Baldur's Gate II is what I'm playing most now and it's a good example here... it does have autosaves at area entries but areas are large. I've lost at least half an hour of play, maybe more, three or four times now by dying... I'm doing well, breezing through... stop quicksaving... then hit a really hard fight and die. And of course once the enemies are onscreen it's too late -- no saving while in combat.

BG&E? If the saves put you in places where you were right before some challenge and after dying had to do it over and over to get to the area beyond you well might have a much better point -- ie, if the auto-restore points weren't so numerous. But they are. They're before every single room! As I said it greatly reduces the frustration of dying and gets rid of the frusteration of doing a challenge twice, but isn't that frusteration a big part of what makes games challenging? Too much of it is bad, sure, but BG&E just has too little.

So yes, if you could quicksave you could save halfway through a room and maybe make some things a bit easier. But on the whole I'd say the fact you don't lose any time to death will far, far more than make up for that and make this system actually be one that you complete the game FASTER with than with quicksaves.

Especially given the fact that WHEN YOU DIE IT GIVES YOU FOUR HEALTH! ... uh, I was happy to see it at the time and I'm sure it saved me a couple of the times I died, but thinking about it it's yet another way to drop the difficulty level even lower...