Are you tired of the older generation of gamers feeling superior?

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Psychotic said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

1. Agree about unappealing game mechanics, some were just bad, like it happens in every era, some others were just designed for a few gamers willing to try the same level countless times. Back then it made sense, but I don't miss it, I miss a minority of old classic that made me love them despite all the limitations and sometimes the frustration (but in my first RPG, AD&D: Treasure of Tarmin, I learned that I could grind a little, level up in deeper levels of the dungeon and avoid tougher monsters until I was strong enough, so progressing was still hard, but I almost stopped suffering the frustration of suddenly losing it, and I consider that design choice one of the first true progresses in games with larger worlds and longer campaigns).

2. Hey, but very often we just do it for teh lulz!    ( Except those obsessive-compulsive old platformer maniacs, those are more often serious when they do it )

Well, nothing to argue there Also, more game-changing mechanics were introduced in the newer games - skill trees, level scaling, crafting...

To go back to your original post, it's interesting that you switched to PC because the games allowed saving any time instead of just set save points. My thoughts  are completely opposite, I'd like the save points to return. When I can quicksave the game every two seconds, there's almost no challenge on any difficulty...

I don't want autosave for that reason because it either makes things too easy or it risks messing things if the game offers many possibilities and some are triggered in a way that's not immediately evident. Anyhow, in most games, either saving is possible only during quiet moments, so you can't divide a big battle in many easy chunks, or if it's left possible it isn't a wise choice anyway, because you could reload in a situation in which you haven't enough time to react. BTW this is a flaw in some games with worlds divided in small parts united by load points, like Thief III mission levels and central hub, or like when going from outdoors to indoors and vice versa in Morrowind, where the part you leave remains frozen at the moment you left it, so if you were escaping, chased by enemies, you could be trapped and being immediately hit by them as soon as you reenter that world section without time to react, dodge or parry their blows, unless there are other load points to reenter it.
In Gothic 1 and 2 you can lure away from large groups a few enemies that don't gang together like others, or that belong to smaller groups inside larger ones, to make the fight a little easier, but it's not always possible, and unless it's a very small group, it's a tactic that must be combined with others to succeed. And saving during melee battle with many enemies is suicide, the strongest ones can kill even medium-high level players with very few hits, particularly skeletons, that have crappy armour level and rusty weapons, but more than make up for that being very skilled and fast with swords, reloading in the middle of a battle would automatically concede them the first hit.
In free or almost free-roaming games, and even more in sandbox games, free saving, possibly with the aforementioned limitation, is the only way possible, save points need at least some order to make players arrive to them in a consistent way, without missing them completely or without unwillingly skipping a previous part they'd have liked to play because some shortcut made them arrive to the save point earlier than they wanted. About this, the only thing I didn't like in the first Tomb Raider was that many levels had points of no return, once gone past them it wasn't possible to complete the exploration of the previous part of the level if it hadn't already been completed, the only way was to play the whole level again from the start.