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Psychotic on 12 September 2014
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Alby_da_Wolf said:

Well, this is very hardcore. If the game can be finished in different ways even after botching a checkpoint, fine, but getting stuck without remedy and having to start again, even without a true permadeath, would be frustrating. Also, for this to work well, a perfect design is needed for the main quest and subquests and the most important dialogs, because botching important choices due to not getting a subtlety or rushing a delicate decision is challenging, but botching them because there weren't enough infos and clues to decide, or they were spread around so that they could be found more by chance than following a logical thread is frustrating.
Edit: for some reasons I can't explain I feel I could like that system in Souls series, but not in Diablo 2. Are you sure about Diablo 2? I haven't played it, but I played Throne of Darkness that uses its engine and leveling, skills and magic schools system and it had normal free saves and no autosave (or if there was it, it wasn't mandatory and the last save wasn't the only one available).
BTW a single autosave triggered when you're low on health and without ways to escape or time to use a healing potion or spell would be equivalent to permadeath.
OTOH, in racing games, I'm perfectly fine and I consider the right thing not being able to save during a race, or at most, for long ones, being able to autosave just at the point when I suspended playing to continue later, without being able to reload previous favourable saves if after them I committed mistakes, and I'm fine if after a crash the race is over and it can only be started again from the beginning. But it's different, except long rallies, even long endurance races in real time are 24 hours long, and even not allowing reloads except the last one in championships, they can be a dozen races long or little more and they can often be won even not finishing a few races. Edit#2: Or you can end a championship in a position lower than first, but you still ended it, you don't totally lose all you did.

 

Yes, Diablo II autosaves every two minutes and the only way to quit the game is a "Save and Exit Game" option. It's a PC game, so there are always workarounds, of course. I would know, Diablo II was the game that made me switch from consoles to PC gaming in 2001... only to switch back to consoles when 7th gen came out.

I wasn't arguing for perma-death, though. Both games have their systems made so that can never get stuck anywhere - The Souls series has items that send you back to to town from anywhere and in Diablo 2 you always spawn in town when you load a save - even if you have the optional perma-death on, you can just pause the game, quit it and reaload it to save yourself from certain death.

The first thing anyone says is "If you don't want to be able to save every few seconds, then just don't", but the game has to be designed for that if it's to be engaging... when I can save but just don't and then die and have to backtrack, it's frustrating instead of encouraging.