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BoTWs save system seems at odds with itself

We really have people who want to redo segments they've already completed.

Yall crazy. The save states are fine.

People praise Dark Souls for this but then they end up skipping shit just to run to bosses anyway. I'll never understand the want for a more restrictive save system *shrug*
 
Being able to save anywhere - especially when the game autosaves constantly and reloads from your last autosave if you die - is definitely a god mode power, yes.

It's fine for Zelda to not be a truly difficult game - it is Zelda, of course, and it's meant to be accessible. But a game that basically doesn't make you repeat anything upon death can't ever really be challenging. So it's natural that people who want a more challenging game would hope for BotW to be more punishing that it is. (It is also true that, being an open-world game, you couldn't easily make it even as punishing as something like a Souls game, but I imagine there must be some middle ground.)

But you do have to repeat whatever you died against.

Making you do something you already beat or cleared isnt difficulty in a game like this. It's just tedious.
 
If you wanted to add some challenge involving saves, there's a lot of things you could do other than remove the ability to save anywhere/anytime. You could say a manual save raises difficulty slider up a notch from the default (whichever mode you're playing in) for a period of time (invisible timer). Maybe loading from a save does the same.

Game Overs = optional losses (Choose your penalty! 300 Rupees or 10 Ice Arrows or Extend Duration of Raised Difficulty or 1 ___ (some strong weapon in your inventory).

Maybe stuff like that will happen in the upcoming Hard Mode.
 
Traversing is so long and frequent along with sooo many loot grabs....frequent saving is a necessity. Imagine working your way up that mountainl to slip off and lose everything. It'd be more painful than dark souls since it's much more free in where you could decide to go at any moment

I guess in a super hard mode they could take it out. But it'd be rough in a game this large. You'd be deincintivized to explore in crazy ways and stick to paths only at first. And AI placement are not frequent enough to support the player that doesn't take shortcuts throughout, so there would be a lot of slow ass walking with little gameplay in between
 
The point is that it feels like a Mario game where you could save after each successful jump. Zelda always handled it in a good way, but not this time.
 
Totally disagree.

The game slows you to stockpile consumables, which means that if you couldn't get killed very easily, it would be really easy and exploitable. Because you can die easily, and to encourage experimentation, the saves are very frequent. Remove one of these things, and the whole game gets thrown out of balance.
 
I think the save system is perfect, since I don't need to do it manually and is subtle as you play. And when I do want to experiment a bit, I manually save.
 
I really don't feel like the save system is in any way impacting the challenge of the game... Like others have said forcing save points increases tedium not challenge.

Besides, I have never been fearful of enemy encounters in Zelda than I am in this game. But at the same time I can experiment and if it doesn't work out come back later.
 
I don't really think it's an issue sure the save system can be "abused" but that just means your not using it as intended and it doesn't actually change the game unless you decide to do it. So my question is how would this save system be out of odds with the game if the game does not intend you to use it as such?

Besides that i find at my age and in my situation (kids, work etc) i greatly appreciate being able to save anytime, in fact i find it strange that this is an issue. I mean for years every game that came out with strict saves systems and bad checkpoints was lambasted and here we are now picking apart a save system that works because it can be abused?
 
The point is that it feels like a Mario game where you could save after each successful jump. Zelda always handled it in a good way, but not this time.

Which is good because they threw the old tired formula and did something different. The save system is fine and works perfectly for the way the game is set up.
 
There's too much unforeseen and RNG shit in this game that can kill you for this to be remotely acceptable. If I died because I just happened to get struck by lightning (for example) and had to start back an hour ago, I'd never touch the game again.
 
Which is good because they threw the old tired formula and did something different. The save system is fine and works perfectly for the way the game is set up.

Not for everything. Old Zelda games are better than Breath of the Wild in some aspects. So it's a good thing Nintendo reflect on those for their next entry.
 
There's too much unforeseen and RNG shit in this game that can kill you for this to be remotely acceptable. If I died because I just happened to get struck by lightning (for example) and had to start back an hour ago, I'd never touch the game again.

Lightning strikes aren't RNG at all, though.
 
Being able to save anywhere - especially when the game autosaves constantly and reloads from your last autosave if you die - is definitely a god mode power, yes.

It's fine for Zelda to not be a truly difficult game - it is Zelda, of course, and it's meant to be accessible. But a game that basically doesn't make you repeat anything upon death can't ever really be challenging. So it's natural that people who want a more challenging game would hope for BotW to be more punishing that it is. (It is also true that, being an open-world game, you couldn't easily make it even as punishing as something like a Souls game, but I imagine there must be some middle ground.)
You keep confusing difficulty with tedium. Having to repeat the same things because you slipped up once isn't hard. It's annoying and it's why the soulsbourne games will never be more than a niche series.
 
Dark souls fans in a dark souls thread:
"We dont want people changing our game. It's what the creators intended"

Dark souls fans in this thread
"They should change the save system, I don't care if it's what the creators intended."

Look, if you want to make the game harder for yourself, you can easily do that. You never have to get more than 3 hearts and you can be naked with no defense, and you can choose to load from older saves or only ones you make. I only got the dungeon hearts on my first run, no shirt, and no orb hearts only stamina. I had a difficult and great time and I'm glad I can choose to make the game that way for myself. You can too. Options are always a good thing and you can have this game be as easy or as hard as you want it, but the save system is a great thing that offer flexibility to everyone to play how they want.
 
Can you imagine, everytime you want to experiment with something you have to save just in case? It seems to be really at odds with the kind of game it is.

Ya...this is my gripe. I hate having to remember to save. The auto saving is pretty frequent in this so I really just try to manual save right before I quit.
 
Not for everything. Old Zelda games are better than Breath of the Wild in some aspects. So it's a good thing Nintendo reflect on those for their next entry.

While that may be true, the old save system with the new game just doesn't work. It would disrupt the flow. With the new Zelda being such a success I would expect more experimentation not a regression to the old formula.
 
It's balance. Walking into a boss fight for the first time, not knowing what to do, getting my ass beat, then having to traverse for 5 solid minutes forces me to consider planning and technique because I sure as shit don't want to make the trek a third time. It forces me to think and I like that.

The current option allows me to meet the boss, get beat, start a few steps from the fight essentially making it a trial and error encounter. The fight itself is still challenging, sure, but it's like strong-arming a solution instead of calculating one. A thought out solution I personally find more rewarding. Though I know it may not be for everyone.



Success through repetition vs. risk. I hate to use the common example of the Souls games but a big reason they became so popular was due to the rewarding feeling of success after risking so much.

In every game with walks to a boss like this I'm always precalculating solutions to the boss and trying them in best order. Walks to boss are patronizing and boring and you should be getting multiple attempts in on one life.

Titan Souls is an especially terrible game for this where you have 1 hit and you're dead with an incredibly boring walk.
 
Dark souls fans in a dark souls thread:
"We dont want people changing our game. It's what the creators intended"

Dark souls fans in this thread
"They should change the save system, I don't care if it's what the creators intended."

Look, if you want to make the game harder for yourself, you can easily do that. You never have to get more than 3 hearts and you can be naked with no defense, and you can choose to load from older saves or only ones you make. I only got the dungeon hearts on my first run, no shirt, and no orb hearts only stamina. I had a difficult and great time and I'm glad I can choose to make the game that way for myself. You can too. Options are always a good thing and you can have this game be as easy or as hard as you want it, but the save system is a great thing that offer flexibility to everyone to play how they want.


Lots of good answers in this thread, but this is the best summation of all the best ones <3
 
Agreed. The game lacks any urgency due to the ease of saving.



Nah. He isn't.

The game kinda lacks any sense of urgency period though. The game doesn't even start you off with some big story like more open world games tend to do to push you forward from the start. Instead in BotW, the story moments are done minimally which goes very far in giving the game a very openness feeling to explore at your leisure.
 
You keep confusing difficulty with tedium. Having to repeat the same things because you slipped up once isn't hard. It's annoying and it's why the soulsbourne games will never be more than a niche series.

Modern souls games are like multi-million sellers. I don't see how a game that sells like 3 million+ is a niche. There is a thirst out there for tougher games for sure. Difficulty is defined by lots of things, and the amount of obstacles in a row is one of them. Think of it like running. Anyone can run for like a hundred feet, running several miles is tougher. Consistency over a length of time is a huge part of difficulty.
 
The thing is that the game persistently autosaves when the player performs an activity that the game deems worthy. However because of the agency that the game provides, the player might spend an awfully large amount of time on an activity that they deem, worthy.

So while the player might spend 30 minutes hunting deer to cook some meat or whatever, and the game is happy to have them lose their progress there, the game will happily autosave at the end of a shrine or whatever the game deems significant.

The only way to compensate this is to allow the player to save themselves, so that they can preserve the value of what they deem worthwhile.

Ultimately though, the way you use the save system doesn't affect anyone but you, and as a single player game I don't see why people care. You can certainly exploit the save system in such a way that would make the game easier for you, than it would be for many others, but at the same time such exploitation is not something you can easily stumble into. If you want a greater sense of urgency, as people describe, then simply stop saving the game all of the time.
 
You keep confusing difficulty with tedium. Having to repeat the same things because you slipped up once isn't hard. It's annoying and it's why the soulsbourne games will never be more than a niche series.

It is difficult. Spaced-out checkpoints like those in the Souls series mean more is asked of the player. (For example, in Demon's Souls, beating a level requires a player to be competent and consistent enough to beat an individual stage and its boss in one continuous sitting. In a hypothetical version of Demon's Souls that allowed you to save between every individual encounter or something, beating a level only means the player was just competent enough to beat a bunch of separate, individual battles. It is undeniable that overcoming one large challenge is more difficult and tense than beating many smaller ones. (Another poster made a comparison to a hypothetical Mario game that saved after every single jump you made. It should be self-evident how joyless of an experience that would be.)

A lot of people say that Zelda's save system enables experimentation, that they wouldn't try certain risky things if they had potential lost progress on the line. That's fine - due to its structure, Zelda clearly isn't the kind of game you could just drop large, spaced-out checkpoints into - but the fact is that a game where you don't have the option to just beat your head against a challenge until it gives way (a game where you have to treat each attempt seriously due to the stakes of failure) is always going to be more difficult than one with constant, frequent autosaves and the option to save wherever you want.
 
Dark souls fans in a dark souls thread:
"We dont want people changing our game. It's what the creators intended"

Dark souls fans in this thread
"They should change the save system, I don't care if it's what the creators intended."

Look, if you want to make the game harder for yourself, you can easily do that. You never have to get more than 3 hearts and you can be naked with no defense, and you can choose to load from older saves or only ones you make. I only got the dungeon hearts on my first run, no shirt, and no orb hearts only stamina. I had a difficult and great time and I'm glad I can choose to make the game that way for myself. You can too. Options are always a good thing and you can have this game be as easy or as hard as you want it, but the save system is a great thing that offer flexibility to everyone to play how they want.

Game is a designed set of rules. Options are not good in this case. Thinking about it having a button to fly, a weapon to kill monsters in one hit and how it would kill the enjoyablitiy of the game even though you have the option of not doing it.
 
Game is a designed set of rules. Options are not good in this case. Thinking about it having a button to fly, a weapon to kill monster in one hit and how it would kill the enjoyablitiy of the game even though you have the option of not doing it.

Why would that kill the enjoyability of the game? I wouldn't do that, I wouldn't play it that way and I don't have to. If someone wants to play the game with one hit kills (which isn't actually an option on most enemies, but whatever) that's fine for them. I don't care what other people do or how other people play the game. Maybe they play with the defense 3 buff on all the time? So what? It doesn't affect my battles with the blights or lynels.

Edit: maybe a bad example but in Half life you are a few keystrokes away from God mode and infinite ammo. I still play that game without those things even tho that is an option.
 
Ignoring the save anywhere feature (as I do), the auto saves are still a little too forgiving, dying is a total non issue because you're either placed in the exact same spot you died at or wherever you were 2 minutes ago.

The game just auto saves too often.
 
The save system is fine, especially since it's an open world game. Look at almost any other open world game, Skyrim, Fallout, all of those allow saving anywhere.

The game does auto-save too, so if you really want to limit yourself, just only manually save at campfires or campfires you make yourself.
 
Why would that kill the enjoyability of the game? I wouldn't do that, I wouldn't play it that way and I don't have to. If someone wants to play the game with one hit kills (which isn't actually an option on most enemies, but whatever) that's fine for them. I don't care what other people do or how other people play the game. Maybe they play with the defense 3 buff on all the time? So what? It doesn't affect my battles with the blights or lynels.
They use the unbalanced tools that the game gives, play the game and have a meh experience. As a game developer I want to avoid this for sure.

Edit: maybe a bad example but in Half life you are a few keystrokes away from God mode and infinite ammo. I still play that game without those things even tho that is an option.

It's called cheat. If people had a bad experience they know it's their own fault for not playing the game they way it's intended.
 
They use the unbalanced tools that the game gives, play the game and have a meh experience. As a game developer I want to avoid this for sure.

A) just because a person plays a game a certain way doesn't mean they have a "meh" experience. Don't assume how someone else enjoys the game just because it's not how you would enjoy the game.

B) the devs put those tools in the game so obviously they didn't mind people use them. Again, I think you are assuming a certain intent by the devs that may or may not be there.
 
Well I like it as it is. It's relaxed and allows me to enjoy the game. Doesn't make the difficult parts any less difficult, but simply not super frustrating having to do lots of busy work to get back to the point you were at before.

Maybe that's just me as I hate forced save game points in games. I like how this saves after anything significant happens. Plus it works in tandem with the system which allows you to sleep and resume from exactly where you left off. As long as you can keep a charge in your Switch you can continue from where you left off for the entire game. This basically just makes deaths a million times more time consuming and frustrating and to me that's not a particularly enjoyable gameplay mechanic.

I feel this is an arbitrary thing that's basically a holdover from ye olde retro games where you couldn't even save the game at all.
 
I love the Souls games.

I love Zelda BotW.

Zelda BotW =/= Dark Souls

Zelda doesn't want to punish you for death. It's a core gameplay choice, clear as day. I'm glad they made it this way so I can say "Fuck it" and try something fun and crazy.
 
I actually think it's not generous enough.

I saved mid-shrine last night, and when I reloaded they put me back at the start of the shrine.

I'm all for convenience.
 
A) just because a person plays a game a certain way doesn't mean they have a "meh" experience. Don't assume how someone else enjoys the game just because it's not how you would enjoy the game.

B) the devs put those tools in the game so obviously they didn't mind people use them. Again, I think you are assuming a certain intent by the devs that may or may not be there.

I abused of the save system and I know that I'd have a better reward experience if I hadn't done this. But I'm not a masochist enough to backtrack that if the game doesn't force me to do it. Also I know that's their intention and that's why I'm criticizing it for what worked or not in my experience.
 
In a game where you can easily kill yourself just from trying stuff out, I'm happy I can save whenever. Limited saves would just be obnoxious in this game and it'd make people play really cautiously.
 
Dark Souls has ruined a generation of gamers into believing challenge come from difficulty and tedium. Thankfully, we have alternative to that in Breath of the Wild.
 
Dark Souls has ruined a generation of gamers into believing challenge come from difficulty and tedium. Thankfully, we have alternative to that in Breath of the Wild.

I haven't even played Dark Souls but what the fuck is this? Repeating stuff on death is not necessarily forcing "tedium" on a player, it's forcing the player to learn the game and get better. I don't believe it works with BotW but there's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of save system.
 
Considering how many enemies can one shot you, how finicky the physics can be and how much progress that can cost you, this would be the worst idea.
 
I would prefer a punishment system with constant saving and no loading (so, Souls is right). Unraveling a well-designed level is very different story than searching through an overly large world with little direction or limits filled with collectables. BotW's exploration depends a lot on novelty and collecting any one of the 900 seeds or doing one of the 120 shrines just once is more than enough.

It is difficult. Spaced-out checkpoints like those in the Souls series mean more is asked of the player. (For example, in Demon's Souls, beating a level requires a player to be competent and consistent enough to beat an individual stage and its boss in one continuous sitting. In a hypothetical version of Demon's Souls that allowed you to save between every individual encounter or something, beating a level only means the player was just competent enough to beat a bunch of separate, individual battles. It is undeniable that overcoming one large challenge is more difficult and tense than beating many smaller ones. (Another poster made a comparison to a hypothetical Mario game that saved after every single jump you made. It should be self-evident how joyless of an experience that would be.)

A lot of people say that Zelda's save system enables experimentation, that they wouldn't try certain risky things if they had potential lost progress on the line. That's fine - due to its structure, Zelda clearly isn't the kind of game you could just drop large, spaced-out checkpoints into - but the fact is that a game where you don't have the option to just beat your head against a challenge until it gives way (a game where you have to treat each attempt seriously due to the stakes of failure) is always going to be more difficult than one with constant, frequent autosaves and the option to save wherever you want.

Well said. Don't even have to say much in this thread lol.

I would add, in response to who you are quoting, the Souls series isn't even niche. It's actually one of the bigger new franchises of the previous gen and it has a lot to do with its design surrounding punishment. Completely bogus claim from someone who would like to think everyone agrees with him for some reason.

Dark Souls has ruined a generation of gamers into believing challenge come from difficulty and tedium. Thankfully, we have alternative to that in Breath of the Wild.

Challenge doesn't come from difficulty? What? And the alternative is a much easier game? Yes, clearly, Dark Souls have ruined the millennials - which would include almost everyone who grew up playing Zelda games. What generation are you in?
 
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