DeadFalling said:
Now you can have one save at 5 hours in, one at 6, one at 7 and one at 8 hours, just in case you prioritize the wrong case and wouldn't have enough time to complete them both or something. Or one before a huge decision and one afterward and then one after the NEXT big decision, so you can undo any of your choices made. Breaking the save system also breaks the whole time limit thing imo
Multiple save slots or not, as long as 1) You can still only save manually, at save points, and 2) The time limits are in place, and just as stringent, then I don't think anything's been sacrificed. To complete the game, you'll still need to plan routes that maximize the effectiveness of your time, execute them without taking too long, dying, or just screwing up, and play enough of the game in one shot to go from manual save point to manual save point. That's the essence of the game, and it hasn't changed.
The only thing that it changes is that a player who makes a poor decision and saves himself into a situation where the game is unwinnable, is not forced to restart from the very beginning of the game. The player will still, ultimately, have to roll back to an earlier state of the game, and to win, the player will still need to create and execute a plan good enough to overcome the challenge. That earlier state is just, say, an hour earlier, rather than five hours.
While I had no problems whatsoever myself with the first game, there's a
very valid argument you can make that a player who has successfully managed to reach the five hour mark in the game will, as a given, be able to reach that point again. You're not providing additional challenge to that player by forcing him to repeat five hours of something he's already done - you're just wasting five hours of his time. There's a logical limit to that argument (which is why I insist that the game should still require the player to play in 'chunks' long enough to last from one manual save to the next), but wasting a player's time is hands-down the biggest cardinal sin in game design, so I don't think the argument that it potentially can make the game easier for some players is enough to keep multiple save slots out of the game.
And apart from that, there's at least one tangible benefit that a multiple-save system brings that directly benefits people who want the game to be challenging: You can start a fresh game from level 1, without wiping out everything that you've ever done and collected in the game.
That was my number 1 complaint about Dead Rising 1, so if this fixes it, I'm all for it.
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The two-player co-op news rocks.
Fairly indifferent to the save game changes, I can adapt.