Edge is full of shit. It’s very, very rare that I criticize the bible of gaming magazines, but for once I think their game elitism went to their head. For once. I’m sure a lot of people scoff, thinking “just once?” but I’m not haggling about that here. Today’s topic, class, is a bit more far reaching than one magazine’s asinine grasp on a concept – their voice is just the latest in a chorus I’ve heard too often: Quicksave is bad!
Why? I’ve wondered that myself and the most common argument against it is that it makes the game too easy. Edge acknowledges that part, but also argues that it spoils the rhythm of the game (Difficulty Curve, Edge 132). That, to me, is like saying the pause function on a DVD player is a stupid idea. Watch the whole chapter or don’t watch it at all!
Okay, there is an opposite school of thought as well. On occasion you hear PC gamers voice their disdain with the checkpoint system in Far Cry. While it suited the game’s mechanics well, it broke the traditional quick save rules that most FPS games endear and a lot of players did not like the game dictate to them how they should play. Painkiller went through this lambasting to a lesser extend, since it also sported a waypoint system. PC gamers loath save points and anything of that kin, so much so that Silent Hill 2 was released on PC with a quick-save feature.
It’s not a console versus PC thing, though. The cries for removing quick saves seem to come from everywhere. The PC is just more adept at it, having a hard-drive and more than enough keys to spare, but it’s really a matter of taste. The hardcore players seem to prefer taking their games in single shots, while more casual prefer to lounge at the bar and leisurely suck on their beers. I’m part of the beer crowd – I like taking my games in at a pace and decide when I’ve had enough. This is the beauty of the quick save: you do it when you need to, instead of racing in a flat panic to the next checking point.
Granted, it does spoil things a little, but you only notice it when it isn’t there. Pounding away at Halo’s infuriating Hunters might have made me want to tap an F key if I had one, but you never think of that as you try and strafe plasma blasts. But Halo had two things going for it. The check points were so close to each other that it could practically count as a quick save feature and when you died it loaded instantly, so you were never far from where you died, both physically and in time. Not all games with a controlling save feature give you that much thought. There are some serious worst-case scenarios in the save-point world. Diablo 2 often forced a player through a lot before you could get back to town and save (not that anyone minded, really, but the Diablo series never did any evil in most eyes). Grand Theft Auto notoriously only allowed you to save at the end of the city – a pill too tough for most to swallow and one they routinely corrected with churches in GTA 2.
Auto saving also comes with other pitfalls. Most games don’t save your progress in separate files, simply overwriting your profile. That means that you can’t really track back to specific moments in a game. While quick saving never allows that luxury, you can always jump to the menu and make a proper save entry. It’s a rare pleasure, but sometimes you want to show someone a cool scene you encountered and you don’t feel like outwitting the fifty plus opponents between you and that moment. Besides, it would be rude to play games on your own when you have guests.
But there’s a blindingly perfect piece of reasoning for quick saving. If you don’t like it, just ignore it. This is the thing I don’t get about the ‘No Quick Save’ campaign. Since it doesn’t exactly affect your game, because you choose when to save, why complain about it? I’ve yet to encounter a game that forces you to quick save every two minutes (except maybe Call of Duty, but that’s a matter of survival) and it’s left entirely in the gamer’s finger whether or not his saving is making things boring or ‘ruin[s] a game’s rhythm’. If it mystifies you why someone saves in the middle of a boss fight, guess what: there are a lot of things that will mystify you because sometimes there is no explaining for the things people do. They just do then because they think it’s a good idea. And if that invades with how you play your game, perhaps it’s time to get out and make a few real friends.
No, it’s probably not that socio-pathetic. I think it’s more a matter of purists. Or idiots. Perhaps is because it allows gamers to not have to save. Didn’t Garfield say that a lazy person invented power steering? Perhaps that same inventor doodled the concept of checkpoints during his lunch break.
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