Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Reloading the game on failed checks?

So my game is "broken." My game is "degraded." So what? Did it happen to your game? No it didn't. It happened to my game. MY game. And what happens to MY game is none of your business. I'm sure next you'll be saying you need to come into my house to check up on me and make sure I'm playing my game the way you think I should be playing it.

This is not a question on which there are equally valid differing points of view. There is only one valid pov: people should be able to play THEIR game THEIR way. To say otherwise is you trying to deny me my right to play my game my way, and that is the very definition of tyranny and oppression.

XCom’s system is easy enough to exploit if you want to. Predetermining rolls only prevents people from taking the same shot until it hits, but there’s always other things you can do with your turn, and now you have advance knowledge of what the next few rolls are going to be. Plus of course the worst thing you can usually do is trigger another pod in a flanking position with your last soldier to move.

What they really did right though is to make a game that’s more fun to play when you do get into dicey situations (excuse the pun) and find a way through. At least more fun for a lot of people. Things are supposed to go wrong, soldiers are supposed to get injured and killed, and clawing your way back to eventual victory is arguably the point of the game.

Tabletop D&D is similar in some ways. The most entertaining parts are often when your plan falls hilariously apart and you need to improvise. That’s the design philosophy they need to capture, IMO.

They don’t need to stop players from save scumming if they can make them not even want to. If some people still want everything to go their way, that’s their choice. They might have a lesser experience though.

Maybe they could add a sarcastic achievement for passing every dialogue check?

This is true. Many successful developers see that "players will optimize the fun out of a game." While it is good for developers to give as many freedoms to their players as possible, it is not always good.
Here's a video illustrating the point better than I could ever do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8

I echo the interpretation that Larian seems to be designing interesting opportunities to arise from failure to make failing checks as exciting as succeeding on them. As a recovering scum-saver, myself, I hope these opportunities are interesting enough to make up for the intrinsic pain of "losing" a skill check. But I'm skeptical.

While games designers do generally know what experience they were designing for, they very definitely do NOT know the experience each player wants. My idea of fun is very definitely not the same as every other player, and not the same as every game designer.

Clearly others disagree, but in my opinion, any form of play-style coercion within a game is the mark of a failed game design.

Players should be allowed to play the game however they want.
If they want to save scum, so be it.

I will definitely reload in some cases, like a char who is very skilled with traps dies because he rolls a natural 1 when disarming a trap.
The exact amount of save scumming will depend on loading times.

Sorry, I didn't read back, maybe someone mentioned already.
I don't remember, but a few games have an optional mode in their menu where you can select that the game always saves automatically after decisions or checks, and the system does not allow to re-load. Maybe it was in Disco Elysium? Or maybe it was some kind of a detective point-and-click advanture game. I don't remember, but I love the idea of this feature, as reloading is killing the immersion.
Sure, we learn in our life that failure is really bad and we need to avoid it, so we do the same during gaming, but for me it breaks the experience, if I reload. Earlier I did it, but I try to avoid it now, and I will master in in BG3.
This would be a cool feature to add to the diffuculty settings!

Why, is your game holding a gun to your head and forcing you to reload?

Could just include an option in the settings to allow the player to enter their own dice values (or perhaps select succeed or fail) in whichever situations bring the dice up on screen. That way if people want to roll their own irl dice they can, or if they want to ‘cheat’ to avoid savescumming past checks they can. If it means disabling achievements or whatever, who cares.

I personally wouldn’t use it, at least not on first playthrough, but I don’t see who it would hurt to include that option. There will be difficulty settings which make combat trivially easy, so I don’t really see the difference with an option which bypasses the RNG element of checks, if the player wants to use it.

is htis bait?
seems like an attempt to turn it into a slippery slope.

I agree that access to cheese makes cheese more likeley to happen. So now, entering a dice value is too far for me.

There doesnt always need to be a "hard distinction", save scumming is ok in a singleplayer game, entering dice values is silly.

One thing we have to remember is that this game would be played in Multiplayer too... Save scumming in a MP is tedious indeed, but Would this option be disabled in MP? The host of the game could turn on or off the option to reload the dice rolls for the entire party? Any player could decide? And if the latter is the case, would that be an unfair advantage?

The only difference between the two is sitting through load times vs. not. Given some players definitely are going to savescum until they pass RNG checks, I don’t know why you wouldn’t give them the option to avoid wasting their time watching load screens.

Again, all I’m suggesting is an optional setting, like trivially easy combat will -quite rightly- be a setting for people who want it. Nobody would be forced to use it who doesn’t want to.

No one is dumb enough to believe that. You're obviously trolling. Go away.

No, I’m offering an alternative to savescumming in a thread specifically about player behaviour surrounding failed checks. Try thinking outside the box: game design doesn’t have to delight in wasting the player’s time and disincentivising certain behaviour through load screens just because ‘that’s how it’s always been done’.

Earlier in this thread you said “Simple: They'll allow it. It's up to the player to decide if they want to save-scum or not.“ Please explain why this ‘It’s up to the player to decide...’ logic applies to savescumming, but *doesn’t* apply to an optional setting which achieves the exact same thing as savescumming but bypasses the load screens.

There’s also the functionality of allowing players to roll their own dice on checks to consider, which I expect some will want to do if the game is going to keep the ‘hold everything, we’re doing a dice roll’ mechanism on checks.

See. This is, as ive pointed out in other threads, the danger of Reductionism.

"Its the same" the reductionist claims.
Theres a logic to the reductionist arguments. Savescumming is just entering the value yu want with extra steps.

The Reductionist argument however can also be applied to any other part of gameplay. "Retrying an encounter till you beat it is just skipping the encounter with extra steps"

Thats why Reductionism always ends up sounding like a slippery slope to people.

If you make a Reductionist argument, you always ALWAYS have to include ALL the variables.
In the case of the Savescumming, the "Extra steps" part is still part of the expirience.
The User will not feel like entering whatever roll you want is part of the core expirience.
Saving and loading representing a virtual "failure" state is historically ingrained into the mind of players.

In short, people know that save scumming is "bypassing" the System of the game.
Thus savescumming is for people who are aware, and want to be made aware that they are bypassing the game.
Just entering whatever you want is on the same level as a "skip boss fight" button.
It bypasses the games system but without making the player aware, taking him out of the game so to speak.
Without letting the player expirience that "game over" in a way.

The Barrier to entry is a real metric you cannot ignore. The barrier to entry is not just "annoying" it speaks about intent.

So in reality id argue its not the same.

Still think It´s easier for people that want to play that way to use a Universal Memory Editor, like cheat engine or bit slicer.

The option that is demanded in this thread is basically that you have automatic successes in all your checks, so you do not have to reload. That could be easily accomplished with a 3rd party editor instead of making Larian give you an option to bypass the rules of WOTC and his own game.
I think everybody knows that at some point there´s going to appear god-mode mods, cheat engine tables, etc as in any game, basically, the demand of this thread is for Larian to give you the option to cheat in their own game.

In the single-player mode you are free to play as you want, of course, but I think the resources of Larian are better spent elsewhere ( More companions and NPCs, Voices, UI refinements, but fixing, a day/night cycle) if you already have options to make yourself a cheat to bypass the game´s rules.

You are equating the ability of players to reload with manually entering numbers into every dice roll if they don't like it. Would you prefer if the game keeps one save file and one save file only and overwrites it, writing to the hard disc, with each and every dice roll, just to prevent some random people from possibly save-scumming?

If you say you do prefer that ridiculous, resource-intensive system, you are trolling, go away. If you say you do NOT prefer that system, you only bothered equating the two things to stir up trouble. Hence, you are still trolling, go away.

Erm, doesn’t look like trolling to me.

Anyway, I agree that Larian don’t need to add anything to make save scumming even easier, especially if that gives the impression that’s it’s a “proper” way to play the game. I still think the key is to encourage players accept whatever the role is, by making it fun to fail at least sometimes. In most games passing checks equals best outcome, but apparently that’s not always the case here. Also you might not know the real consequences until later.

However Aurok did mention one interesting idea- to allow players to replace the on screen dice roll with rolling a physical dice. Sure it’s completely unnecessary and ripe for being abused, but I quite like it anyway.

So im going to add something here.


Im gonna call it Sordaks Law or Sordaks Law of Reductionist Argumentation:

"If you break down any Everyday situation using reductionist techniques and end up with a simpler rather than a more complex solution or question to the obvious one, you did something wrong or you forgot some variables"

Sounds like your law takes the concept of Reductionist Techniques and reduces it to a simple solution.

Right.




If you mean, a human picks up a die and rolls it next to their keyboard, there's no way to get that input into the game other than by allowing the human to manually enter their number in. Larian is not likely to allow for that because even though they do want to let players the way they want as much as possible, they are not adverse to adjusting things in their games which they feel are unbalanced (such as being able to stack Lone Wolf and Glass Cannon in DOS 1's alpha). Switching the implementation of status effects between DOS 1 and DOS 2 is another example.

Original Sin 1 had an RNG-based system where chances of a status landing were a roll of the dice, which, for some players, encouraged save-scumming. DOS 2's armor-based status prevention lost the highs of landing a lucky status and the lows of getting screwed by an enemy status landing, and exchanged that for reliability and consistency. The change was not without controversy among players of DOS 1, but it's likely that one side-effect of the consistency was probably a reduction in save-scumming.