Special Report
PCG INVESTIGATES
Developers weigh-in on save scumming
We all save scummed in Baldur’s Gate III, right? A bad roll, fight’s not going well, time to mash quick load, baby. In stealth games this behaviour may manifest as a compulsion to pull the ripcord every time you get spotted, while 4Xs see us setting up a temporal base camp right before declaring a risky war. But what if living with the consequences of your actions could be fun? Usually I’d say I do enough of that in real life, but a recent dalliance with Baldur’s Gate III’s permadeath Honour mode gave me pause.
With save scumming at the top of our minds, it was time to get to the bottom of things by asking a professional for their take. Five professionals, in fact: two RPG developers, and three who work on immersive sims, aka ‘the thinking man’s FPS’, aka those games where you crouch walk everywhere and knock guys unconscious.
First up is Nick Pechenin, lead systems designer on none other than Baldur’s Gate III itself. From the start, Pechenin bristles a little at the value judgement inherent in the term “save scumming,” arguing that it’s “making a sin out of routine player behaviour”.
Pechenin further elaborates on a player-first philosophy towards the practice: it’s your money and free time, so you decide how you approach the game. While Pechenin acknowledges there’s always a risk of save scumming getting out of hand, he thinks it’s up to a game’s developers to head it off, “The designer’s job is to avoid creating a situation where a susceptible player can fall into this trap.” Pechenin pointed to interesting failure states that you wouldn’t necessarily want to erase as a way to keep players from getting their scum on, recalling a dynasty-ending Crusader Kings III succession crisis that was “so perfectly authentic [he] could not bring himself to reload and ‘fix’ it”.
Coming from the opposite direction, Pechenin praised ‘quick rewind’ functions in racing games, which turn that trial-and-error of a quick load into part of the game itself instead of something abstracted through menus. That segues right into our second developer, or rather, developers: Team Fortune, the two-person team behind the Early Access FPS-immersive sim Fortune’s Run.
It’s a fast-paced game with very few autosaves, instead leaving it to the player to decide where their checkpoints should be via quicksaves. On top of that, Team Fortune implemented a rewind animation on loading a save similar to what Pechenin describes. “We really just wanted to have some kind of cinematic or narrative framing for the transition,” a Team Fortune member explains, wanting to minimise the feeling of it being “a technical feature”.
