[An4ximandros]

http://www.routinegame.com/

Now this is shaping up to be a good one!

70s-80s Sci-Fi vibe; horror; no saves; no guns. What's not to like?

[FireSpawn]

I just shat all the pants I have ever and will ever wear, at once.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I'll take "Games Never to Play Alone at 0300" for $1200, Alex.

[Scotty]

No saves isn't atmosphere.  When it comes to something like this, unless the entire game is a roguelike/randomized, no saves are lazy bull****.  Hell, limited saves are generally bull****.

[MP-Ryan]

No saves isn't atmosphere.  When it comes to something like this, unless the entire game is a roguelike/randomized, no saves are lazy bull****.  Hell, limited saves are generally bull****.

+1

I can quicksave in Skyrim, to choose one example, whenever I please - in combat, out, on the top of a hill, on top of a horse, whatever.  That doesn't mean I do.  It doesn't make the game "easy" or "cheap," and in fact makes any game much less frustrating.

BioShock Infinite is about the only checkpoint-based game that hasn't driven me completely around the bend, but the emphasis there is on completely.

Some people who play games have family commitments and other things on the go - there is nothing more annoying about gaming than losing 30 minutes of progress because some developer decided to go against a convention that has been established for nearly two decades because it's easier/immersive.  Any developer swho does this should be forced to do a playthrough of their game on its hardest difficulty in installments of 30-90 minutes, where they are forced to randomly quit without warning sometime between the 30 and 90 minutes.  I can bet good money that they'd put in a proper save system.

[An4ximandros]

Lack of saves is because it's a horror sandbox. You go in trying to find out what happened. Then uncover bits of the whole thing and leave. I'll keep my eyes on it. It looks interesting and, if handled well, might excuse the lack of "non quit-saves."

[Phantom Hoover]

The fundamental theorem of horror games is that actually letting the player die is the single worst way to ruin the suspense. Running scared from a threat is utterly terrifying; getting caught in a dead end and dying to it quickly leads to an anticlimax when you remember it's just a game and now you're just going to be replaying the exact same chunk of narrative. Permadeath simply increases the size of that chunk, and I have no idea how these people think it will enhance the experience.

[Nuke]

i remember when you had to play an entire game in one sitting without saves.

[StarSlayer]

That happened to my copy of Dark Forces.  It wouldn't hold on to saves so I would have to try to beat the whole thing in one sitting.

[Klaustrophobia]

i'm gonna agree that no saves is a HUGE thing not to love

[Kobrar44]

Yeah, I think permadeath should be a game mode, not the entire game. But this way they can spare developement time!

[Scotty]

Spare development time?  How ****ing hard is it to enable "quicksave"?

[General Battuta]

I think permadeath and no quicksaves is a good design decision for some types of games.

[Phantom Hoover]

Spare development time?  How ****ing hard is it to enable "quicksave"?

well a save system is a massive investment depending on how robust it is, but you already need a robust save system in order to implement permadeath (otherwise forcing the game to crash when you're ****ed becomes worthwhile)

[Dragon]

Well, there's always the old "quit the game, backup the save, re-enter". Tedious, but functional.

[Phantom Hoover]

nethack may or may not once have circumvented that by encoding the inode (unique file ID on unices) into the savefile itself and deleting it if they didn't match

[BloodEagle]

Spare development time?  How ****ing hard is it to enable "quicksave"?

It depends.  Are we talking about a linear corridor shooter or a sandbox game?  How about an RPG with thousands of potential flags?  What about levels that you can revisit?  Are individual objects moveable?  Do NPCs respawn?  Do the NPCs need to remember what they were thinking about at the time of the save?

And are we talking about an actual 'quicksave' or simply tying a hotkey to the save functionality?  Will the experience suffer if a player has to wait two seconds for the save to finish?  What about longer?

Save systems can be really complex, at times.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I think permadeath and no quicksaves is a good design decision for some types of games.

I'll hold off on judging the game until I play it, but I (tentatively) agree. Having been playing a lot of adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress, perma-death is an effective way of creating tension. It can be frustrating sometimes when it seems that everything is conspiring to ruin the time and effort you put in to the game, but I can understand the design decision.

[The E]

Lack of saves is because it's a horror sandbox. You go in trying to find out what happened. Then uncover bits of the whole thing and leave. I'll keep my eyes on it. It looks interesting and, if handled well, might excuse the lack of "non quit-saves."

In a game abotu exploration/investigation, having no quicksave/checkpointing system is more frustrating than anything else. It doesn't increase tension, it only creates frustration when you (inevitably) fail and then realize that you're going to have to repeat everything up to the point where you died.

I agree that permadeath and no quicksaves can be a perfectly valid design decision (FTL, for example, does it pretty well), but there's a reason why almost no games do this today, and it has nothing at all to do with the old "games today are all for casuals" chestnut.

[Scourge of Ages]

They haven't really released all the details about it yet, have they?

I see two logical possibilities:
1) Designed world, set storyline, checkpoint saves, but they're pretty sparse, to give you more motivation to try to live.
2) Procedural world, roguelike gameplay. Permadeath-hard-stop, start over, deady. But you can save and exit if you need to.

But if they go with true permadeath on an actual designed world, then you'll be seeing the exact same stuff A LOT and it'll get extremely frustrating.