WithBaldur’s Gate 3breaking all kinds of concurrent player records, it’s fair to assume that gaming’s most reviled yet inevitable practice is shooting through the roof right now. The ‘F5’ keys on keyboards are experiencing unprecedented wear and tear, and SSDs are straining to keep up with the sheer amount of read-writing quicksaves and quickloads people are putting them through.
Yes, save-scumming is at an all-time peak right now, so we’ve gathered the DualShockers Council in the war room to confront this emerging crisis. How do we feel about save-scumming? Is it the death of gaming or the definition of gaming? Does it make us feel dirty, or good, or a bit of both?
Here’s what we think.
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I’ve come a long way since the days of saving just before every match in Football Manager and reloading if the result didn’t go my way, but it’s genre-dependent. I’m much better now at rolling with the punches and seeing where the tides of fate (and RNG) take me, and in Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t think I’ve quickloaded once off the back of a failed check where you actually get to see the dice rolling (partly becauseI’m so into the whole ‘visible dice’ thingthat just overruling it would ruin the suspense).
Mad though I may get in combat when I somehow fail an attack with 91% chance of succeeding, I get satisfaction from adapting in battle, and thankfully the game rewards that because thanks to things likethe game-changing ‘Shove’ ability, the game makes it very possible to turn a battle around even when it looks like you’re on the brink of defeat.
I’m at my save-scummiest in stealth games likeHitman,Dishonored, andThief, where I really want to master the scenarios and levels and complete them in the slickest, sneakiest way possible. There’s just something so inelegant about going gung-ho and letting the bodies pile up in these games.
Joshua Leeds - List Writer
Many games give players choices with serious consequences should they fail to choose the right option or pass a chance-based check like a dice roll. Save-scumming may subvert some of a game’s mechanics, but there are many situations that I’d rather not leave up to chance. Game-altering consequences can be fun in challenging me to make the best of a bad situation, but there’s just as much fun to be had in having situations go the way I want.
Save-scumming makes me more invested in a story, as it further proves my ability to affect the game and its story to make it feel like my own unique experience. I don’t play games for a sense of realism, but to do things that are unrealistic, like always making therightdecision. Save-scumming has helped me avoid many disastrous situations in countless games, and it almost always feels better for me to do something awesome and save the day than fail while trying.
This may not make me the most popular editor around here, but I’m a proponent of save-scumming in certain situations. I’m not talking about failing checks or picking the wrong dialogue options, reloading saves in those situations is still silly and certainly not in the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, where roleplay trumps ‘winning.’ However, with combat as unpredictable as that in Baldur’s Gate 3, I think reloading when something has gone catastrophically wrong is fair game. I doubt anyone wants to go reviving each of their characters after an enterprising goblin mass-shoves most of your party into an abyss.
Sometimes I might also intentionally pursue an unwise series of dialogue options just to see where it takes me. My characters are too rational to antagonise powerful forces, but I like to see how far Larian lets me travel down these paths before it ends badly for me. I wouldn’t reload simply because the outcome wasn’t what I expected but rather because I was experimenting with choices I would never make. Yes, I am someone who quicksaves every thirty seconds, but I like to think I have a pretty firm moral compass when it comes to quickloading.
Needless to say, I take a similar approach in other games. If I’m going for a no-detection run of Dishonored then of course I’m save-scumming if I get detected. People who pretend they wouldn’t do the same are lying.
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Matthew Schomer - News and Features Editor
Ah, to be young and innocent again. Sure, there was a time when I looked down on save scumming. And then I playedFallout 2.
See, like most games in the series, Fallout 2 only has so many settlements, and if you want to fill up that quest log and make some caps by selling to traders, you pretty much had to stick near them. The most central settlement in Fallout 2 is The Den, and outside each of its shops are these little brats that will attempt to steal from you every time you walk past—with a 65% success rate, mind you—and then go fence their ill-gotten gains at the same shop you were just going into or out of.
Of course, you’re able to just kill them (that’s why there are no kids in the entire European version!), but that earns you the dreaded Childkiller perk, or got steal it back of them, though that gets a bit tedious.
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Yes, yes, I’m getting to my point, I promise!
See, all that back-and-forth pickpocketing got me to thinking: I’m on a timer here! My people are dying without the holy G.E.C.K. As the defacto savior of the wastes, isn’t it my duty to make sure I’m the best-equipped person in New California? Turns out those kids had the right idea, so I started stealing from every single NPC in the game. Of course, there was no Childkiller perk for killing me, so people were really rather miffed when I got caught. The bang-bang-you’re-dead kinda miffed. So, reload and rinse and repeat. Every. Single. Time.
Point is, neither Fallout 2 nor Baldur’s Gate 3 is a competitive multiplayer game, so it’s only cheating if it offends your delicate sensibilities. Play the game your way.
Chris Harding - Multimedia Editor
I’m a save scummer and I’m proud of it. Some games demand absolute perfection, and as I’ve always been told, perfection is the enemy of good. Take Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast as a prime example. This is a game that was released just after Y2K, when auto-saves and hand-holding were minimal. Get 90% through a level and die? Tough luck, buddy, back to the start you go. The recent-ish port is just as brutal as the original, but it does allow for manual saving. I scum-saved so much that I actually broke the game to the point I couldn’t save anymore unless I deleted my previous save files. Hey, if you’re going to make your puzzles so hard that a simpleton like me can’t beat them without save-scumming, at least let us save-scum till the blue-milk-giving cows come home.
Alas, Jedi Knight 2 isn’t my only experience with save scumming. As a younger kid, I save scummed my way through the Elite Four in Pokémon Yellow. To be fair, I could barely read, and to get as far as I did was a miracle. Through pattern recognition and pure dumb luck, I eventually gained the rank of Pokémon Master. I had to save-load at least four million times, but I got there in the end. Hey, it took Ash Ketchum the better part of two decades and he had a whole team of professional writers behind him. Give me a break, please.
My save scumming continued, though, even after I hung up my PokeBelt and moved on to greener pastures. Specifically, the green, green grass of Old Trafford in the Championship Manager series. In my defense, I rarely save-scummed, but when the game threw the poop at the fan, the poop pile was big and the fan was massive. I entered the Champion’s League final (basically the ultimate prestige in club football) with a sub-reserve goalkeeper and no decent strikers up front. My main goalkeeper (the legend, Fabien Barthez) was serving a three-match ban for being a twonk, while my backup keeper was sitting on the sidelines nursing an injured toe. Modern footballers are soft, I tell you. So I had my 19-year-old youth team keeper between the sticks, with Giggs and Beckham up front. My main strikers, Nistelrooy and Rooney were both injured, as were my backups, and the youth team players just can’t be trusted to win a final. I must have played that match upwards of 50 times, and that’s not an exaggeration. It’s a good 15 years behind me, but I still remember the weekend I spent trying to win a fictional final with a bunch of fluffs. I did eventually win, but did I feel proud? At the time, no. Now, looking back through the lens of time? You’re damn right I feel proud. That young Chris showed the kind of perseverance Old Man Chris just can’t be arsed with. Good on him, I say.
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