Shadow Hearts: Covenant headed to the U.S.

[Thief Silver]

Pfft you should play it one sitting. Pasny.

[haohmaru]

You get a wife, two kids and own your own business then come talk some more shit.

[Roufuss]

I'm of the mindset that you should be able to save any game anywhere. Save points have become a thing of the past. It seriously pisses me off that I have let the PS2 run for a couple of hours on "pause" because I have to go do something and don't have the time to slog through "x" amount of random battles to get back to some ridiculous save point.

I feel exactly the same.

In this day and age, that shit should really be no more.

Or, my favorite, when you're right before the save point in a hard ass dungeon and you die, forcing you to replay a good hour or so of the game.

[Thief Silver]

You get a wife, two kids and own your own business then come talk some more shit.

Ah man.. I just got owned.

[Dipstick]

I agree with both haohmaru and Roufuss... to some extent. Games should give you the ability to save and restart anywhere, and savepoints should be spread out much more thoroughly than they are (anything more than ten minutes per save point is obscene, really). Games should autosave more, too -- why do I have to manually save every single time I reach a checkpoint? More games should default to saving automatically -- and stop asking me if it is OK to overwrite the previous save! If you really want to give players an option to not save (beyond just pulling the damn memory card out), offer a button combination to pass on saving during most autosave points (and an option to turn it off permentenly).

However, I am no fan of letting players save whenever they want as much as they want. This induces savecreeping, and I am one that believes people use every tool they have to finish games -- and the ability to save state is such a tool. You can argue that players who want a harder game can just not save as frequently (or at all), but that is an artifical challenge, akin to playing a game of Street Fighter with no throwing. One common answer to this is to design the game in such a way that savecreeping is completely unnecessary. You induce this by having lower costs of failure -- why worry about failing some mission if it just restarts you two minutes back with nothing lost? In-game decisions lose a lot of their weight if you remove any negative consequences from them; it makes smart decision making much less valuable.

Ulitmately though, this is one of those problems where I am split. Half of me believes that people should be able to play games however the hell they want, and the other half says that people need to be saved from themselves, lest they ruin their own experience.

-Dippy

[haohmaru]

I dunno - if people want to win/defeat a game by "savecreeping" (nice term, never heard that one before) than the onus is really on them for ruining their own experience. That's like bitching that Space Raiders has unlimited continues and sucks for that reason. No, the *player* sucks for that reason if they just blow through the game.

If you really wanted to, I guess you could limit the total amount of saves allowed per game for people that really abuse the system.

[AaronChance]

If you really wanted to, I guess you could limit the total amount of saves allowed per game for people that really abuse the system.

This is exactly what the Hitman series does. You can save at any time, but at normal difficulty you only get three saves, which is more than enough to finish the mission. I think some sort of 'three saves per dungeon' system would work well for RPGs. This would also save the developers the trouble of spacing out the save points properly, which they never seem to do anyway.

Autosaving is a mixed blessing because sometimes they're spaced too far apart and others they save either a little too early or a little too late. Galleon does this and I would have rather had save points.

[Despair]

Good to see more people playing this and actually liking it

I dont find safe locations in SHC so random, and they are definately not all that spreaded apart. As it was noted, there is always one in the beginning of the dungeon area, and one right before boss battle, and most of the time its more than enough to cover up the exploration area. Random battles are not rediculosly frequent, and if you keep up with good equipment, get used to Rings system and look around for hidden stuff (like Ring Soul Attack increases), you will be just allright.

That Penny Arcade strip was pretty funny. And collecting the stud cards its weird and funny feature. Good to see a game that tries something different and strange for a change

[haohmaru]

Random battles are not rediculosly frequent, and if you keep up with good equipment,

I dunno - in the dungeon before Wales you can't walk for 10 seconds without a random battle happening - it gets to the point of annoyance rather quickly, especially if you're already frustrated at not being able to find the end point.

[Despair]

Most of the time Random battles happen when screens switch, and in some areas it can be more of them than in others. I agree with you that RB can become more of a annoyance, but hopefully, SHC will have one certain item, like the original did, that pretty much cuts down number of battles in half, or less.