I have to say this saving problem could be a big deal for me, it kind of breaks what can be so fun about an open-world game, which is to save, then GO OFF ON A MAD BENDER OF DOING REALLY STUPID SHITE, and then going back to the save and carrying on properly.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12 ... far-cry-3/Quote:
It’s hard to imagine how it could be this bad. A game that absolutely naturally lends itself to quicksaves (I don’t care if you don’t like them – guess what, you don’t have to use them even if they’re there) has no such thing. And as such it becomes a game that heavily relies on checkpointing. But it’s an open-world game, and so, er, needs quicksaves. The eighth-arsed solution is a system where death means being revived at the nearest safehouse or controlled radio tower. Now, that alone would have been almost fine. Frustrating when your target location is a hefty journey away from one of those, but it would have at least made a degree of sense. But what actually happens here is death means not only reviving far away, but also with an arbitrary amount of progress undone.
When this progress includes menial tasks like crafting items, it’s just a pain in the arse to have to discover what’s now undone. Let alone the tedium of having to repeatedly retrace your steps to a particularly tricky challenge. And this reaches farce once the jumbled mess of its saving conflicts with the jumbled mess of its mission areas. At one point I wanted to clear a radio tower in an area, mostly to get the minimap working. However, this tower happened to fall inside the vague area that triggered the next story mission, despite my not wanting to do it, nor engaging in it. Instead I cleared the tower, then I believe was ambushed by komodos on my way to doing something else. I came back to life at some arbitrary place, the radio tower itself now reset – despite those things supposed to be the one reliable checkpoint you have. The mission had taken over, and anything I did between then and actually reaching the location where it properly takes place was undone. Because… because? Because why? Because someone at Ubisoft hates people, and hates the thought of people having uninterrupted fun?
This is even further encumbered by some archaic leftover from the last generation of consoles, with the persisting belief that there’s a need to limit save slots. So you’re allowed one save, and one save only, and saving again overwrites the last. So any desires to archive moments of the game, to be able to return to a certain point to play again another time, are taken away. Because… because? For no damned reason. The “save” option in the menu itself is an utter farce – on the rare occasions it actually lets you use it, it doesn’t save anything at all. And there’s no need for any of it. If I want to stop playing at a certain key moment – say I have to go out, or to bed, or to work – tough. Leave it running and risk a crash, or lose the progress anyway. Because… because fuck you.