Gah! Ghost of Tsushima annoyed me last night.
I've been sticking to NORMAL difficulty as I love the combat and I enjoy the challenge it provides, despite my crapness with a gamepad and some of the moves requiring some fairly adept stick + button combos - and in fairness to myself, I've been coping OK.
I've been doing a lot of open world style stuff, finding locations and shrines, killing enemy camps, finding friendly camps and settlements, getting a maximum health boost and a couple of item boosts, and generally having fun away from the main campaign missions, but last night I decided to progress the main campaign.
The first stages of the mission were all fine, I found the NPC I was looking for, we killed some baddies, had some story and exposition stuff, and eventually went to a nearby enemy fort where the mission objective was.
We scoped out the place, and identified some stuff we could do to distract and weaken the enemy, ahead of getting in there and starting the fight proper.
My first few attempts went badly, but as I got into the groove of the fights, the enemy composition, the layout of the camp, and so on, I was making more and more progress. After a death the game returned to its last checkpoint, which was just as the engagement was about to start on the edge of the camp, so that was fine.
However, on my next attempt I made a substantial amount of progress, clearing out nearly the entire camp with a combination of archery, stealth, distraction, and toe-to-toe combat, all told it'd taken about 20 minutes - and I was quite badly dinged up, but there were only two weaker style enemies remaining.
I got myself to a quiet corner of the camp, I hadn't noticed if the game had checkpointed or not, so I went into the menu and the game allowed me to save. Excellent, I thought, I'll proceed from here.
However, upon killing the two remaining baddies, a second wave came out of the back of the camp I wasn't prepared for, and having used up most of my resources and being very low on health, I got killed.
It turns out the game hadn't checkpointed again, so it took me right back to the beginning of the encounter.
No fear, I've got my manually saved game!
So I loaded in the save I'd created, the timestamp was correct so I was optimistic, but my manual save was....... exactly the same as the game's own checkpoint.
At this point I just wasn't in the mood to go again, I'd spent over an hour on this single encounter already, I thought I'd nearly done it, but it turned out it's a two wave fight, the game considers the whole thing to be a single checkpoint event, and a manual save doesn't make any difference.
Why for the love of god can't we just save our game when we want to? It always used to be a thing in games, I mean, heck, it was very common for PC games to have 'QUICKSAVE' and 'QUICKLOAD' keys, many of them still do.
Anyway, I figured I'd knock the difficulty down to EASY to get through this encounter, but fuck me EASY difficulty really knackers the combat, the enemies become incredibly crap, the time you have to react to stuff is massively increased, and the lovely, tight, sharp combat mechanics are basically ruined. I actually put the pad down in disgust before I even finished the encounter.
So yeah maybe I'm just not good enough, the game is clearly designed for the whole encounter to be done in one, hence the game not checkpointing before the second wave. If it were split into two I'd be fine on NORMAL, if I lumped away at it some more I'd be able to do it NORMAL I guess, now I know the second wave is coming, I'll probably have another go at it later on today.
The problem is the difficulty and accessibility options are nothing like as comprehensive as TLOU2, so all you have is the relatively stiff challenge of NORMAL, or the total cakewalk of EASY - which honestly just feels crap to play.
I could put it down to EASY just to get through this encounter and then put it back up to NORMAL, but I'd much rather get through on NORMAL, which I'd be fine with if the game would just let me fucking save before the second wave starts. (And this isn't such a rare thing either, games often give you midfight checkpoints on bigger encounters, in fact thinking about it, God Of War actually gives you a mid bossfight checkpoint, on that battle against the two brothers, so if you get past wave one of the fight and then die on wave two, it just puts you back to the start of wave two, and that fight is substantially shorter than the one I was doing last night.)
Anyway, I gave up with it last night and played Chase HQ in MAME instead.