Shit is getting out of hand. Let’s face it, shaming people for saving progress in a game wherever they want because they can’t face the consequences of their actions, is just weird.
It’s like wanting to prove you’re a better gamer because you don’t save before a significant happening and accepting it might ruin the game for you, but you want to just not have fun because of it. And because you don’t like to have fun while gaming, you shame those who do.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the recent discussion about ‘scum saving’. In other words, the freedom to save your progress whenever and wherever you want.
It came up with the release of Baldurs Gate 3, in which you have to make decisions and fight enemies of which the outcomes have a significant impact on the rest of the game. If a party member dies for example, you have to do without them for the rest of the game.
Scum saving is the act of saving your game before such a happening and loading the game if things don’t go as planned so you can try again and get the desired outcome. Gamers against this way of playing claim this goes against the way the game is ment to be played, which is the greatest load of bullshit ever heard in the history of mankind.
Speaking of history, I’m probably older than the gamers that claim scum saving is a thing, and I can remember games (like the original Baldurs Gate) which allowed this style of play way before the scum of the earth came up with the scummy term.
Scum saving is a way of playing which is almost as old as gaming itself and has never seen flack before now. In fact I’ve lived through a time in which the freedom to save whenever and wherever was going out of style in favour of checkpoints. And boy, did gamers complain about those. Especially in the early days when checkpoints where few and far in between.
Nowadays checkpoints are common and there are more of them than you would ever need. Some of them are even available at your command, you just have to get to them. Which means this also allows for a bit of scum saving, but it somehow isn’t seen as the same…
But to get to the point of scum saving being a thing of this era. It’s just another instance of people grabbing onto every chance to shame someone else for doing something they enjoy.
It’s just plain stupid to not ‘scum save’ and ruin your own game because you have to go through the game severely damaged, with half of you party missing or with the whole world hunting you down because you called someone a ‘Scum Saver’ in the beginning of the game just for the fun of it, and that NPC got your wanted level up to 16 stars.
The whole point of playing a game is to have fun, and scum saving is part of ensuring you have just that. In fact, let’s call it smart saving instead of scum saving. It’s very much not scummy to have fun, it’s smart.
It’s very scummy to pain yourself with having to go through a shit experience of a game. Hating every time you start up Baldurs Gate 3 to just get through the next three hours of just hoping it gets fun again, probably isn’t what the developers had in mind for the players.
In fact, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think the developers made a conscious decision to include the option to smart save before major happenings as an integral gameplay element to ensure players where having fun. I mean, if they wanted players to not have fun at all, they could have turned BG3 into a soulslike game like Elden Ring.
So enjoy the option to save wherever and whenever you want for as long as it lasts. It probably will be over soon, because executives at publishers are going to see this as a big issue and make sure it won’t ever be available in any game ever. They are so well connected to the community, at least they claim.