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Quicksaves should be restricted because: We want the game to be the exclusive domain of a small minority of hardcore players who are able and willing to spend 14 hours a day honing their Dark Mod skills, and we regard all other players as "scum" who should bugger off and play Candy Crush instead. We assume we know best what gameplay experience will be most rewarding, and want to force our one-size-fits-all solution on every single player for their own good. We want to encourage the development of unofficial forks of the game (since it's open source), and regard the resulting player confusion as just another part of the excitement. We firmly believe that game difficulty should only ever move in one direction: upwards. We are unable to improve any of the unpredictable and confusing mechanics which motivate save-spamming in the first place (like blackjack failures or hitting the wrong part of a light with one of your 6 remaining water arrows), and we consider removal of the save function as the easiest band-aid.

I love my freedom. The mission creator must not define how the mission must be played.

Dear mappers, please be aware of this decorative light option introduced in upcoming 2.10 It aims to highlight the light volume and produces something like the existing fog particle with the intended effect of better speed and arguably better visuals It looks like this in game The test map we have been testing recently is courtesy of Bikerdude: download To enable this effect you will need to mark your light material with the volumetricLight keyword, like this lights/test_mansion01_window04_vol { description "volumetricLight for mansion01 window04" volumetricLight { map lights/mansion01_window04 colored zeroClamp } } Volumetric lights use projection and falloff textures to generate the volumetric effect. With shadow maps on, they also take shadows in the account. There's also an optional parameter after volumetricLight that toggles max speed vs decent look mode. Credits: @peter_spy for the original test map and direction @Bikerdude for great support during the reintroduction effort this year @stgatilov for taking the implementation on a completely different quality level @all for being cool and awesome

Years long in development it now has a release date next month. Its' genre is steampunk / alien underworld horror with puzzles to solve, so albeit not a direct Thief competitor, you could get some Shalebridge Cradle vibes from it (and maybe some Half-Life and Inside flashbacks). I'll be looking forward to it. If it gives me nightmare then it's worth it. https://scorn-game.com/

Hey all, I'm doing a bit of research on save restrictions in stealth games, and I'd like to hear your opinions on the matter. Basically, the topic of save restrictions has been gaining prominence lately, and some stealth games, including TDM, are starting to adopt this in some form. The explanation I always see in favor of it is, "It's just too easy to reload when you get caught!" which makes me think that the entire reason behind it is to inhibit the ghosting playstyle. However, I can't help but think I'm biased here because ghosting is my preferred playstyle. Thus, I want to ask: what other reasons are there for save restrictions? Note that I'm not looking for reasons that quicksaves should be allowed. I don't want this to turn into a debate thread, I just want to see and understand all possible reasons against quicksaving.

I ask what reasons for disallowing quicksaves there are, yet half the replies are that they should be allowed. Guys, I know. I am of this opinion myself. I also love my freedom of saving. Here's the thing: my playstyle is very niche. I am not satisfied with the mission/game unless I get through it undetected. If I get spotted, I could roll with the mistake, sure, but I am no longer satisfied with the run and would rather reload, or, in the case of save restrictions, restart that entire section of the game. So whenever I come across save restrictions, it seems like they are meant to either prevent my playstyle or just make it tedious, requiring me to practice the same thing over and over until I get it right. This is what I meant when I said that I feel like I'm biased here. Surely there are other reasons for these limitations, it's not just to mess with perfectionists, right?

They're guards. They're supposed to keep an eye out for intruders. From a practical standpoint you have to balance realistic guard behaviour with fairness to the player. It breaks immersion if guards never patrol the entrances to the mansion and never look in obvious thief hiding spots. I think a lot of missions are built on the assumption that players will observe guard patrol routes and plan accordingly. That's been my approach. But it's easy to pass by those guards by save-scumming instead of observing.

Yeah IRIS is a PHENOMENOL mission, but the Thief community offers much more variety and environments of missions. The best way to sample them all is to play them all. None of this "I have no time to play them" stuff. They aren't going anywhere. Play just an hour a month and maybe in 10 years you'll have played them all. There's no rush.

A more critical take: Quicksaving (at its worst) is a vile panacea that enables complacency and mediocrity from both players and map makers, by promising a lowest-common-denominator solution to every problem. Want to a tough stealth, or platforming, or puzzle sequence in your mission? Well there's no need to worry about things like the consistency or fairness of the challenge, or about providing alternate solutions to accommodate different playstyles. Anyone who is having trouble will just save scum their way through. Having trouble with a particular section? Don't concern yourself with whether there might be a different solution that would suit your abilities better. Don't think about taking some time to polish up your skills somewhere else, and returning to the challenge later. Just keep banging your head against that wall. Eventually chaos theory and the law of large numbers will see you through. Never-mind how that string of failures might sour your experience of the rest of the level. Never-mind how you've deprived yourself of an emergent story arc about using creativity and self-improvement to overcome adversity. At least you didn't have to "waste your time". Of course, I understand there is a pernicious tradeoff baked into the above philosophy. TDM and Thief are often buggy. Their gameplay is also highly emergent, making it impossible for a level designer to anticipate every situation. Quicksaving pretty much guarantees players always have a way to backtrack and scrape a win out of what would otherwise be a labyrinth of unavoidable dead-ends. It makes these games far more accessible, both to the players, and to the map makers trying to create enjoyable experiences for them. Without this panacea, there would be a much less content and a much smaller fan base for this kind of game. But after 20 years of experimentation and practice, I do think there are some level designers and players who are capable of surviving and thriving on that level in TDM and Thief--without the safety net of the quicksave. And being so firmly tethered to it is holding them back. While watching your ghost walkthroughs, @marbleman, I always shake my head when you'll occasionally take half a dozen reloads to nail a particular jump or stealth maneuver. "With your skill, couldn't you find a reliable solution to that section?" I ask myself. And on an intellectual level, I recognize that, no, you using this solution probably means there is no reasonable alternative. But on a visceral level it still bugs me. I feel vicariously let down by the level designers in those moments.

@lowenz I think we need to fix the visibility of this since the CVAR's don't print to darkmod.cfg but also try disable the BVH optimizations: r_modelBvhLightTris 0 r_modelBvhShadows 0

Thanks! Do either: seta r_shadowMapSinglePass "1" or setting Stencil Shadows in the GUI improve performance at all ? How about toggling: r_softShadowsMipmaps "0" ?

I am not really in favor or against save restrictions - I would only say if the designer deems saves should be restricted the game design should accommodate it. This is true of all mechanics in a game obviously. I also would not be of the opinion the game is too easy and save restrictions are a way to make it more difficult. Really the only reason in my mind is that they would be a tool to make the player engage with more systems in the game, but in return the expectation should be that these systems actually hold up. This is not something to take for granted in terms of TDM which I do no think supports it well "out of the box", or other stealth games for that matter. I did not enjoy this mechanic recently in Gloomwood for example as navigating the large map already felt somewhat tedious and I wasn't inclined to take risks and lose progress. Options when you're detected in Gloomwood seemed to be to die (this is before you acquire the pistol, which causes the whole dynamic of the game to shift into something else even less interesting). While you open up more and more access to the save point as the level progresses - this also felt kind non additive as this usually comes after you have already navigated and cleared a certain route - contrast that with a souls game and this feels like a huge deal. That feeling maybe holds up better for ghosters. The one instance where restrictions are used in TDM works (in my opinion) because it consciously deemphasizes many of the elements that prompt me to quicksave, though it obviously hasn't worked for everyone. For example undead enemies make the blackjack irrelevant (the unreliability of which is a source of compulsive saving on my part - though this topic seems as controversial at times as save restrictions) and making liberal use of the lethal toolset doesn't weigh on my conscience in the same way. They are also easy to outmaneuver. This meant I was playing in a different way and using more of the equipment systems which are often ignored and letting the game systems actually play out in interesting ways that I personally really enjoyed, but I could see this causing real issues for your preference of play style on the other hand.

This sounds like getting old cows out of the ditch. Can't you just look in the other threads about this?

Ghosting is my preferred style as well. Getting through the level in first go, and minimizing the consequences of my less-than-good-enough decisions or execution - is why I love stealth games. TDM, with a mission done well, is the most immersive experience I have had since playing Chaos Theory's Lighthouse level at 11 years old. I would imagine the same reason as why some games have only one difficulty level - it is giving player no other option than to play how the creator intended it to be played. And level of immersion in TDM, for me, feels the highest when you have no rewind button in a vulnerable situation. I imagine if people are used to saving in games, they are missing out on what brings the best out of TDM. But it is just how I see it and I'm also not lookin for a debate. Besides that, I can't come up with any more reasons why it should be limited. I only use saves when: - I am done for the day and have to continue later. - I have almost no interest in completing the level, but I also do not want to revisit it in future. - I have been stuck for way too long, and the only way I see to proceed is making a potentially lethal jump to something I have no idea is meant to be possible or not.

I agree that small missions are usually not very popular. But since we are at it, I'd like to add to your list of top 30-minute missions, the mission "A Night Of Loot: One Man's Treasure", small but pretty polished!

I love the ambience and the art of the game, but i dont get the shalebridges vibes of it. Because this is not a stealth game. and shalebridge is a combination of great ambience, stealth -> sound focus. But i would be nice that scorn get it too. Gameplay video with some sound ambience:

IMO it's not the same thing as other cheats. Different approach to saving is more like having a different gameplay type, and it's okay if you don't like it or don't want to play it. Why trying so hard to alter that mode then? And, e.g. you don't complain about RE typewriter saves or roguelike games, insisting that authors should change it to your needs. You either make time for these games, if the gameplay is appealing to you, or you avoid them. Same thing here so far, you can always just choose different difficulty/game mode. And raging about that is IMO just not listening what the other side is trying to communicate here, not to mention that it sounds super entitled. Authors can design missions however they want and they do not owe players anything.