Slaunyeh

That's... fair. I guess. It doesn't really help us understand why you think "save-scumming" is the Dark Side of game design though.

I'm in favour of limited ammunition, with perhaps rare magical quivers that might refill automatically or some such.

He's not saying that being able to save any time is a problem for the player. He's saying that the 'save anytime' functionality automatically causes inherently broken game mechanics in every part of the game due to it's very presence (like the corruptive nature of the dark side, I guess). Which is why this functionality will affect him even if he doesn't "abuse" it himself. And then he promptly ignores any requests for examples of this ever happening in a game.

I was looking for instructions, but they all seemed to direct to the Kickstarter page, so I was wondering: Can you update your paypal donation somehow? Edit: Aha! Custom donations aaall the way at the bottom. Got it.

. That's my favourite by far.

Not to mention if the game is a little less stable than desired (no offence, but this is an Obsidian title ). I don't want to replay a difficult fight because the game crashes, the cat steps on the power cord, there's someone at the door, or whatever. The Save Point mechanic is a serious turn-off, and occasional deal-breaker, IMHO.

I liked DA:Origins quite a lot, for the most part. That said, my biggest issue with that game was the huge disconnect between the game world and the game mechanics. Like, how you could throw blood magic left and right, and nobody would care, except everyone would be all "but that other guy is a blood mage, you must stop him!" Heck, you could turn the game's most adamant anti-blood mage character (Wynn) into a, you guessed it, blood mage. Because character system wise, blood mage was just another specialization. Or, to use another game (Skyrim in this case), I really hated how the game didn't know which factions you were part of. Unless it was important for a specific quest. If I can become the leader of virtually every faction in the known universe, some interaction between those factions would be quite nice. The easy way to handle this, of course, is to not have a game where any of the mechanical character choices should have a significant impact on the game world (eg. if everyone hates necromancers and the main plot involves killing all necromancers on sight because necromancers are bad, don't let me play a necromancer who can walk around town with a small army of undead in tow). The cool way to handle this, is to have a game that is actually aware of the in-game choices you make and have a world that reacts accordingly. Of course, that might be tough to pull off. But it would be pretty cool.

Woha. Thanks for the warm welcome. Personally, I'd love to have a co-op option (yes, I'm one of those horrible people who ruined your Planescape: Torment with PvP). That said, I have a lot more respect for Obsidian going "sorry, but that just adds a whole new level of complexity we'd rather not open up" than when games usually make some vague, dismissive comment like "uhm, no, that doesn't fit the story". So, if that's the decision the guys at Obsidian made, I just have to say: Thanks for being up front about it.