This reminds me of the DevGameClub podcast when they were playing X-COM. Naturally, they played it on Easy and tried to savescum their way through every mission and keep everyone alive. Their experiences sounded everything but fun, horror stories of constant struggling with thousands of quickloads per battle, lots of timewasting, and they only got like 2 or 3 months into the campaign. Despite all that, they were still praising the game. They even preferred it to NuXCOM.
In
their follow-up interview, Gollop told them the AI would dynamically adapt to the player's skill. Meaning, if you lose battles and lots of soldiers, the aliens will attack less frequently and ease up a bit to give you time to breathe. If, on the other hand, you manage to win every battle perfectly without any losses, they will advance in their tech tree faster and become more aggressive. So, by savescumming (grinding perfect play), the DGC guys actually made the game unnecessarily hard for themselves, way above their skill level.
What in the fuck are you exactly playing for in the first place? Just to get it over with?
Fully agree with your post, and this is why it's degenerate. What's the point of quickloading until you finally roll a 20, because that's the only way your retarded strategy could actually work? You've learned nothing and only wasted time mindlessly repeating the same steps over and over again. Lost 1 HP? Better quickload!
I stopped doing it because:
1) It interrupts the flow of the game.
2) It's basically cheating.
3) It made me hoard the cool and powerful items and save them for tough boss encounters, instead of using them
now. Those "tough bosses" never come, of course.
4) I can trust the developer to have provided a safety net. If there is a tough battle ahead, chances are you are going to find some goodies (or the game may have dynamic difficulty like in the X-COM example above). There will always be layers upon layers of safety nets. Especially in modern games, you could probably go to the final boss/battle/area stripped naked, and the game would throw enough badass equipment at you to make it as fair as possible. In oldschool games you may actually need a brain though.
Some games are designed around quicksaves, like Shadow Tactics, which will even remind you to save every minute. It has the advantage that it allows you to experiment, but I still think it's a flaw. I'd take well-placed checkpoints over quicksaves in almost any game.
