Skysagi

Four years, my friends. Four years.

woops I accidentally underlined my text, not used to this format lol

Very inactive, but still present, in some form...

I should be good now, yesyes! I just have to make sure I don't pop another kidney, ufufu~!

Happy Halloween!

Fake loading screens are harmless? Oh no no no... I beg to differ. They are incredibly harmful.

Say what you want about bugs but, while often much more avoidable with practice, they sneak up on the best of us. They are the inevitable result of complex systems interacting, and the only way to avoid them is more practice. They are minor things in most cases, easily dealt with or avoided and often just as easily fixed. Even at their most catastrophic, it's hard to fault a designer for every bug. Even if they break the game, at least that's all they break.

No, the real harm comes from Anti-patterns. They are diseases of the mind, poisoning designers with horrible ideas, mutating and infecting more and more hosts. Every single game that goes down this path, every single coder that makes scripts to do it, every person enthusiastic about the idea spreads the disease. For every person that theoretically use them well, a hundred more do not. Bad design is bad design. You either stamp it out, or it will infect everything. Everyone will have their own idea of what that means of course but fake loading screens definitely is one meme I want dead.

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Even at their most catastrophic, it's hard to fault a designer for every bug.

It's not hard to fault them if you know, that they simply don't care about them. Silly little bugs, that caused way much more trouble than needed. Still persisting after being reported thousand of times, by thousand of players. Getting updates with new content, when existing one was failing sometimes. I'm not talking about complex-to-fix bugs. Adding new (paid) content was simply more important than quality. That's how I ended my story with one game.

Fake loading screen? I can deal with it, as long as it will not be an annoying simple text on black screen appearing all over the place.

Same as people are complaining on lack of save-anywhere feature. There was a looooong debate regarding this. For me, it may ruin the game's difficulty and allows players to 'cheat' to some degree. There was one RPG with hardcore difficulty, but being able to save after each step allowed me to keep trying running away from battles -- and because of that, the devs terribly balanced the game, because there were too many random things based on luck, but apparently nobody cared, as you could use saving as workaround. Actually saving was the preferred method of beating the game and the dev always could use that as an excuse for bad balancing. For the others on the other hoof, it's something extremely essential, because they like to play the game for 5 minutes a day apparently.  I remember how there were no saves at all, back on NES- or save points on most of PS1 games. People seemed to deal with it, but now it became an issue?   Everybody has their rights and I guess it will be best to just leave it that way. There is always something some people will like, while the others dislike. People are complaining, that the game is too hard, while for the others it's not hard enough.

You hate fake loading screens, that's understandable. Personally I'm tolerant to these, because there are much worse things, that can ruin the experience.

But well, that's how you see it and I don't think we'll get anywhere from there. We'll have different opinions there then and we'll have to deal with it.  There's no point to spam this status update any longer.

I didn't think I was spamming, just blabbing a lot. But I guess it is a bit much for a status update huh? Okay I will say no more about it.

I am curious about this save-everywhere discussion. Personally I am okay with it as long as you can't save during actual combat and combat is balanced to be focused more on each combat being it's own challenge rather the having the challenge be getting to the end of a dungeon. Like in the SaGa series for example, you can save basically any time outside combat but each individual combat encounter is also much more meaningful or interesting then most RPGs. The SaGa series usually even completely heals your HP between battles so they can afford to get more involved.