Look at The Witcher 3, where you will be the all-powerful hero of the tale regardless of what happens. In fact, plenty of games are developed now, even RPGs, so that failure outside of death pretty much isn’t even an option. I should imagine the vast majority of gamers usually save and reload their games. The idea is pretty simple but the ramifications are potentially huge. You may be surprised by what happens next.” However, if you character is caught pickpocketing, if a quest goes wrong, or some other mundane mishap occurs, let it play out.

If your character dies, gets locked in a dungeon, or some other truly catastrophic event takes place, by all means return to your last saved game and replay it.

In fact, you will never see some of the most interesting aspects of the game unless you play through your mistakes. All adversity can be overcome, excepting only the character’s actual death. Bethesda Softworks has worked very hard to make The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall a game that does not require players to replay their mistakes. It is about building a character and creating a story. “Role-playing is not about playing the perfect game. The final history of their game looks like an endless streak of lucky breaks and perfect choices. Anytime something goes wrong, they return to a saved game and replay it until they get it right. “Most computer gamers use the save game to maximise their playing ability. So if, for example, one of your characters died in XCOM, the process of reloading a turn to try it again and save the character would be ‘save scumming’.Īnyway, in the Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall manual, Bethesda lays out its intentions like this: Save scumming, for the uninitiated, is the process of constantly saving and reloading in order to achieve the best possible scenario. While by no means the first Bethesda title, it was one of its earliest, and the manual for the game carried a pretty straightforward message - please don’t save scum. This week I was inspired by a tweet by YouTuber Mark Brown, who posted an image plucked straight from the Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall’s manual.

Xcom 2 save scumming