I think OWI tried their best to minimize the issues that come from Quicksaving, and for the most part they succeded. I'm talking mostly about the chase sequences you mentioned before. They were so intense that you couldn't really Quicksave in the middle of some of them, and they were fairly long. I'm definitely not surprised you have fond memories of them, I do, too. Unfortunately, some of them have enough "breathing" moments for you to Quicksave during the chase, which takes away from the experience.
Quicksaving was the intented way of playing AE from the very start, that makes the game stand out more among others with the Quicksave feature; it's more of an exception, rather than a rule. The good example is AE's last level, which would be way too hard without saving after each segment. It was designed around the idea.
Even with the feature, you can easily cheese some puzzles, and that is a bad thing. It's really not that hard to abuse Quicksave. And the player doesn't even consider it cheating, because, hey, the game allows that, it even encourages you to use it.
That said, all of the issues with Quicksaving, and I don't mean just some, I mean literally all of them, can be solved with well-placed checkpoints, and this is not an easy task to a developer. Most of AO's checkpoint placements aren't that bad, actually. AE has literally zero checkpoints (except for the start of a level), OWI gave the choice to the player when to save, instead. It's partially taking the easy way.
I don't think that is a good idea. The way I see it, it's a game compromising its own mechanics just to allow you to finish it with as little effort as possible. Imagine this happening in sports: Doing a 100-metre dash and being able to stop in the middle, go get some food, a good sleep, wake up the next day and continue from this part, no strings attached. Or worse, redrawing the finish line 10 meters before, because you got tired after 90. Or racing, except the other drivers slow down if they get ahead of your car. Damn you, Need for Speed games, I do not need your pity, I know I'm losing! There's no sense of achievement, actually earning the victory with your efforts.
I've never finished AO as a kid. I revisited it after few years and beat it then (well, I still was a child, but not a child child), and I'm glad I did. The thing is, you don't have to complete every game you play. You don't even have to complete the game to say you think it's amazing. I loved AO despite the fact I've never completed it. I completed it later because I was loving it. If it was the same but with an ability to save anywhere, it'd break some puzzles' difficulty. I'd probably beat it as a child. Maybe I would even forget the game afterwards and never join OWF in the first place.
The more I talk about it, the more I realise *why* I'm loving AO and just like AE.
Last edited by Varrok; 12-23-2016 at 06:52 AM..
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