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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.
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There's a couple of sequences in AO with "breathing" room in them, mostly in the trials. But I'll grant you, it's more of a moment to collect your thoughts, as opposed to a quicksave area. Surely though, these sections in AE are basically just optional checkpoints?
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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.
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I'll agree with that right away and it seems a shame to me that some of the puzzles in New n' Tasty weren't redesigned to account for quicksaving.
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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.
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Can't really argue with that, though I'd say that there is a point where the player may feel like they're "cheesing" the game. It's rather like in Age of Empires 2, where the AI can be confused by certain strategies and is incapable of dealing with them, where a human player could easily work around it. Or like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and just building nothing but motion simulators because they're the most cost-efficient ride.
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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.
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This is always the flipside of quicksaving. It's great if you're having a hard time with a specific section, for whatever reason. It lets you see the rest of the game, enjoy the story, visuals and the rest of the game. But then there's that other aspect where it can let you breeze through even the smallest difficulty. So either the game has to be hard enough to require quicksaving, which isn't always a bad tactic, or the game has to be extremely well-designed enough to avoid needing a quick-save. I think AO makes the cut quite well, but New n' Tasty, because of its finicky saws and some other strange inconsistencies, probably benefited from it.
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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.
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I'd say that I'm in a similar boat, but when I was a kid, I loved AO when I wasn't playing it, if that makes sense. Everything about AO appealed to me, except the actual act of trying to beat the game, because it felt like such a futile exercise. I don't think I finished Exoddus before it, but I definitely played for longer. AE I thought was funner to play, because it wasn't as hard. The quicksave was almost the only reason for that.
I don't know if the quicksave was the best way to solve the difficulty issues, but it was effective at making the game easier, that's for sure. Making the game easier was definitely a positive for me when I was first starting to play the game. If it hadn't been for Exoddus where I could make snail's pace progress as opposed to trying the same puzzle over and over and failing every time in Oddysee, I think I might not have remembered Oddworld the way I did.
Not to say I don't like the difficulty of Oddysee. In hindsight, especially, it was a big part of the game's atmosphere and overall feeling. Probably part of what drew me to it, knowing that it was hard and feeling some accomplishment when I made the least bit of progress. But whether or not it was best to introduce such an awesome world with such a seemingly sharp difficulty, I'm not sure.
I'm reminded of how I used to play Oddysee. It was a mix of me, my mother and my father all playing different parts. I did as much as I could myself, my mother took over when I wasn't sure what to do or had to memorize some kind of pattern and my father played exclusively to diffuse UXB mines, since he was the only one with that sense of timing. If I'd been playing alone, I would have lost patience after maybe three UXB bombs and a few complicated paramite puzzles. I suppose that's something else to thank my parents for.
