trennungmitkind

In Pacific Drive you develop a relationship with your car like the classic bad relationship you have with a person in your 20s: "I can fix them." Only you're right, because it's a car and not an unemployed stoner who is sort of in a band sometimes.

At the end of every trip into the Zone I'd repair that rustbucket and upgrade it, but never fix that one weird thing it does if you slam the driver's side door too hard, because that gives it personality. And then I would prepare to go back into the Zone, look at the clock, and think maybe I didn't have time [[link]] after all.

When Pacific Drive launched there were no mid-level saves, and if you didn't complete an entire level in a single go you'd have to abandon it and throw away whatever progress you'd made. That only happened to me a couple of times, but it was enough to make me gunshy about going for a second level if it was getting late or I had somewhere to be or the dog was looking edgy, and so I'd call it quits after one level of Pacific Drive then play another game that fit into whatever time I had left. Until eventually I just switched to that other game and never went back.

Pacific Drive game director Seth Rosen said he was committed to the game being the way it was, so I didn't expect changes, but a year later Pacific Drive was updated with a "Suspend Run" feature that allows you to quit mid-level and later return to the spot you left off. Rosen says this addition by the studio after his departure was actually in line with his original design (his concern was with preventing save scumming), but the update came too late for me. I'd already moved on, uninstalled it, and frankly forgotten so much of what was going on that I'd have to start over anyway. Maybe some day I will?

A similar thing happened with the System Shock remake. It had a robust set of difficulty options that meant you could leave the combat on normal but turn the navigation down to easy to activate a waypoint system. Since my main memory of the original is getting completely lost—and hating the controls, but mainly getting lost—I turned that option on. And then didn't see any waypoints.

Turned out they were completely missing from the launch version of System Shock, which seems like a pretty big oops from Nightdive. I struggled on, but eventually had one of those moments where I didn't have time to play for a few days, and then spent an entire evening [[link]] figuring out where I was and what I was supposed to be doing without making any progress. That kills pretty much any game stone dead for me.

Of course, in 2024 the to have an easy mode waypoint system that actually worked the way the menu said it would. It got a bunch of other neat changes too. But again, too late for me.

Bugfix patches are one thing, but it's common now for games to get significant post-launch quality-of-life updates as well. Blue Prince's updates have made it so certain doors and a safe remain open once you've solved the associated puzzles once, so you don't have to repeat that stuff on subsequent runs. Promise Mascot Agency's update is going to let your truck do . Every single Owlcat game like a year after I finish it.

It's great that Pathfinder: Kingmaker eventually got an optional turn-based combat mode and Disco Elysium got full voice-acting, because I was happy to have an excuse to play those games again. But it keeps happening and I don't have time to play every single videogame twice. I could wait, but I [[link]] am enough of a wanker that I enjoy playing things when they're new so I can feel like "part of the conversation."

If we weren't airing our grievances this week like it's Festivus I wouldn't bring this up, because it's not like I think game developers shouldn't be allowed to make games better for free. That's a really nice thing to do. I just wish we could coordinate so it would stop happening right after the moment I uninstall them and delete the cache where I remember their plot and also controls from my brain.

Update: In a previous version of this article we said the developer changed its mind regarding mid-level saving, but that the game director says the feature is in line with his original vision.

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