Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer hopes we won't want to save scum in Divinity: 'Our ambition is certainly to make failure more interesting'

We all save scummed in Baldur’s Gate 3⁠—except, apparently, for my friend Jack and coworker Morgan Park. They both accidentally killed everyone at the Last Light Inn and just kept trucking. As part of Larian’s big Divinity AMA on Reddit, the game’s writing director, Adam Smith, revealed how the studio is factoring players’ save scumming tendencies into its next game’s design.For a quick definition, I think “save scumming” is best understood as using a game’s save/load feature for anything other than quitting the game and coming back later, or continuing from a game over⁠—no moral judgement here, mind you, just an observation of our tendencies. The incentive to save scum could be argued to be a design failure, or merely a natural function of games as wish fulfillment. We already have to live with our mistakes in real life, why do so in our fantasies?Comment from r/GamesThe big Baldur’s Gate 3 example has to be quickloading every time you fail a skill check until the 20-sided dice finally lands your way. But for RPGs that are all about choice and consequence, this ever present temptation to never have to live with failure can adulterate some of a game’s chew, removing stakes from the story and preventing you from seeing interesting plot developments from failure states.”Are there any plans to try to make failing these dialogue/non-combat checks more interesting, a la Disco Elysium,” asked user Nidies in the AMA, “to try to encourage players to accept ‘bad’ [random number generation]?””Our ambition…

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