How Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew made save scumming a central mechanic

gamedeveloper.com:

"Save scumming"—the practice of quickly reloading saves after an undesired result in a video game—brings out some really weird opinions on Al Gore's internet. Yes, it's usually not how a game is "intended" to be played, but it's a feature that only exists in single-player games where players are free to dictate how they spend their time without hurting anyone else. It literally doesn't hurt anyone why do people have such weird opinions about it we don't need to have a hot take on everything oh my god.

But! Maybe I'm looking at this problem the wrong way. Maybe people have weird opinions about save scumming because save scumming is itself "weird." Players are used to "game over" screens or fail states that dump them back at the last checkpoint, but according to Mimimi Games head of design Moritz Wagner, plenty of players—players who even rely on save scumming in games—tend to think of it as "cheating." "They feel like they're doing something that's not intended by the game, because that's how it often is games," he said, noting that players may feel "cheap" even while willingly mashing the quicksave and quickload buttons.

Wagner's speaking from experience. He's been with Mimimi Games his entire professional career and was there when the studio broke big with 2016's Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. The stealth-strategy smash hit took inspiration from the classic Commandos series, and from the beginning, Mimimi wanted players to feel as free to experiment as possible. Save-scumming was meant to be an "integral part of the game," he said. He remembered bombarding people with tutorials to try and make the act of quicksaving and quickloading feel as natural as possible—but try as they might, it didn't always stick.

Well, if