History Main / SaveScumming

The term SaveScumming comes from the roguelike community, which has long frowned on the practice (most roguelike games prevent this by erasing a save file as soon as you load it) and thus categorized save/reload as one of the many forms of "scummy" behavior honorable players eschew.

* In FalloutNewVegas, save scumming is possible to win big at the casino games, but there are two catches. Firstly, each casino has a limit on how much you can win before they either ban you from gambling or straight up kick you out. Secondly, reloading a save from within a casino starts a countdown on all gambling games (slots, blackjack, and roulette). You can't gamble until one minute after loading the save. Obviously, [[TheDevTeamThinksOfEverything Obsidian were one step ahead of us]].

* In FalloutNewVegas, save scumming is possible to win big at the casino games, but there are two catches. Firstly, each casino has a limit on how much you can win before they either ban you from gambling or straight up kick you out. Secondly, reloading a save from within a casino starts a countdown on all gambling games (slots, blackjack, and roulette). You can't gamble until one minute after loading the save. Obviously, [[TheDevsToughtOfEverything the devs were one step ahead of us]].

* You can do this in FalloutNewVegas to win big at the casinos, but there are two catches. One, each casino has a limit how much you can win before they will ban you from gambling (you can still do other stuff though), and second, if you save inside any of the casinos, when you reload, there will be a 1 minute countdown until you can gamble. This was obviously added to frustrate save scummers.

** In general, most "Strategy" of this game simply involved SaveScumming becuase health didn't regenerate, like in ''other'' games.
*** Says you. I just maxed out the Health Regen augmentation. So, EpicFail.

Old, old method of playing games. Basically, you save the game whenever you get a result you like, and restore the saved game whenever you get a result you ''don't'' like. It could be because the game demands TrialAndErrorGameplay, or perhaps you have a limited number of tries to get the [[RandomNumberGod RNG]] to get a favorable result. Or maybe you're just not that good at the game. And woe befall you if you save a game after a non-obvious error that makes the game {{Unwinnable}}. Seasoned savescummers will make multiple saves throughout the game so they can go back to the part that they messed up on.

* You can only make a certain number of mistakes in cases in the ''PhoenixWrightAceAttorney''. However, if a player is so inclined, they can just save, try something, and if it doesn't work, re-load it and try again, which kind of takes away the bite of the penalty system. One case actually punishes you for doing this, with the "success" and "instant GameOver" responses starting with the ''exact same line'' from Godot, which is generally all you take the time to see after losing once. You can save at nearly any point in the ''AceAttorney'' games, unless the judge is directly asking you a question. This is helpful at GuideDangIt moments, where you can just keep presenting things until you find one that doesn't get you a penalty.

* Possible in ''Postal 2''; however, abuse will lead to the Postal Dude commenting "My grandmother could beat this if she saved as much as you do."

*** The new HeartGold/SoulSilver titles actually avert this to a degree - if you knock out one of the three Legendary Birds accidentally, no worries. Just beat the Elite Four again and they'll respawn for you. Doesn't work if you actually catch them though.

Some games modify this by giving you limited amounts of saves (similar to VideoGameLives but perhaps allowing some strategy), bonuses for low numbers of saves, or immediately erasing/saving a game whenever you die or do something important (Iron Man mode, aka, adding FakeDifficulty). Some games kick it up to 11 by actually detecting whether you cheated by Save-Swapping, trying to obfuscate the game which deletes a saved game by manually putting back a copy of the said save file right after deletion by the game into its save folder. Even worse, wiser games will even call you out for actually trying to feed it an invalid saved file!

* Spoofed in BaldursGate Throne of Bhaal: a party of "noobs" assaults your group while flinging insults, resulting in their complete extermination. After a fake "reload" screen, the same party of adventurers encounters you again, greets you nicely and walks away.

*** In the older games. Newer ones just have them respawn later to discourage this. Of course, this gets abused for LevelGrinding but hey, you can't have everything.
**** Don't mean to be Mr. Negative here but repeating legendaries would be one of the worst possible ways to level grind. The only respawn methods so far include waiting a week or so and beating the entire Elite 4 to respawn them. Add that to the fact that wild pokemon give less experience than trainers' pokemon and you can see that grinding the Elite 4 is generally FAR better for leveling.
** In Pokemon you end up saving a LOT because any major fight could become a rout. The mechanics contain copious amounts of random chance at times.
*** Then again, saving after narrowly beating the first Elite Four member with underlevelled Pokémon and then discovering that you forgot to bring Revives and Full Restores might be a bad idea.

** Unfortunately, the DS remake severely limits your ability to save. To recap Nippon Ichi's train of though: Allow nearly unlimited saving on consoles. Give players exactly one SavePoint in the ''entire game'' for the handheld. SoYeah.