| HN Mirror

One of the most valuable lessons I learned early on from hacking the binaries of savegames is that if you make it too easy, it stops being fun.

And yet, I still sometimes go to places like flingtrainer.com when a game "feels too hard" for me (and therefore is also not fun... the recently-released 2021 "Dark Alliance" is one example)

I think editing game state should be "difficult, but not impossible". The thing is, if it's "difficult", then someone somewhere's just going to make a free save editor...

"Fun" is a delicate balance in these things and probably varies by person. For example, I CANNOT STAND inventory management in games (it's not immersive, it's WORK!) so Skyrim became 100% more fun once I figured out how to console up my carryweight (and installed a mod to make the inventory UI searchable/sortable by type). To me, all this did is prevent me having to spend time traveling in-game back to a home stash to retrieve some odd thing and then traveling all the way back... that's literally "work, inside a game" to me, and takes away time better spent exploring, questing, fighting etc. Similarly, I have no idea why Blizzard limits Diablo 2 stash size (I mean... the extra database cost has to be practically... negligible for them?) because all it does is cause lots of login/logout churn for them as people switch off to mule characters to hold all their set items/uniques/runes/etc.