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[Gnarf]

Get rid of save points, they're an archais device that serves no function in modern games other then to act as a crutch for lazy game designers.

At least positioning save points is game design. What exactly are you suggesting to replace it with? Are you implying that leaving everything in the hands of the players is the non-lazy kind of game design here?

[William Broom]

Yeah, I don't really get what's so terrible about save points. Can you explain your reasoning, Benza?

[moi]

There's a very interesting article on gamasutra about savepoints.

[Gnarf]

Makes a couple of good points. Particularly that you can let the player save anywhere without ruining your game, by making sure that save game is deleted whenever he starts playing again. And then use save points or some such in addition if the game is not meant to be restarted on failure.

I'm not sure what point he is trying to make by explaining how hard he thinks Dead Rising is. It seems that if they added some Dawn of Sorrow or Fire Emblem style save anywhere system to it, he'd still wander around forgetting to use the save points and then die. It just comes down to wanting the game to go easy on him, so that him and Little Jimmy non-gamer from Idaho won't ever get frustrated. Because unless you're constantly laughing out loud and also winning the game it's not really a good game.

Slight chance I'm reading a bit too much into that.

[GhostBomb]

If grinding is a problem, you could always go the Paper Mario route and give little to no experience when the player is fighting weaker enemies.  This has the problem of making the player feel frustrated that he's not being rewarded for taking time to fight battles, but I also like how you can equip a badge that lets you completely skip battles with weaker monsters altogether.

Oh wow, I kinda necro'd this thread :/
I thought it'd get more posts since it was linked to a sticky.