Mirage wrote:What's your opinion if there's like a pause button?
If there's a pause button then, playing Devil's advocate... what motivation do I have to
not pause when a timed choice comes up?
Bear in mind when discussing timed choices that there's a number of reasons to think they're bad - it's not just that I might get distracted by a house fire, but also I might just be a slow reader, or I might be a non-native speaker and have trouble with some of the phrasing.
For that matter, the poor-reader or non-native-speaker is another reason rollback is useful - those people may easily misinterpret choices and select something they didn't really want to do.
Auro-Cyanide wrote:
I think it is rather important for VN choices to be permanent just like our choices in life can not be undone.
...
To be able to go back is a form of cheating in my opinion.
Are you in favour of your saves deleting themselves when you load them, so that you can use saves to pause your progress and come back again later but can't use them to check if something is OK and go back if it isn't?
Mirage wrote:
Some games happened to be very difficult, and winning it give a sense of satisfaction, like an achievement of sort. While books supposed to entertain instead of giving the readers achievement. A two very different kind medium.
As I said earlier: my answers are assuming that we're talking about a traditional VN without any 'game' elements, just branching story based on choices. I'll use the word 'game' anyway because, inappropriate as it usually is, it's the norm on this forum and elsewhere.
If you're talking about a 'game' - like a management sim, or a scheduler-driven dating sim with frequent choices - then it's not quite the same question, IMO. In a
game, there are so many decisions involved to reach that point in the game that the particular state that I'm in when I make a choice is fairly unique to my particular playthrough - I may have a different amount of cash and different employees in a management sim, I may have different characters with different 'attraction points' or whatever in a dating sim. IMO it's a lot more reasonable, because of this, to treat it as a 'special' point in time and a 'special' decision and block rollback. I can't rollback out of a firefight in
Gears of War or whatever, and it's never bothered me.
In a
VN, on the other hand - with limited branching storylines, infrequent decisions and so on - it's trivial to get back to the same point in the game, I just have to go back to my last save (or the beginning of the game if necessary) and make the same sequence of decisions. So I can 'cheat' your system whether you like it or not, if I want to... it's just incredibly tedious to have to skip through the game to reach the same point to try the other option. And more to the point, I can't get my entertainment out of your VN
without going down your prescribed branches; I'm not constantly making decisions like I am in a management sim, so my enjoyment comes from the prose and the images instead.
IMO it's an anti-player move to block rollback where available on a traditional VN, and if you're not making a VN for the player, who
are you making it for? Ultimately, if a player doesn't want to use rollback they don't have to, and if they do use it they use it because they want to, for whatever reason.