User blog comment:Koveras Alvane/The Beauty of Mass Effect 2 Ending/@comment-5607736-20130429182345/@comment-256004-20130506164102

It seems that RNG is your universal answer to everything. :D But let me contradict you again on that matter...

While I have nothing against reloading saves if you really botched up, I can see how that can be an annoyance to a game designer. Fact is, when you make games for PC, where any reasonably tech savvy gamer has full control over his (file) system, you cannot do much to prevent this from happening. However, I do see two efficient ways of combating it. One is found mostly in roguelikes and is basically all about save game limitations: you can be limited to one saved game per character, which can be deleted if Shepard dies. Of course, this limitation should be optional so that it becomes a conscious choice and a self-imposed challenge for hardcore players.

The other is much more difficult but also more fitting for a story-driven game like Mass Effect, as it is not about preventing them from reloading saved games technologically, but from erasing their compulsion to do so in the first place. The trick to this is IMO to give a follow-up to each "failure". The problem is, if you, say, fail Samara's Loyalty Mission in ME2, that's it: you get a message that you have failed and it's never brought up again, unless Samara dies in the endgame. It is good in the sense of penalizing the players for failure, but a lot of players will not accept this penalty because it does not offer an emotional release: Morinth just never shows up and you entire effort has gone to waste. Now, if instead, after you fail to confront Morinth, she'd continue to kill more people on Omega before you finally find and kill her and that wouldn't give you Samara's loyalty (because of all the unnecessary victims--but hey, at least you get XP), I think players would be much more accepting of their own failure. Of course, since not many games do such follow-ups, it should be made clear to the player that there will be one. I, for one, was extremely disappointed that, having failed to kill Vito in Zaeed's Loyalty Mission, I never got another chance to get him later.

This a-follow-up-on-failure mechanic is done very well in the Jack-Miranda and Tali-Legion post-loyalty confrontations: if you fail to persuade both parties to stand down, you lose one loyalty, and have to run another lap to convince the now-disloyal squad member to reconsider--and you can do so immediately or not do so at all, if you don't feel like it. Basically, I think, it boils down to penalizing the players for failure with more legwork, rather than less content.