If there were saves, I would save. I wouldn’t make my own arbitrary rule to not use them. The game sets the parameters for challenge, not me. But I like what the no-saving does to the experience of Freelancer. That’s why.
I wouldn’t be opposed to an in-mission save when you quit though. So that you can pick up where you left off.
I might get frustrated by the lack of saves once in a while, but ultimately I like the challenge and the satisfaction of the parameters that IO decided on.
Just started playing my first Freelancer session for a good while, and during an Alerted Territory mission in Bangkok the Hitman servers (Steam version of the game, in the UK) have just gone down on me, mid-mission… in fact, mid-kill - I’d just dropped my final target and the Objectives marker still showed “2/3 Targets Killed”, and then got repeated Can’t Connect To Server messages.
No Saves means I lose my progress on this mission, and I’ve had to kill the H3.exe process via Task Manager just to salvage my campaign and not auto-fail. Always Online continues to suck!
And even if saves were a thing, it couldn’t have helped, as online saves are incompatible with offline saves.
This conflates two separate things.
Requiring an active server connection is absolute shite and everyone here knows it.
However, the core tenet of Freelancer’s design is to give you (in IOI’s own words) “sweaty palms”
That aspect completely evaporates if you can just save mid-level.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t make me against the concept; the satisfying answer is to implement a casual game mode, akin somewhat to Minecraft’s creative mode.
Of course, you can do exactly this with Peacock/mods on PC - so I do sympathise with console players who are missing out.
An active connection should really only be required on Hardcore Mode.
I do believe it’s possible to do a mid-level saving that keeps the risk and tension, by making it “save the game state when quitting and load it once when loading back in” instead of Hitman’s usual freely reloadable saves.
Just look at Binding of Isaac Rebirth, Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Noita or Dark Souls series. All of those allow to quit the game mid-run and return later, but the save cannot be reused afterwards, so it cannot be used to evade consequences (unless you count some of the games listed using that last saved point as fallback if game crashes and doesn’t get to save properly before closing).