Best way to complete Campaign Auth and Auth Plus w/ No Manual Saves

[zOldBulldog]

I already completed almost everything, including the campaign in Rifleman/SniperElite/Authentic/Authentic Plus.

I can't say I enjoyed Authentic or Authentic Plus, mainly because it is very similar to Survival... you find a good defensible spot, get intentionally detected, then wait for enemies quite far away to start coming to the turkey shoot. Once done, either walk around quite safely or find a new safe position close to the next pile of enemies and repeat.

But I am almost done with achievements and I would like to wrap up the "no manual saves". A couple questions come to mind:

1) If I go straight for the Authentic Plus "no manual saves" campaign, will it count as Authentic too?

2) Is it better to do this solo, where you have more control over what happens, or with a partner skilled at Authentic/Authentic Plus and cautious enough that he won't get you in trouble at unexpected times, so that it goes faster?

3) From everything I read, if you are playing solo you can use F5 for a quicksave so that you can stop and continue later as needed, or simply to avoid the fact that you messed up and got killed. Is that right? It almost seems to defeat the whole point of that "no manual saves" campaign, but it appears to be how it is designed to be played. In any case, the question is "can I use Quicksave, or am I stuck to having to do a multi-hour complete map playthrough in one sitting for it to count?"

[TJD]

To answer your questions in sequence:

1) Yes, it will count.

2) It is much easier and faster to take the coop approach, assuming you have a partner with whom you work well. Good comms and a similar style are essential. The first several missions can be done solo easily enough, but the later ones, and especially Allagra, are pretty tough. It took me more than 20 attempts to get through Allagra alone. In contrast, when I helped a guy do it on coop, it seemed infinitely easier and faster.

3) To my understanding using the fast save F5 approach will void your chance of getting the no manual saves, Better than the Best achievement. You cannot save at all. I didn't at any rate. I agree, using F5 would seem to defeat the whole point of the exercise.

[Rebus]

Do it (without saving) when you would be really ready. If so at authentic plus you ll open 4 achievements at one time. If your skill is not so good for it so try it with saves but you’ll spent much time again when decided to do it without them.

[zOldBulldog]

Originally posted by NTR Rebus:

Do it (without saving) when you would be really ready. If so at authentic plus you ll open 4 achievements at one time. If your skill is not so good for it so try it with saves but you’ll spent much time again when decided to do it without them.

I have the map knowledge and techniques well figured out. I already beat it solo on Authentic Plus, and I am not worried about being able to beat it.

What really worries me is the time it takes to play it in one pass. I rarely have sufficient time to beat it solo in a single session.

It would be no big deal if the game was smart enough to make an auto-save on exit, but it isn't. So, it is starting to look like I might just end up leaving those last two achievements undone. Hopefully they will fix that flaw for the next game.

As a matter of fact, I already moved my solo gaming to SE3, while still doing coop in SE4. I do have to say that the game mechanics were vastly improved in SE4... SE3 now feels quite clunky in comparison.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Originally posted by zOldBulldog:

From everything I read, if you are playing solo you can use F5 for a quicksave so that you can stop and continue later as needed, or simply to avoid the fact that you messed up and got killed. Is that right? It almost seems to defeat the whole point of that "no manual saves" campaign, but it appears to be how it is designed to be played. In any case, the question is "can I use Quicksave, or am I stuck to having to do a multi-hour complete map playthrough in one sitting for it to count?"

Originally posted by TJD:

To my understanding using the fast save F5 approach will void your chance of getting the no manual saves, Better than the Best achievement. You cannot save at all. I didn't at any rate. I agree, using F5 would seem to defeat the whole point of the exercise.

Yeah, I was never completely clear on this particular point either, so I went on the safe side as well. It really doesn't help that the game doesn't give you any solid feedback about what you have or have not legally completed with regard to the no-manual-saves part.

The achievement could have at least been done as the kind that has a bar that shows progress and a number ("X/Y missions completed"); instead, you just get a binary yes/no on the entire campaign completion, so it just kinda leaves you guessing and hoping that you have been doing things properly, when you're like 50% of the way there.

Also the game's tracking of "has this mission been completed on Auth Plus with no manual saves?" seems to be entirely internal and isn't shown to the player in the user interface. All you can see in the Select Mission screen is the "highest difficulty completed" for each mission. So it'll say "Authentic Plus" regardless of whether you completed the mission in one, no-death, no-saves run, or if you savescummed it all over the place.

(Side point: the exact same lack-of-information problem applies to the handful of game achievements that are basically mission challenges but in achievement form; e.g. My Rifle is My Best Friend. The mission challenges give you an in-game display that'll actually tell you if you break the rules of the challenge and fail it, and you'll get that feedback immediately. Whereas with the achievement ones, it often comes down to "do the entire mission and hope you did it right... and then see if the achievement actually pops up when you finish".)

Ultimately, I think what this comes down to is "are quicksaves considered manual saves?". From the player's perspective, there are basically three types of saves in SE4: checkpoints; manual saves in the main menu slots; and quicksaves done via F5/F9. Obviously checkpoints would be considered "automatic" saves; and obviously main menu saves are "manual" saves. And then... everything I understand leads me to believe that F5/F9 quicksaves are considered by the game to be manual saves; since, just like saves made manually through the main menu, they can be saved and loaded at will, any time you want.

But ultimately, I don't actually know for sure if that's the true answer to the question. (Because like I explained above, the game gives essentially no feedback on the "saveiness" of a particular mission run, and therefore there's no easy way to do a test to answer this.)

I just did the missions based on the assumption that quicksaves were a form of manual saves, and so I used absolutely zero quicksaves for all of the mission completions. And I got the achievement.

True story: before doing my Authentic Plus runs, I literally went to the options menu and cleared out the F5 and F9 key bindings for quicksave and quickload, so that I literally could not do them out of habit or by accident at all.

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Originally posted by zOldBulldog:

What really worries me is the time it takes to play it in one pass. I rarely have sufficient time to beat it solo in a single session.

I relatively recently went through and completed all of my missions on Authentic Plus difficulty; and yeah, I agree that the amount of time it takes for a single, no-death, no-saves run of a mission can be really killer.

Partly because if you get interrupted, you have to leave the game running, and that's hard to justify if the interruption is going to be long or is "I have to go to bed and will continue this tomorrow". And also partly because it punches you in the gut when you get 80% of the way through a mission and then fail and have to start all over again at the beginning, meaning that you just "wasted" 80% of the couple of hours the mission takes, and you'll have to do those over again.

But also I found it to be a killer thing because my graphics card has had issues recently where it'll often decide, a random amount of time into a SE4 session, that it should crash the graphics driver. It's all fine for the most part (Windows does the whole "your graphics driver crashed and so we restarted it for you, no worries" thing), except that it makes SE4 lose its grip on DirectX, so it has to be restarted for things like, you know, graphics, to work.

I had a number of times where I was working on an Authentic Plus no-save run of one of the Deathstorm DLC missions, and then all of a sudden, after a bunch of really fantastic effort and some luck and good play, 80% of the way in, the graphics driver would decide to end the run in grumpy fashion. That was super-infuriating, since it had nothing to do with me getting killed or doing anything wrong.

Fortunately, at a later point, I finally realized "wait a second... this achievement I'm working on says Authentic Plus, but it doesn't say anything about not saving...", and then I quicksave'd my way to victory on those missions (where necessary).

[zOldBulldog]

@sigsegv, I think you were doing the one called something like You know you are really insane. Unfortunately there are two more, one for Authentic and one for Authentic Plus that require doing it with zero manual saves... those are the ones I was talking about.

The answer seems to be to find someone else that plays Authentic Plus reliably and doing as "no checkpoint" matches in Coop.

But I am only able to play fairly uninterrupted only from about 6:30-9:00am EST = 11:30-14:00 GMT. These are terrible hours for most SE4 players and there aren't many that enjoy Authentic Plus for missions (not even me, I can do it well but I certainly do not enjoy it). So... I think I need to be realistic and know that Coop is not really an option for me, and accept that playing cautiously enough to do with no saves will often take longer than 2.5 hours.

As annoying as it is for someone who likes to do 100% to leave it undone, logic tells me I should give up on it. It also tells me that Rebellion failed in the design of the achievements needed for completion... Achievements should be about skill and patience, not time availability. I hope they do better next SE.

[puiuz]

First time I played campaign on Marksman difficulty and I got "Mission Possible" and "The Masterful Marksman" achievements.
The second time I played on Authentic Plus difficulty with no manual saves and I got "The Real Deal", ",Are You Insane?", "The Best of the Best of the Best", "You know you're REALLY insane, right?" and "Better than the Best"
But guys, is pure madness. I've completed the first 3 missions relatively fast, I mean 8 hours :), but the fourth mission (Lorino Dockyard) it made me cry. I struggled for two days to finish it. I had to kill almost all the enemies after the map(119 enemys).
Missions 5, 6 and 7 I ended them in one day and the last mission (Allagra Fortress) it took me some time. I do not want to give spoilers, but after you complete all the main missions and call the bombers....♥♥♥♥, ♥♥♥♥.., who finished this mission knows what I mean.
I'm played solo and I did not use any manual save. To get Better than the Best achievement, just play the missions without any manual save or F5. If you accidentally save it, you must restart the mission. Good luck guys!!!

[sigsegv [the real one]]

Originally posted by zOldBulldog:

@sigsegv, I think you were doing the one called something like You know you are really insane. Unfortunately there are two more, one for Authentic and one for Authentic Plus that require doing it with zero manual saves... those are the ones I was talking about.

Nah; actually when I said this:

Originally posted by sigsegv:

Fortunately, at a later point, I finally realized "wait a second... this achievement I'm working on says Authentic Plus, but it doesn't say anything about not saving...", and then I quicksave'd my way to victory on those missions (where necessary).

I was referring to an entirely separate achievement... although it turns out I was slightly mistaken with what I was talking about anyway:

So what I was referring to was "complete all 3 Deathstorm missions on Authentic Plus difficulty", which I thought I remembered being a Steam achievement. But actually it was the unlock criteria for the Valkyrie Sniper character for multiplayer.

(Some links referring to that character unlock requirement below, since I can't screenshot the requirement text myself anymore, after having unlocked it:)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/312660/discussions/0/1470840994965615086/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/312660/discussions/0/2132869574277497039/

In any case... that particular achievement not-actually-an-achievement doesn't require doing the runs with no saves. And initially I was getting super frustrated by having the game crash on me and ruining my attempts, because I was still in the "cannot save at all, ever" mindset due to having just previously finished the Authentic-Plus-with-no-saves achievement for the main campaign, where "cannot save at all, ever" was required.

Hope that clears that up.