There's always one or two questlines in each Fromsoft games that I believe no one organically figures out. Like the order and locations in which they appear make absolutely no sense, and you'd only visit those locations if you were following a guide.
Siegmeyer in DS1. Assuming you find him at all the other locations, why anyone would have any reason to go to Ash Lake at all, much less reason to go after completing almost the entire game, to see his final sequence makes no sense to me.
IIRC you can kill them all but you can't kill them all without letting him engage. So the ideal way is usually to pick off three of the four then jump down and let him hit the last one before you kill it.
I somehow did this one naturally in my first playthrough just because I went back and forth between places more then. Second playthrough I had to look up a guide step by step lol.
In SOTE, I pretty much have to visit every NPC after anything happens just to make sure I'm not missing the quests.
~~One of the best weapons in the game~~ The only missable weapon in the game* can only be obtained the first time you play the first battle, it disappears afterwards and you can’t get it in new game+
-Phantom Brave
You missed the thunder summon materia in some random office you are only allowed in once, during a heavy-plot section, so now you can't get it or forge one of the big fancy summons - FFVII
You missed a butterfly in Macalania Woods and can't get a party members ultimate weapon 40 hours later - FFX
You didn't click on the thing with no visual indicator as Laguna so you can't get the weapon upgrade as Squall - FFVIII
You didn't check your desk at the beginning of the game so you start out without access to your first two summons and sort of the entire system the game is based around until you struggle through the first test handicapped
I’m playing through ff12 right now, why is that a thing and please tell me they removed it in zodiac age or that it’s late game enough I can still get it
That is removed in Zodiac Age.
And thats the fun part, there were 4 chest locations that weren't hinted at all and one of them was about an hour or 2 into the game right across from a plot important location!
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Zodiac_Spear_(Final_Fantasy_XII)
Here is a nice breakdown of how it works. I had to look up the differences in the zodiac age edition. In the original, it was pretty much impossible to get without prior knowledge, as there is a series of 4 chests that you COULD NOT open. If you did (which why wouldn't you open a chest in an RPG?), the Zodiac Spear would not appear in its designated chest later in the game. Thankfully it looks like that mechanic was removed from the Zodiac edition.
Nope. And one of the first chests is right at the beginning of the game. I remember buying a strategy guide after I had beaten the game and that's when I learned about it
It was designed to sell Ultimania guides. Which were never released in the US anyway at the time. XII in particular has a lot of things that you can only really know about with the official guides.
I absolutely owned a strategy guide for FF12 at the time in the US. I still own it.
The brand may be different but it was still something to sell guides and it definitely helped sell official guides in the USA.
Did the Prima guide have drop rates for all the other various chest as well, with and without the Diamond Armlet? Or instructions on how to get [Seitengrat](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Seitengrat_(Final_Fantasy_XII\))? The Ultimania guides weren't *just* strategy guides, but that was a major component; they also tended to have a lot of lore and story information that's just not in the game.
This might be because I’m a little bit older, I grew up with SNES and PS1. But there was a time where there was missable content, like permanently missable. Like restart whole game type stuff. This is what I want to know. I’m not trying to minmax or anything, but I hate when I get to hour 40 of an RPG and find I picked option A when option B would give me the quest for the super weapon.
In Persona 5 Royal, you don't get to access the final part of the game (the Royal DLC) if you don't max the relationship with a specific NPC before a set date. The game lets you know that he's leaving, but it doesn't stress that a whole storyline is locked behind it.
wait, which npc was it?
I haven't played in a while but I think I vaguely remember seeing this message but not really caring since I don't prioritize hanging out with the guys.
It's a really common myth that you need to max out all three of them, and it's very tiring to see so many people still saying it, despite almost every guide in the world telling that you need only one. Preservation of old information is really strong in people.
Every time it is mentioned I always recommend doing them anyway cuz while they aren’t required, the extra scenes they do add, add more to the respective characters and make them better.
Not to max but pretty much rank 9, rank 9, rank 5. It's not too difficult to max almost every confident in 1 playthough but I focus those 3 if they are ever on map
Or if you were playing a King's Quest game, turns out you missed some essential item that you can't finish the game without, but you won't know that until you get to the wizard's castle or whatever. Those were fun.
At least that was in a time where you had effectively infinite save points that could be individually named and sorted in folders. Why did we lose THAT feature, GAMING?! You're telling me I have a two TERABYTE drive and I'm limited to ONE save file for this game?
And another thing! Why are some save files "locked" so I can't back them up? Why do the developers care if I can "save scum" or whatever in Animal Crossing?
This has hurt me so much in childhood that as a grown up Im scared to make decisions, always thinking I picked the wrong option and missed out something greater.
When I was still a kid and adolescent I was all about the game guides. I wanted to *know* what the games' secrets were before I played. I wanted to find things and encounter the stuff I read about. So much of my experience with gaming was also about reading and searching for that content before a game came out, or before I could buy it (or got it as a gift), or even reading guides or manuals in times/places where I couldn't actively play a game (like school, or in a car excluding Gameboy games, or when batteries died!).
Then I hit that sweet spot in time when I was old enough to really find and enjoy challenges in games, and I *also* had (nearly, seemingly) infinite time to actually play and replay games for hours and hours and hours.
That's when you're best suited for exploration and experimentation and discovery on your own.
Now I'm a working parent, and even though my work schedule is extremely flexible, I still have quite strict constraints on my time. I definitely do not want to play games with trial and error right now. I want to know *exactly* what certain gameplay elements are out there. I also know enough to know which things I'd like to try to keep secret if I can manage and which things I want to just google and understand.
One day when my kids are older and my career is mature I'll be able to work marathon gaming sessions back into my life. I may compile a backlog of must play games, and I'll try new stuff totally cold - or, more likely, *selectively* cold. I do look forward to some of that.
In the mean time, don't judge people for how they want to play. Let them play. Game on!
Spot on. Also, it does still happen in games, it's good to know if bards get access to way more interesting stuff, as I'm unlikely to spend a second 100 hours on a playthrough.
Games also used to just be a lot more cryptic. Not every action had a 15 step tutorial and not every item had a detailed tooltip. You had to go looking in the manual to know how some stuff worked and even then it might just not be in there.
If we're getting into really retro territory a lot of paper guides were also straight up wrong, or may have been true in the original version but not the one you have. Proofreading was sketchy at best
This seems to have become a "feature" these days.
"You're supposed to lose your first campaign"
"It takes a few playthroughs to get the game".
or
"Your fault for not playing with the guide on a second screen"
"This game is best played without knowing how it works or it kills the challenge."
>"Your fault for not playing with the guide on a second screen"
And then when you do use the guide, it'll mention late-game spoilers like the identity of Darth Revan, Father, or the Dream Visitor completely unecessarily on a page about early-game content.
This exactly. Seems like every open world game I play has missable loot, missable missions or just missable content in general. It sucks having to start over so you gotta do your homework a little before making decisions or leaving some areas.
But on the other hand there are games like Skyrim where there is pretty much nothing you can miss, because you can be part of all guilds, all organizations and you achivements and loyalties do not matter at all.
I wish more games did what Witcher 2 did, because learning that the whole Act 2 is completely different (as in different quests, different city, different dialogues) based on your choices in Act 1 was mindblowing.
Some games still have it. I hate it, which is also why I Google/ask.
My worst experience is: There's a game that's actually pretty neat which is like a business simulation game of sorts. One quests has you be able to donate units of soda to one of your customers, a bee hive. You can donate as many as little as you want.
Someone asked in the forum what the limit is/the mechanics are. The dev commented "I'm curious to see what people found out, what are your experiences with it?", a bunch of people report their findings/answer the OP. One Person donated really a lot of Soda, and says there doesn't seem to be anything more after. The dev responds "are you sure that's all there is to it? Maybe there's more.", and the entire game is riddled with this stuff and your decisions all have lasting effects.
Brother the guy specifically asked for Infos on this quest, just give him the full answer! Use a spoiler tag if you have to.
Exactly this. I usually search for "gamename missable" before I start, and inevitably there's some helpful Reddit, Steam, or GameFAQs forum post detailing what, if anything, is missable.
If your game is a few hours/roguelite/etc., fine, have missables. Anything longer, get outta here with that shit.
Witcher 3 is awful at this. You can't comb through everything as you encounter it because the level/difficulty of areas seems to have been chosen by monkeys throwing poo at the map. You can't play through the story and return to explore later, because many quests become permanently unavailable as you progress. You pretty much need to follow a guide to find all the quests at the relevant stages.
You need to find the quests first, though. And like I said, the game discourages you from 100%-ing every area as you find it before moving on by randomly placing high-level enemies you clearly aren't supposed to fight until later.
Yeah some games there are little things that easily go unnoticed and can actually help you a lot. One example off the top of my head is FO4. At launch there was the "things to know" and one was that the perks screen scrolls down to show more perks. I had no idea at level like 20 or so. And there was definitely a "dang I would have gotten such and such perk already had I known"
Oh, they explain it fine. I just tend to forget my galilean opera glasses when reading the 5 second popup of detailed instructions in .008 point font in the leftmost corner of the screen.
Anyone remembers State of decay 1? The "tutorial" was a joke, in some inventory menus you could do certain actions by pressing a never explained button.
That’s all fine and dandy, but 90% of the posts are before people have even started so they wouldn’t know if the game was bad at explaining or not. I say at least give it an ol college try before posting on reddit, but then again idgaf
I believe those are people that can't play the game, but can access reddit.
I usually only play on the weekends after kids are asleep. So when i am hyped for a game over the week, the question isn't between "playing the game" VS "checking game infos on reddit/youtube".
The decision is "checking game infos" VS "doing something else completely"
Plenty of games that, as a short list of examples:
- Have no respec option and unevidentally useless stats or abilities that can easily lead to bad builds.
- Have unintuitive as and annoying lockouts for things.
- Have important but poorly explained mechanics.
- Have common pain points (gameplay, settings, etc.) that can be rectified.
I 100%'d Hollow Knight, and also the DLC, got like 150 hours in the game, and...
... THEN I found out you can just walk into the well in Dirtmouth, you don't have to jump.
Been seeing it a lot for Hades 2.
I know someone who completely missed the upgraded tank and the rebreather (which makes deep diving easier) for Subnautica Below Zero. So two important items for first time players were missed. They are both things you find very early in the game.
I was kinda confused when you mentioned Hades 2 then talked about below zero.
But yeah, rebreather is only found in that one spot in the twisted bridges or whatever it's called.
It’s easily possible to run right past it haha. Definitely something good to know when you see probably your first snow troll and you don’t know how tough they are.
I am wrapping up my second playthrough of Fallout New Vegas and starting my Nth game of FO4.
I just learned that there are "junk" perks: as in, they were coded incorrectly. Literally, a waste of a perk slot.
So yeah I've been doing this a LOT lately LOL.
> Have no respec option and unevidentally useless stats or abilities that can easily lead to bad builds.
Parry skill in Neverwinter Nights.. Worst part is that Bioware was made aware and couldn't fix it.. but they never removed the skill.
Some games have very obtuse systems.
In Dark Souls 1, you would roll to dodge attacks.
In Dark Souls 2, you would use the same dodge roll and get hit twice as often. This was because the game added a new stat and you had to level it several times to make your dodge roll as effective as it was in the previous game. Depending on your build, you NEED dodge roll to work properly, but the game was awful at explaining this.
So, "what do I need to know before starting dark souls 2" is a fair question.
"Put about 10 points into ADP as soon as you can so you don't get whomped while rolling" is a fair answer.
Souls games are notorious for this. You could ask this question for each game and get several valid answers for each.
I just remember playing it thinking "I swear I didn't get hit this much in 1" - particularly during the first Pursuer fight.
Then I googled it and it all clicked.
There were some unusual choices in that game, for sure.
Though I do appreciate the "kill an enemy 10 times to stop them respawning" addition - not useful enough for people getting really beaten up or fed up by a cluttered boss run, but also bound to upset the purists, thus pissing just about everyone off.
I get it.
A lot of people have limited time. Some games will do weird things like “oh, your best path was to do this instead of that but that’s ok because you’ll get to experience the best path in new game+” and some people simply don’t have time for that.
This is it. Many games I’ve thought hey I’ll do it the other way in a different playthrough and then realize there are so many games I wanna play I’ll never have another playthrough
Some people want to know about making a fun character build or certain decisions they should do to have the outcome they want at the end. I've reached the end of many games throughout the years where I wish I did it differently, even though I still had a blast. I guess that's a good excuse to do a second playthrough
Cause I don’t want to miss things or get screwed over by esoteric mechanics or points of no return. I hardly have time to play games as is, much less do multiple playthroughs.
Because some of us like to only do one playthrough of a game. I e.g. try to do all my games in 1 playthrough and then watch alternative endings on youtube. So I try to get the most of this one playthrough, find all possible quests etc. Posts like those definitely help with this
I also only play them once but I don't bother with alternate endings or missed content - the story I experienced is the one I made for myself and I'm happy with that. But yeah makes sense some people would want to see it all as well :)
which is fine, but then you go into stuff like trails where the story spans multiple games and has multiple throw backs and its like "OH HEY THIS CHARACTER APPEARED THAT ONLY SHOWED UP IF YOU DID THIS ONE QUEST 4 GAMES AGO ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CONSOLE"
For whatever reason devs have put substantial work into concealing the ludonarrative dissonance in their games, and you do have a better experience when you know going in what goals, pressures, and constrains are just ludonarrative window dressing and which others are actually enforced or measured by the mechanics of the game.
There is a giant demographic of gamers that just follow guides and YouTube videos for literally every aspect of the game.
Personally I don't and for me it would basically ruin my experience. But for them, apparently it doesn't so more power to them.
There is no wrong way to enjoy yourself with a single player video game
I swear as a kid I used to buy a game and then the big thick walkthrough books that came with them and I used to spend more time reading the walkthrough books than playing the actual game.
I love that. I used to have to wait to get games but I got Nintendo power so I would literally read every single thing I possibly could about the game first haha
Yeah and that's fair as well to be honest. They even have games that play out exactly that way. But to be real with you it's the same reason that a lot of people will watch a streamer play a game instead of playing it. They can see someone who is really good who has a team of really good people on their team, and how that looks when played. But to do this themselves can be incredibly hard.
There is no shame in either IMHO. Just because it is not something I do, doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to enjoy doing it.
There are also people who want to know how a movie ends before they even know what it's about. I don't know who these freaks are, but whoever's putting together Hollywood trailers these days seems to be humoring them.
I hate that! Literally my favorite movie ever which is children of Men I had never seen a trailer for and knew nothing going into. I feel like that was a huge part of how much I enjoyed it and now I just try to avoid trailers in general
At home if I’m watching a movie I look up the plot online if I’m interested enough. I spoil myself on leaks for most movies, like I knew Endgame’s ending before going into the theater. When I read books I read the last chapter first. And when I buy games I watch the first, middle and last part of a walkthrough before doing so.
I cannot enjoy myself if I don’t know how things go. And I’d rather have my first time be more like my second since that’s usually when I really enjoy and understand something. Honestly, I just think we’re all too concerned with virginal experiences and focus more on the first time than actually enjoying the product.
Is it just the anxiety of the unknown for you? I get the game things because I get frustrated with games and won’t finish them so I need guides to allow me to finish it, but the movies and books thing I don’t really get. Not trying to be judgmental, I just want to know honestly lol.
I do think I have a fear of the unknown. I have to tackle it everyday when I do anything. But books, movies, games, etc. I can find out what's going to happen so I have some semblance of control. It's my escapism.
It’s in respect of my time. I love to game, but with a full time job and a family I sacrifice sleep to get an hour or two most nights.
This means I have little patience for grinding, avoidable backtracking, or missing key gameplay methods for too long.
Knowing to save my gold till after X, or pick up Y macguffins as a priority, or that parrying completely changes the combat game are good for me to know upfront instead of learning organically, as it helps me pack the most fun in the time I do have
^ This... games are complex these days and have dozens of mechanics. Before starting I like to get a sense of which mechanics are most important and which can be given less attention. Because games never tell you that. They say these are xyz mechanics and this is what they do, but they don't say how important each one is.
It depends on the game.
I certainly would recommend to a new player if they're gonna start playing a Monster Hunter to learn some basics online since those games usually don't give you much information on how the mechanics work, specially the older ones.
There is a surprising number of people who prefer to go into most things with no surprises. These are the people who go out of their way to find leaks of new games, guides for old games, and watch hours of gameplay before they play.
Or, you just don't want to miss anything.
I do none of those things, and like when the story surprises me. However, hours down the line and I find out a tiny, seemingly insignificant choice/option locks me out of content, that's all I'm thinking about the rest of the game and it's essentially ruined for me.
I also don't NG something that just took me 40+ hours to complete, just file the information away for the next time I pick it up in a year or two.
Also premium games cost money, so it's understandable people want to know whether if they like the game or not and it's usually impossible to tell just from the store page alone.
If we're talking about free games, then I would say it's not that big of an issue, other than wasting the time you spend downloading.
Because I work full time and have a kid, house etc so I do not have the energy to play a game multiple times else I would never get chance to play anything since most games now are 60 hours plus.
So instead i look to see what gives me the best possible chance to get the best ending (or just not a bad one) and run with that.
If its a short game, say 2-3 hours long then yes I will play that blind. But a 60 hour game? Screw that.
Yeah me with fromsoft games mostly. Thing I can’t replay games (no time and don’t care). So if I want to take in and enjoy the maximum amount I need to watch guides.
this is really strange behaviour to me. There are magazines dedicated to telling viewers what happens in soap operas before they air.... then I guess the readers of the magazines watch what they know is going to happen, happen? Low frequency existence
I think of this as roughly the same as rewatching a movie, or watching a movie after seeing a modern movie trailer (since they are just giant spoilers these days). You know what’s going to happen, but watch anyways. If you enjoy it still, then you enjoy it.
Some people just find comfort in knowing.
Well there are literally games where if you do something wrong you can fuck your entire account/playthrough or severely hamper yourself and sometimes you don't want to dig through Google for answers you want to talk to the community because you get more of an experience and even some fun advice/anecdotes from other players.
But I guess some people just get unnaturally upset about stuff they could just... Y'know... Scroll by and ignore? They're like that meme of the kid whose face is beet red like hes about to burst, just waiting for something to whine about that doesn't affect them at all.
It's so narcissistic.
"You guys have to play games in the exact manor I would do it. Don't you dare ask for help on here because I'm a whiney baby who's incapable of scrolling past a post."
Get the fuck over yourself.
My personal experience with seeking info like that is that I have very limited gaming time and don't want to spend time on unnecessary stuff.
Tldr I don't do foreplay when I'm masturbating.
Loads of reasons:
Missable contents
Fucking up your build - souls games punish you for investing in all stats with no in game way to change them (until the later ones)
Having to avoid grinding later making the game a chore because you missed a thing.
Also people don't have that much time on their hands these days and so "go and discover everything for yourself is not a viable option from everyone"
If you don't like offering tips to people you can ignore these posts. How people choose to play games doesn't change your experience in any way
OP, have you played Skyrim?
Are you from the age where you couldn't remap controller buttons. Wait, this might still be a thing.
Figuring out whatever set the devs went with was the actual tutorial.
Maybe games have changed. I have played entire games skipping features and things because I simply did not know it even existed.
Play a game in another language or a game game where you get stuck and suddenly you'll understand the plight.
This is an "issue" of being used to games.
Play a genre you've never played or I don't know, non American **football on a keyboard**.
I don’t know man, play how you want to play. Some people love having all the answers beforehand, some like playing blind and figuring things out. I guarantee both are having fun.
Been this way since gaming immemorial.
Because a lot of games don't have good onboarding experiences.
And I'd much prefer people ask before playing than get pissed off and quit.
Especially if it's a good game.
Personally, this depends on the game and the gamer. There are games that don't flat out tell you what to do or the tutorial just doesn't explain everything and leaves you to figure it out. It's annoying really. So that's why people ask what they need to know. For example, you're playing Stardew Valley but there's really no tutorial that tell you what to do here other than digging holes and making crops. You don't even realize later on that, oh there's a cave to fight monsters here. That's why people ask what they need to know.
I haven't played Elden Ring, if I wanted to get in on it, I'll find a trash can. :)
I've been playing My Time at Portia as a big SV fan and have to keep googling stuff. Food restores health but not energy. Okay, how do I get energy? Sitting on a bench and drinking juice? Okay, how do I get juice? Oh, I can't afford that. I need a massage chair? Oh, I can't afford that...
So I'm just taking it easy now and chilling and gathering money. I'm hoping the game will tell me if it's time to kick it into gear. I can see how to upgrade tools for better resources, but aside from buying juice, I still haven't found a way to restore energy...
People have always used walkthroughs, they've been a thing since pre Internet when you used to have to buy the Prima guides. I had guides for Megadrive/Genesis games. I think the wealth of information from both annoying youtubers, forums, gaming sites all with different opinions about the correct way to do something make it harder to know, so it's easier to find out than research... I really miss physical guides, Cyberpunk was the last one I got.
I get it in some cases. My current example is Persona 5 Royal. There is a core mechanic of building relationships with other people. Which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't a time limit and too many characters for a single playthrough of a 90+ hour long game. And to unlock the final part of the game (20 hours or so, that's what I've read) you need to build relationship with a specific character to a specific level before specific date. And additionally to that, to unlock the true ending, you need to do the same with 2 more characters. Without knowing beforehand what the conditions are I would have 100% missed the final part of the game, because before knowing this I wasn't building relationship with the required character at all because he seemed unimportant to me.
I love the idea of going in blind, but every day, game developers are finding ways to punish it. It almost feels like every game is *required* to have cool weapons, characters, or story scenes you can miss, or trap options that lead to bad investments, or they have trophies or romances that you need to be dialed in on from the start. Or maybe certain collectibles/endings require you to walk a tightrope of choices you couldn't have known in advance.
It's a great concept, but devs don't support it. They undercut it and make you pay.
There was a player that played maybe 6 minutes of metro exodus and dropped it because... he couldn't understand what was going on and why the main character was being scolded. Because he didn't play the other games.
I know it doesnt particularly answer the why question but hopefully you now get an idea, what type of person could be asking such question and so you dont need to think much more about it than the person asking it.
I do tend to agree, but there are some fair answers to that question.
Some games don't do a good job at warning you about points of no return, or certain unclear mechanics or quest fail states. Also there might be a cool ability or tool or something that you get access to relatively early on, but if you explore everything first you only get to use for a quarter of the total game instead.
An example is Deathloop. Basically everything you do prior to unlocking the ability to keep stuff. Going straight there and avoiding too much exploration is probably gonna give you a better experience over effectively wasting the whole first few hours exploring only to have to retread all of it.
Unless you have GamePass, it's not like you can rent or try out games.
And 2 hours to try out a game is not enough to see if it would keep your interest. Plus people can discuss the pros and cons of a particular title and start comment wars. :D
Can't speak for anyone else, but I usually look up if their are any missables in games I'm about to begin playing. I have a huge backlog that I'm trying to get through and it's very, *very* unlikely a game merits a second playthrough, so I try to get as complete a run as possible.
Some people want to know if a particular type of game is "for them" before dropping up to $60 on it.
My friend loves games for their narrative quality, but doesn't banging his head against the wall. So he asks me "what do I need to know" before jumping in.
Dark Souls is not for him. Spiritfarer absolutely was.
Asking this question instead of looking it up is a great way to avoid spoilers, while getting a feel for if the game is worth investing time and money into.
Not everyone can afford dropping $60 on a game that they know nothing about
I dont want to smash my head into wall just so i can find one build that opens the door. I dont want to make charisma build just to find its useless stat 50 hours in. It dont want to be stuck in a room for 2 hours just because jump-dash mechanic is not explained in the game. I dont want to try to kill unkillable NPC every level/weapon upgrade just because how the aurmor mechanic works in a way that more aurmor and unkillable looks identical. I dont want to build awesome plane that does not work because i did not untick one box on tiny part that makes it flyable.
It is not fun discovery, its "oh fuck this shit im uninstalling". It would be fine if I knew and did not waste time on it, but now that I did im angered, flustrated and anoyed.
Its "what do i need to know" not what is the most OP build. Some games just dont tell you critical/important information.
You see, you think this is logical and simple, but it isn't. Some people enjoy games more when they engage with them that way. You cannot apply your arbitrary standard of how to enjoy a game to other people. There is no "one way" to enjoy a game. I personally like min maxing and playing efficiently, and that is much easier to do with more information. You don't get to sit here and tell me that I am playing wrong or not enjoying it as much. How fucking dare you
1. Missable content. Some people want to experience everything a game has to offer on their first run because, for various reasons, the reckon they won't play the game again. For example, they are a busy, hard-working parent and they want to play Dark Souls. There is a lot of missable content in that game that you would almost never find on your own and some of it is the best content in the entire game (DLC). Since you are busy with IRL stuff you probably won't be able to play through the game again due to the feeling of "I've already beaten this game and I only have so much spare time to play games, I should just play something else entirely".
2. Some games do a poor job of explaining themselves or are very mechanically dense or both. Dark Souls, Europe Universalis 4 (or probably most 4x games for that matter) etc...
3. Some games have poor mechanics/aspects which are a detriment to the game as a whole. Some people feel that avoiding those mechanics/aspects at the cost of some slight spoilers is to their benefit because they will enjoy the game more. For example, I want to play a game on the hardest difficulty, but only if the hardest difficulty does not just make the enemies bigger damage sponges with more damage, which is tedious.
4. Some games have bugs which can be annoying to deal with without prior knowledge. For example, the infamous Dark Souls 2 weapon durability bug, where striking the corpse of a dead enemy will lower your weapon durability a significant amount and force you to often repair your weapon, which is tedious. You are unlikely to notice this because you are busy killing the enemy in front of you. Knowing ahead of time about the bug helps with circumventing it.
5. Some people just enjoy playing games with no surprises and want to play the optimal way.
I for example do this for crpg that can easily last 60 or 100 hours. I am an adult with family and can barely play most of the games once so I don't want to miss important stuff or waste a lot of hours with a bad build. As someone said this is especially the case in the pathfinder games for example which are very overwhelming with all their options!
Also I couldn't care less about randomly exploring for needed collectibles (at least if important stuff is locked behind them) or I hate most puzzles in gaming so I use a guide for that stuff most of the time.
I don't create these posts, but I appreciate those that do. I play most games once and move on to the next. It's great to have tips to experience most of what the game has to offer within one playthrough.
At this point we ask because before, games used to come with little instruction books with presumably all you needed to know.
Now they don't. So I have to Google which button I need to push just to jump if I want to know what I should try and do before starting the game "and just fucking around to learn"
Everyone's fun is different. Some people may not like the exploration aspect of the game but really like everything else, so in order to enjoy the game they just ask the internet for help.
In Fallout 4 accepting to lead the minutemen near the start of the game kicks off a never ending series of useless side quests that eventually you can't even choose to accept or not. You are treated as an errand boy instead of a general, and the guy who didn't want the job will just walk near you and say "another settlement needs help" and boom it's in your quest log.
If you refuse to lead them you can just go about the game without any of that BS.
Some single player games can have very convoluted secrets and stuff mixed in that's extremely easy to miss if you do something wrong. Others might have weird balancing issues where building your character a certain way can lead to a significantly less fun experience. It can sometimes help to get these things pointed out so you dont miss something crucial or end up with a bad build that ruins it.
Some of us with jobs/families don't have enough time for multiple playthroughs, so we try to get as much of the experience as we can in one go. Sometimes that means looking up some tips or getting a heads up about a mechanic or miss-able.
Games are absolutely *full* of missables and everyone saying you should just wing it is probably planning to do a lot more playthroughs than your average working gamer.
The better question is why there is such a persistent group of people getting in the way anytime someone needs help or wants more information.
As someone pretty active on the r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker subreddit i can definitely say some single player games just are pretty rough mechanically and you can get decently stuck in them. In alot of RPGs there are also sometimes entire story paths that a player might want to experience that are easily missable, e.g. the mythic paths in Pathfinder WotR. Some people just want to know about thosw beforehand, especially if they are older gamers and have experienced Dead Man running(missing an item early on only to not be able to progress five hours later with no way back) situations in the old Kings Quest games or similar.
To be fair, the quality of Google has gotten astonishingly bad when it comes to asking certain types of questions. You can ask a very specific question about a particular game, and the front page is all, “Here’s fifty results about a completely different game that maybe contains one of your search parameters.” Adding “Reddit” to your search can vastly improves your results when that happens.
Google has been bad for years. The prevalence of SEO using tags for things that aren't even related to the material. I remember when you'd have five or six results that were ads but now it feels like that's still the case but then three pages of results are review articles written by arbitrage marketing that's just designed to get you to accidentally click an ad so they can make $0.003 in revenue.
1. fifty results loosely related to the game, but not relevant
2. dead pages mixed in
3. you find a forum thread, the only reply is "Google it, lazy ass"
4. you find a forum thread, the only reply is by OP, who says "nvm figured it out"
5. nothing else
Googling stuff, especially stuff like strategy or tips is a really painful process nowadays though. You can either slog through a sea of soulless content farms and meandering videos, or get a direct, specific answer from a genuine person. Easy to see why people prefer the latter
There's a channel on Youtube, related to DaVinci software.
It's some girl, and pretty much all of her tutorial videos are at most 90 seconds long, and every single one is straight to the point and clear. Love her, but she won't love me back
Oh what do you mean, You don't like pulling up part 32 in a 50 part tutorial series to figure out where the fuck they moved a certain button this update?
I like the questions on Reddit because if the answer of what you are asking would spoil it people tend to nudge you to right direction while caring for not spoiling it for you. When you search in google there is a big chance that the results will just give you the spoiler answer.
Also, for me it feels more like when I was a kid and I would get stuck in a game and I would ask a neighbour or school friend and they would nudge me in the right direction.
I always assume that it's people just wanting others to share in their excitement of starting a new game. They probably don't want to just post something like, "I'm excited to play this game!" and instead lean towards a more conversation-oriented question like "What should I know?" so more people interact with their post
There are some single player games where a bad build can sort of brick you. Or at make the game take significantly more time than it reasonably should.
If I ever ask that question, I’m mostly just making sure it’s either A) not one of those games B) if it is, what types of builds are viable. Is it a game where you need to make an all around build and spread stats eventually or can you pick a theme and go with it.
Also, is there some hidden settings that makes the game much more enjoyable. I.E rebinding the controls for some space games is pretty essential. Like in ever space you really want a button to turn off the inertia dampener, which isn’t bound by default, because it makes combat more fun.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a new phenomenon, because back in the day you had strategy guides and cheat codes and the like, but gaming culture nowadays with the internet, YouTube, Twitch streamers, etc. gamers are all about min max optimization of their gameplay experience over anything else. Everyone needs to follow a meta instead of figuring things out for themselves, and too many other people insist that metas are the only viable means to play through games, even furthering the narrative that gaming needs to be fully optimized.
As the saying goes, given the opportunity, gamers will optimize the fun out of any game.
Because I don't want to spend 200hrs figuring out how elden ring works.
Ie. I had no idea that parry was even a thing until I looked up beginner guides. Now it's my favourite thing
You opened a random chest now you can't get the ultimate weapon -FFXII
You missed a random NPC hidden behind a random corner at the start of the game and now he's dead and five questlines are ruined - Fromsoft games
There's always one or two questlines in each Fromsoft games that I believe no one organically figures out. Like the order and locations in which they appear make absolutely no sense, and you'd only visit those locations if you were following a guide.
Siegmeyer in DS1. Assuming you find him at all the other locations, why anyone would have any reason to go to Ash Lake at all, much less reason to go after completing almost the entire game, to see his final sequence makes no sense to me.
For bonus points, he's got a sequence where you'll fail and he'll be permanently dead if you don't intervene soon / effectively enough. Why?
But not too effectively either, IIRC. If you kill all of them yourself his quest line also breaks.
IIRC you can kill them all but you can't kill them all without letting him engage. So the ideal way is usually to pick off three of the four then jump down and let him hit the last one before you kill it.
His quest is the real final boss
Exactly Milicent's quest
I somehow did this one naturally in my first playthrough just because I went back and forth between places more then. Second playthrough I had to look up a guide step by step lol. In SOTE, I pretty much have to visit every NPC after anything happens just to make sure I'm not missing the quests.
*Pain*
You didn't fuse kinstones early enough, now you can't upgrade your bow. - Legend of Zelda Minish Cap.
You didn't make the old man cry before killing him so you missed out on getting the best faith talisman. Elden Rings.
You can kill that old man multiple times without issue actually.
You must finish the game first to talk to Biggoron for a Mirror Shield - Minish Cap
The light arrows are a missable item - Minish Cap
~~One of the best weapons in the game~~ The only missable weapon in the game* can only be obtained the first time you play the first battle, it disappears afterwards and you can’t get it in new game+ -Phantom Brave
You talked to this NPC so now that other NPC is dead and you failed the entire side quest - Souls games
You missed the thunder summon materia in some random office you are only allowed in once, during a heavy-plot section, so now you can't get it or forge one of the big fancy summons - FFVII
You missed a butterfly in Macalania Woods and can't get a party members ultimate weapon 40 hours later - FFX You didn't click on the thing with no visual indicator as Laguna so you can't get the weapon upgrade as Squall - FFVIII
You didn't check your desk at the beginning of the game so you start out without access to your first two summons and sort of the entire system the game is based around until you struggle through the first test handicapped
I’m playing through ff12 right now, why is that a thing and please tell me they removed it in zodiac age or that it’s late game enough I can still get it
That is removed in Zodiac Age. And thats the fun part, there were 4 chest locations that weren't hinted at all and one of them was about an hour or 2 into the game right across from a plot important location!
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Zodiac_Spear_(Final_Fantasy_XII) Here is a nice breakdown of how it works. I had to look up the differences in the zodiac age edition. In the original, it was pretty much impossible to get without prior knowledge, as there is a series of 4 chests that you COULD NOT open. If you did (which why wouldn't you open a chest in an RPG?), the Zodiac Spear would not appear in its designated chest later in the game. Thankfully it looks like that mechanic was removed from the Zodiac edition.
Were there any in game hints or logic that you could use to figure out not to open them if you were really perceptive?
Nope. And one of the first chests is right at the beginning of the game. I remember buying a strategy guide after I had beaten the game and that's when I learned about it
It was designed to sell Ultimania guides. Which were never released in the US anyway at the time. XII in particular has a lot of things that you can only really know about with the official guides.
I absolutely owned a strategy guide for FF12 at the time in the US. I still own it. The brand may be different but it was still something to sell guides and it definitely helped sell official guides in the USA.
Did the Prima guide have drop rates for all the other various chest as well, with and without the Diamond Armlet? Or instructions on how to get [Seitengrat](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Seitengrat_(Final_Fantasy_XII\))? The Ultimania guides weren't *just* strategy guides, but that was a major component; they also tended to have a lot of lore and story information that's just not in the game.
Yes, it’s been changed. Just low chances now.
The worst kind of design in videogames imo along with no respec option.
You must wait till the last 20secs or Shadow is a goner - FF6
This might be because I’m a little bit older, I grew up with SNES and PS1. But there was a time where there was missable content, like permanently missable. Like restart whole game type stuff. This is what I want to know. I’m not trying to minmax or anything, but I hate when I get to hour 40 of an RPG and find I picked option A when option B would give me the quest for the super weapon.
In Persona 5 Royal, you don't get to access the final part of the game (the Royal DLC) if you don't max the relationship with a specific NPC before a set date. The game lets you know that he's leaving, but it doesn't stress that a whole storyline is locked behind it.
wait, which npc was it? I haven't played in a while but I think I vaguely remember seeing this message but not really caring since I don't prioritize hanging out with the guys.
If I renember correctly >!maruki the counsellor, akechi, kisumi that red haired girl I thing that's her name!<
you have to max all 3 of them???
No you don’t only the councilor is required for the third semester. Akechi and Kasumi add extra scenes but are not requirements for it.
It's a really common myth that you need to max out all three of them, and it's very tiring to see so many people still saying it, despite almost every guide in the world telling that you need only one. Preservation of old information is really strong in people.
Every time it is mentioned I always recommend doing them anyway cuz while they aren’t required, the extra scenes they do add, add more to the respective characters and make them better.
Not to max but pretty much rank 9, rank 9, rank 5. It's not too difficult to max almost every confident in 1 playthough but I focus those 3 if they are ever on map
Just the first one.
Or if you were playing a King's Quest game, turns out you missed some essential item that you can't finish the game without, but you won't know that until you get to the wizard's castle or whatever. Those were fun.
At least that was in a time where you had effectively infinite save points that could be individually named and sorted in folders. Why did we lose THAT feature, GAMING?! You're telling me I have a two TERABYTE drive and I'm limited to ONE save file for this game?
It is pretty ridiculous, yep.
And another thing! Why are some save files "locked" so I can't back them up? Why do the developers care if I can "save scum" or whatever in Animal Crossing?
Those animal crossing people are just sadistic. I mean who puts animals up on crosses?
Ave, true to Ceasar
This is my problem, also I don’t have the time to restart/do a second playthrough on a 40+ hour game. I want the full package experience in one go.
What about the games where it's impossible because of mutually exclusive options ? Like class-exclusive quests.
This has hurt me so much in childhood that as a grown up Im scared to make decisions, always thinking I picked the wrong option and missed out something greater.
When I was still a kid and adolescent I was all about the game guides. I wanted to *know* what the games' secrets were before I played. I wanted to find things and encounter the stuff I read about. So much of my experience with gaming was also about reading and searching for that content before a game came out, or before I could buy it (or got it as a gift), or even reading guides or manuals in times/places where I couldn't actively play a game (like school, or in a car excluding Gameboy games, or when batteries died!). Then I hit that sweet spot in time when I was old enough to really find and enjoy challenges in games, and I *also* had (nearly, seemingly) infinite time to actually play and replay games for hours and hours and hours. That's when you're best suited for exploration and experimentation and discovery on your own. Now I'm a working parent, and even though my work schedule is extremely flexible, I still have quite strict constraints on my time. I definitely do not want to play games with trial and error right now. I want to know *exactly* what certain gameplay elements are out there. I also know enough to know which things I'd like to try to keep secret if I can manage and which things I want to just google and understand. One day when my kids are older and my career is mature I'll be able to work marathon gaming sessions back into my life. I may compile a backlog of must play games, and I'll try new stuff totally cold - or, more likely, *selectively* cold. I do look forward to some of that. In the mean time, don't judge people for how they want to play. Let them play. Game on!
Spot on. Also, it does still happen in games, it's good to know if bards get access to way more interesting stuff, as I'm unlikely to spend a second 100 hours on a playthrough.
Games also used to just be a lot more cryptic. Not every action had a 15 step tutorial and not every item had a detailed tooltip. You had to go looking in the manual to know how some stuff worked and even then it might just not be in there.
If we're getting into really retro territory a lot of paper guides were also straight up wrong, or may have been true in the original version but not the one you have. Proofreading was sketchy at best
If the guy writing it missed something, you missed it too. I had so many magazines I had to get rid of because I didn't have the space to keep them.
Got reminded about who framed Roger rabbit recently and the phone hint. They really did trust us back then to "figure it out"
This seems to have become a "feature" these days. "You're supposed to lose your first campaign" "It takes a few playthroughs to get the game". or "Your fault for not playing with the guide on a second screen" "This game is best played without knowing how it works or it kills the challenge."
>"Your fault for not playing with the guide on a second screen" And then when you do use the guide, it'll mention late-game spoilers like the identity of Darth Revan, Father, or the Dream Visitor completely unecessarily on a page about early-game content.
This exactly. Seems like every open world game I play has missable loot, missable missions or just missable content in general. It sucks having to start over so you gotta do your homework a little before making decisions or leaving some areas.
But on the other hand there are games like Skyrim where there is pretty much nothing you can miss, because you can be part of all guilds, all organizations and you achivements and loyalties do not matter at all. I wish more games did what Witcher 2 did, because learning that the whole Act 2 is completely different (as in different quests, different city, different dialogues) based on your choices in Act 1 was mindblowing.
Some games still have it. I hate it, which is also why I Google/ask. My worst experience is: There's a game that's actually pretty neat which is like a business simulation game of sorts. One quests has you be able to donate units of soda to one of your customers, a bee hive. You can donate as many as little as you want. Someone asked in the forum what the limit is/the mechanics are. The dev commented "I'm curious to see what people found out, what are your experiences with it?", a bunch of people report their findings/answer the OP. One Person donated really a lot of Soda, and says there doesn't seem to be anything more after. The dev responds "are you sure that's all there is to it? Maybe there's more.", and the entire game is riddled with this stuff and your decisions all have lasting effects. Brother the guy specifically asked for Infos on this quest, just give him the full answer! Use a spoiler tag if you have to.
Exactly this. I usually search for "gamename missable" before I start, and inevitably there's some helpful Reddit, Steam, or GameFAQs forum post detailing what, if anything, is missable. If your game is a few hours/roguelite/etc., fine, have missables. Anything longer, get outta here with that shit.
Witcher 3 is awful at this. You can't comb through everything as you encounter it because the level/difficulty of areas seems to have been chosen by monkeys throwing poo at the map. You can't play through the story and return to explore later, because many quests become permanently unavailable as you progress. You pretty much need to follow a guide to find all the quests at the relevant stages.
I mean all you have to do is make sure to complete side quests before leaving to a new area. Wouldn't say that needs a guide.
You need to find the quests first, though. And like I said, the game discourages you from 100%-ing every area as you find it before moving on by randomly placing high-level enemies you clearly aren't supposed to fight until later.
I hated the way that you level out of getting full xp for a quest too.
Some games are terrible at explaining their mechanics.
Yeah some games there are little things that easily go unnoticed and can actually help you a lot. One example off the top of my head is FO4. At launch there was the "things to know" and one was that the perks screen scrolls down to show more perks. I had no idea at level like 20 or so. And there was definitely a "dang I would have gotten such and such perk already had I known"
Yeah the first few hours in I thought you had to unlock top down too.
Right, don't look that up though, it's pointless, you should just enjoy the game!
I do, usually it's second playthrough or if I totally bricked the game.
Oh, they explain it fine. I just tend to forget my galilean opera glasses when reading the 5 second popup of detailed instructions in .008 point font in the leftmost corner of the screen.
Anyone remembers State of decay 1? The "tutorial" was a joke, in some inventory menus you could do certain actions by pressing a never explained button.
That’s all fine and dandy, but 90% of the posts are before people have even started so they wouldn’t know if the game was bad at explaining or not. I say at least give it an ol college try before posting on reddit, but then again idgaf
How do you know what a game was bad at explaining if it was bad at explaining it?
I believe those are people that can't play the game, but can access reddit. I usually only play on the weekends after kids are asleep. So when i am hyped for a game over the week, the question isn't between "playing the game" VS "checking game infos on reddit/youtube". The decision is "checking game infos" VS "doing something else completely"
Plenty of games that, as a short list of examples: - Have no respec option and unevidentally useless stats or abilities that can easily lead to bad builds. - Have unintuitive as and annoying lockouts for things. - Have important but poorly explained mechanics. - Have common pain points (gameplay, settings, etc.) that can be rectified.
And how often do you see someone post "LPT: You can..." and get replies like "20 hours in and I didn't realize! I wish I knew this earlier!"
I 100%'d Hollow Knight, and also the DLC, got like 150 hours in the game, and... ... THEN I found out you can just walk into the well in Dirtmouth, you don't have to jump.
YOU CAN WALK INTO IT?! I’VE 83 HOURS IN IT AND I DIDNT KNOW THIS
hey OP this well ain't poisoned
Have you ever tried climbing back up the well? Not ascending with the prompt, actually climbing back up with mantis claw
I don't remember doing that
I think it's just a rancid egg, but it's a thing you can do!
Been seeing it a lot for Hades 2. I know someone who completely missed the upgraded tank and the rebreather (which makes deep diving easier) for Subnautica Below Zero. So two important items for first time players were missed. They are both things you find very early in the game.
I was kinda confused when you mentioned Hades 2 then talked about below zero. But yeah, rebreather is only found in that one spot in the twisted bridges or whatever it's called.
>Have common pain points That troll in skyrim
On the other end of the scale: the Giant's Club Space Agency
It’s easily possible to run right past it haha. Definitely something good to know when you see probably your first snow troll and you don’t know how tough they are.
I am wrapping up my second playthrough of Fallout New Vegas and starting my Nth game of FO4. I just learned that there are "junk" perks: as in, they were coded incorrectly. Literally, a waste of a perk slot. So yeah I've been doing this a LOT lately LOL.
> Have no respec option and unevidentally useless stats or abilities that can easily lead to bad builds. Parry skill in Neverwinter Nights.. Worst part is that Bioware was made aware and couldn't fix it.. but they never removed the skill.
You mean like leveling ADP to 99 in Dark Souls?
Some games have very obtuse systems. In Dark Souls 1, you would roll to dodge attacks. In Dark Souls 2, you would use the same dodge roll and get hit twice as often. This was because the game added a new stat and you had to level it several times to make your dodge roll as effective as it was in the previous game. Depending on your build, you NEED dodge roll to work properly, but the game was awful at explaining this. So, "what do I need to know before starting dark souls 2" is a fair question. "Put about 10 points into ADP as soon as you can so you don't get whomped while rolling" is a fair answer. Souls games are notorious for this. You could ask this question for each game and get several valid answers for each.
Maybe that's why I fucking hate DS2 with a passion while DS1 is in my top 5 games of all time. I had no idea.
I just remember playing it thinking "I swear I didn't get hit this much in 1" - particularly during the first Pursuer fight. Then I googled it and it all clicked. There were some unusual choices in that game, for sure. Though I do appreciate the "kill an enemy 10 times to stop them respawning" addition - not useful enough for people getting really beaten up or fed up by a cluttered boss run, but also bound to upset the purists, thus pissing just about everyone off.
I get it. A lot of people have limited time. Some games will do weird things like “oh, your best path was to do this instead of that but that’s ok because you’ll get to experience the best path in new game+” and some people simply don’t have time for that.
This is it. Many games I’ve thought hey I’ll do it the other way in a different playthrough and then realize there are so many games I wanna play I’ll never have another playthrough
You know what most people hate? Wasting time.
Some people want to know about making a fun character build or certain decisions they should do to have the outcome they want at the end. I've reached the end of many games throughout the years where I wish I did it differently, even though I still had a blast. I guess that's a good excuse to do a second playthrough
Cause I don’t want to miss things or get screwed over by esoteric mechanics or points of no return. I hardly have time to play games as is, much less do multiple playthroughs.
Bro, have you ever played Kerbal space program?
Q: "what do I need to know before I start?" A: *500 page essay
Q: I’m playing RP-1 A: my mistake. *application for grad school
>Q: "what do I need to know before I start?" Orbital Mechanics
Because some of us like to only do one playthrough of a game. I e.g. try to do all my games in 1 playthrough and then watch alternative endings on youtube. So I try to get the most of this one playthrough, find all possible quests etc. Posts like those definitely help with this
I also only play them once but I don't bother with alternate endings or missed content - the story I experienced is the one I made for myself and I'm happy with that. But yeah makes sense some people would want to see it all as well :)
which is fine, but then you go into stuff like trails where the story spans multiple games and has multiple throw backs and its like "OH HEY THIS CHARACTER APPEARED THAT ONLY SHOWED UP IF YOU DID THIS ONE QUEST 4 GAMES AGO ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CONSOLE"
It's so narcissistic to tell people how they should go about playing a game
I have limited time to play, and having at least a general base to start is nice to have instead of being frustrated
For whatever reason devs have put substantial work into concealing the ludonarrative dissonance in their games, and you do have a better experience when you know going in what goals, pressures, and constrains are just ludonarrative window dressing and which others are actually enforced or measured by the mechanics of the game.
There is a giant demographic of gamers that just follow guides and YouTube videos for literally every aspect of the game. Personally I don't and for me it would basically ruin my experience. But for them, apparently it doesn't so more power to them. There is no wrong way to enjoy yourself with a single player video game
I swear as a kid I used to buy a game and then the big thick walkthrough books that came with them and I used to spend more time reading the walkthrough books than playing the actual game.
I love that. I used to have to wait to get games but I got Nintendo power so I would literally read every single thing I possibly could about the game first haha
There's a demographic who doesn't actually want to play games. They just want an interactive experience that takes them to a final winning state.
Yeah and that's fair as well to be honest. They even have games that play out exactly that way. But to be real with you it's the same reason that a lot of people will watch a streamer play a game instead of playing it. They can see someone who is really good who has a team of really good people on their team, and how that looks when played. But to do this themselves can be incredibly hard. There is no shame in either IMHO. Just because it is not something I do, doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to enjoy doing it.
There are also people who want to know how a movie ends before they even know what it's about. I don't know who these freaks are, but whoever's putting together Hollywood trailers these days seems to be humoring them.
I hate that! Literally my favorite movie ever which is children of Men I had never seen a trailer for and knew nothing going into. I feel like that was a huge part of how much I enjoyed it and now I just try to avoid trailers in general
At home if I’m watching a movie I look up the plot online if I’m interested enough. I spoil myself on leaks for most movies, like I knew Endgame’s ending before going into the theater. When I read books I read the last chapter first. And when I buy games I watch the first, middle and last part of a walkthrough before doing so. I cannot enjoy myself if I don’t know how things go. And I’d rather have my first time be more like my second since that’s usually when I really enjoy and understand something. Honestly, I just think we’re all too concerned with virginal experiences and focus more on the first time than actually enjoying the product.
Is it just the anxiety of the unknown for you? I get the game things because I get frustrated with games and won’t finish them so I need guides to allow me to finish it, but the movies and books thing I don’t really get. Not trying to be judgmental, I just want to know honestly lol.
I do think I have a fear of the unknown. I have to tackle it everyday when I do anything. But books, movies, games, etc. I can find out what's going to happen so I have some semblance of control. It's my escapism.
It’s in respect of my time. I love to game, but with a full time job and a family I sacrifice sleep to get an hour or two most nights. This means I have little patience for grinding, avoidable backtracking, or missing key gameplay methods for too long. Knowing to save my gold till after X, or pick up Y macguffins as a priority, or that parrying completely changes the combat game are good for me to know upfront instead of learning organically, as it helps me pack the most fun in the time I do have
I mean, there are a shit ton of single player games that are not easy to pick up...
^ This... games are complex these days and have dozens of mechanics. Before starting I like to get a sense of which mechanics are most important and which can be given less attention. Because games never tell you that. They say these are xyz mechanics and this is what they do, but they don't say how important each one is.
I have yet to find any single player game that’s not incredibly easy to pick up. Depending on the console, they only weigh like 16 grams.
Because there are posts that are like "I played _____ for 90 hours and just found out that you can ______?!?!"
Or games where pretty much everyone agrees that the starting area sucks and you should just blow past that quickly to get to fun areas
It depends on the game. I certainly would recommend to a new player if they're gonna start playing a Monster Hunter to learn some basics online since those games usually don't give you much information on how the mechanics work, specially the older ones.
There is a surprising number of people who prefer to go into most things with no surprises. These are the people who go out of their way to find leaks of new games, guides for old games, and watch hours of gameplay before they play.
Or, you just don't want to miss anything. I do none of those things, and like when the story surprises me. However, hours down the line and I find out a tiny, seemingly insignificant choice/option locks me out of content, that's all I'm thinking about the rest of the game and it's essentially ruined for me. I also don't NG something that just took me 40+ hours to complete, just file the information away for the next time I pick it up in a year or two.
Also premium games cost money, so it's understandable people want to know whether if they like the game or not and it's usually impossible to tell just from the store page alone. If we're talking about free games, then I would say it's not that big of an issue, other than wasting the time you spend downloading.
Because I work full time and have a kid, house etc so I do not have the energy to play a game multiple times else I would never get chance to play anything since most games now are 60 hours plus. So instead i look to see what gives me the best possible chance to get the best ending (or just not a bad one) and run with that. If its a short game, say 2-3 hours long then yes I will play that blind. But a 60 hour game? Screw that.
Yeah me with fromsoft games mostly. Thing I can’t replay games (no time and don’t care). So if I want to take in and enjoy the maximum amount I need to watch guides.
this is really strange behaviour to me. There are magazines dedicated to telling viewers what happens in soap operas before they air.... then I guess the readers of the magazines watch what they know is going to happen, happen? Low frequency existence
I think of this as roughly the same as rewatching a movie, or watching a movie after seeing a modern movie trailer (since they are just giant spoilers these days). You know what’s going to happen, but watch anyways. If you enjoy it still, then you enjoy it. Some people just find comfort in knowing.
Well there are literally games where if you do something wrong you can fuck your entire account/playthrough or severely hamper yourself and sometimes you don't want to dig through Google for answers you want to talk to the community because you get more of an experience and even some fun advice/anecdotes from other players. But I guess some people just get unnaturally upset about stuff they could just... Y'know... Scroll by and ignore? They're like that meme of the kid whose face is beet red like hes about to burst, just waiting for something to whine about that doesn't affect them at all.
It's so narcissistic. "You guys have to play games in the exact manor I would do it. Don't you dare ask for help on here because I'm a whiney baby who's incapable of scrolling past a post." Get the fuck over yourself.
Forgot the superiority complex
My personal experience with seeking info like that is that I have very limited gaming time and don't want to spend time on unnecessary stuff. Tldr I don't do foreplay when I'm masturbating.
Loads of reasons: Missable contents Fucking up your build - souls games punish you for investing in all stats with no in game way to change them (until the later ones) Having to avoid grinding later making the game a chore because you missed a thing. Also people don't have that much time on their hands these days and so "go and discover everything for yourself is not a viable option from everyone" If you don't like offering tips to people you can ignore these posts. How people choose to play games doesn't change your experience in any way
OP, have you played Skyrim? Are you from the age where you couldn't remap controller buttons. Wait, this might still be a thing. Figuring out whatever set the devs went with was the actual tutorial. Maybe games have changed. I have played entire games skipping features and things because I simply did not know it even existed. Play a game in another language or a game game where you get stuck and suddenly you'll understand the plight. This is an "issue" of being used to games. Play a genre you've never played or I don't know, non American **football on a keyboard**.
I'm not arguing or anything I'm just curious what you meant about Skyrim?
Not OP but probably something to do with there are countless posts of “I’ve played Skyrim for 900 hours and only figured _______ out”
I don’t know man, play how you want to play. Some people love having all the answers beforehand, some like playing blind and figuring things out. I guarantee both are having fun. Been this way since gaming immemorial.
Because a lot of games don't have good onboarding experiences. And I'd much prefer people ask before playing than get pissed off and quit. Especially if it's a good game.
Personally, this depends on the game and the gamer. There are games that don't flat out tell you what to do or the tutorial just doesn't explain everything and leaves you to figure it out. It's annoying really. So that's why people ask what they need to know. For example, you're playing Stardew Valley but there's really no tutorial that tell you what to do here other than digging holes and making crops. You don't even realize later on that, oh there's a cave to fight monsters here. That's why people ask what they need to know. I haven't played Elden Ring, if I wanted to get in on it, I'll find a trash can. :)
Stardew is a great example, I swear there's at least one post a week on that sub that I learn something from, and I got a farm that's in year 20
I've been playing My Time at Portia as a big SV fan and have to keep googling stuff. Food restores health but not energy. Okay, how do I get energy? Sitting on a bench and drinking juice? Okay, how do I get juice? Oh, I can't afford that. I need a massage chair? Oh, I can't afford that... So I'm just taking it easy now and chilling and gathering money. I'm hoping the game will tell me if it's time to kick it into gear. I can see how to upgrade tools for better resources, but aside from buying juice, I still haven't found a way to restore energy...
People have always used walkthroughs, they've been a thing since pre Internet when you used to have to buy the Prima guides. I had guides for Megadrive/Genesis games. I think the wealth of information from both annoying youtubers, forums, gaming sites all with different opinions about the correct way to do something make it harder to know, so it's easier to find out than research... I really miss physical guides, Cyberpunk was the last one I got.
I get it in some cases. My current example is Persona 5 Royal. There is a core mechanic of building relationships with other people. Which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't a time limit and too many characters for a single playthrough of a 90+ hour long game. And to unlock the final part of the game (20 hours or so, that's what I've read) you need to build relationship with a specific character to a specific level before specific date. And additionally to that, to unlock the true ending, you need to do the same with 2 more characters. Without knowing beforehand what the conditions are I would have 100% missed the final part of the game, because before knowing this I wasn't building relationship with the required character at all because he seemed unimportant to me.
Some people want to know what they're getting into. Some don't. Different people are different.
It’s usually because they don’t know, but they want to know. Ya know?
So glad all the comments are examples of why. No top upvoted pun thread, or any other stupid new Reddit thing. Glorious.
I love the idea of going in blind, but every day, game developers are finding ways to punish it. It almost feels like every game is *required* to have cool weapons, characters, or story scenes you can miss, or trap options that lead to bad investments, or they have trophies or romances that you need to be dialed in on from the start. Or maybe certain collectibles/endings require you to walk a tightrope of choices you couldn't have known in advance. It's a great concept, but devs don't support it. They undercut it and make you pay.
There was a player that played maybe 6 minutes of metro exodus and dropped it because... he couldn't understand what was going on and why the main character was being scolded. Because he didn't play the other games. I know it doesnt particularly answer the why question but hopefully you now get an idea, what type of person could be asking such question and so you dont need to think much more about it than the person asking it.
OP, why is it okay to look up tips to make an MMO more enjoyable, but not a single player game? Am I not supposed to enjoy single player games?
What do I need to know to start reading this post?
I do tend to agree, but there are some fair answers to that question. Some games don't do a good job at warning you about points of no return, or certain unclear mechanics or quest fail states. Also there might be a cool ability or tool or something that you get access to relatively early on, but if you explore everything first you only get to use for a quarter of the total game instead. An example is Deathloop. Basically everything you do prior to unlocking the ability to keep stuff. Going straight there and avoiding too much exploration is probably gonna give you a better experience over effectively wasting the whole first few hours exploring only to have to retread all of it.
Probably to help themselves get off the ground on the game. Spoiler free what do I need to know’s can be helpful imo
Unless you have GamePass, it's not like you can rent or try out games. And 2 hours to try out a game is not enough to see if it would keep your interest. Plus people can discuss the pros and cons of a particular title and start comment wars. :D
I've been wandering around Zeffo for 3 fucking hours and I don't know how to get back to my ship, I need to know shit.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I usually look up if their are any missables in games I'm about to begin playing. I have a huge backlog that I'm trying to get through and it's very, *very* unlikely a game merits a second playthrough, so I try to get as complete a run as possible.
Some people want to know if a particular type of game is "for them" before dropping up to $60 on it. My friend loves games for their narrative quality, but doesn't banging his head against the wall. So he asks me "what do I need to know" before jumping in. Dark Souls is not for him. Spiritfarer absolutely was. Asking this question instead of looking it up is a great way to avoid spoilers, while getting a feel for if the game is worth investing time and money into. Not everyone can afford dropping $60 on a game that they know nothing about
Why do people make posts trying to tell other people they're playing games wrong? Just have fun and enjoy *your* experience. And fuck missables.
I dont want to smash my head into wall just so i can find one build that opens the door. I dont want to make charisma build just to find its useless stat 50 hours in. It dont want to be stuck in a room for 2 hours just because jump-dash mechanic is not explained in the game. I dont want to try to kill unkillable NPC every level/weapon upgrade just because how the aurmor mechanic works in a way that more aurmor and unkillable looks identical. I dont want to build awesome plane that does not work because i did not untick one box on tiny part that makes it flyable. It is not fun discovery, its "oh fuck this shit im uninstalling". It would be fine if I knew and did not waste time on it, but now that I did im angered, flustrated and anoyed. Its "what do i need to know" not what is the most OP build. Some games just dont tell you critical/important information.
Because they want to talk about the game with people, and it's a conversation starter
You see, you think this is logical and simple, but it isn't. Some people enjoy games more when they engage with them that way. You cannot apply your arbitrary standard of how to enjoy a game to other people. There is no "one way" to enjoy a game. I personally like min maxing and playing efficiently, and that is much easier to do with more information. You don't get to sit here and tell me that I am playing wrong or not enjoying it as much. How fucking dare you
1. Missable content. Some people want to experience everything a game has to offer on their first run because, for various reasons, the reckon they won't play the game again. For example, they are a busy, hard-working parent and they want to play Dark Souls. There is a lot of missable content in that game that you would almost never find on your own and some of it is the best content in the entire game (DLC). Since you are busy with IRL stuff you probably won't be able to play through the game again due to the feeling of "I've already beaten this game and I only have so much spare time to play games, I should just play something else entirely". 2. Some games do a poor job of explaining themselves or are very mechanically dense or both. Dark Souls, Europe Universalis 4 (or probably most 4x games for that matter) etc... 3. Some games have poor mechanics/aspects which are a detriment to the game as a whole. Some people feel that avoiding those mechanics/aspects at the cost of some slight spoilers is to their benefit because they will enjoy the game more. For example, I want to play a game on the hardest difficulty, but only if the hardest difficulty does not just make the enemies bigger damage sponges with more damage, which is tedious. 4. Some games have bugs which can be annoying to deal with without prior knowledge. For example, the infamous Dark Souls 2 weapon durability bug, where striking the corpse of a dead enemy will lower your weapon durability a significant amount and force you to often repair your weapon, which is tedious. You are unlikely to notice this because you are busy killing the enemy in front of you. Knowing ahead of time about the bug helps with circumventing it. 5. Some people just enjoy playing games with no surprises and want to play the optimal way.
Really? You can't think of any reason someone might want to ask "What do I need to know?" Not one?
You don't get it because you can't imagine someone not enjoying a game the way you enjoy it.
I for example do this for crpg that can easily last 60 or 100 hours. I am an adult with family and can barely play most of the games once so I don't want to miss important stuff or waste a lot of hours with a bad build. As someone said this is especially the case in the pathfinder games for example which are very overwhelming with all their options! Also I couldn't care less about randomly exploring for needed collectibles (at least if important stuff is locked behind them) or I hate most puzzles in gaming so I use a guide for that stuff most of the time.
I don't create these posts, but I appreciate those that do. I play most games once and move on to the next. It's great to have tips to experience most of what the game has to offer within one playthrough.
I like going into games as blind as possible because to be honest it kind of helps me figure out for myself the good and the bad.
Because game manuals no longer exist and people need to get excited about the game they've just bought in a different way
At this point we ask because before, games used to come with little instruction books with presumably all you needed to know. Now they don't. So I have to Google which button I need to push just to jump if I want to know what I should try and do before starting the game "and just fucking around to learn"
Everyone's fun is different. Some people may not like the exploration aspect of the game but really like everything else, so in order to enjoy the game they just ask the internet for help.
In Fallout 4 accepting to lead the minutemen near the start of the game kicks off a never ending series of useless side quests that eventually you can't even choose to accept or not. You are treated as an errand boy instead of a general, and the guy who didn't want the job will just walk near you and say "another settlement needs help" and boom it's in your quest log. If you refuse to lead them you can just go about the game without any of that BS.
Some single player games can have very convoluted secrets and stuff mixed in that's extremely easy to miss if you do something wrong. Others might have weird balancing issues where building your character a certain way can lead to a significantly less fun experience. It can sometimes help to get these things pointed out so you dont miss something crucial or end up with a bad build that ruins it.
Some of us with jobs/families don't have enough time for multiple playthroughs, so we try to get as much of the experience as we can in one go. Sometimes that means looking up some tips or getting a heads up about a mechanic or miss-able.
Games are absolutely *full* of missables and everyone saying you should just wing it is probably planning to do a lot more playthroughs than your average working gamer. The better question is why there is such a persistent group of people getting in the way anytime someone needs help or wants more information.
As someone pretty active on the r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker subreddit i can definitely say some single player games just are pretty rough mechanically and you can get decently stuck in them. In alot of RPGs there are also sometimes entire story paths that a player might want to experience that are easily missable, e.g. the mythic paths in Pathfinder WotR. Some people just want to know about thosw beforehand, especially if they are older gamers and have experienced Dead Man running(missing an item early on only to not be able to progress five hours later with no way back) situations in the old Kings Quest games or similar.
Reddit is the lazy man's Google. Ask a question and just wait for the results to trickle in.
I like a more personal answer than digging through 200 shitty yt videos and articles/broken wikis full of ads.
Also a TON of AI articles now.
I also don’t see the problem asking reddit. All you’re doing is making it many times easier to google for people in the future
To be fair, the quality of Google has gotten astonishingly bad when it comes to asking certain types of questions. You can ask a very specific question about a particular game, and the front page is all, “Here’s fifty results about a completely different game that maybe contains one of your search parameters.” Adding “Reddit” to your search can vastly improves your results when that happens.
Google has been bad for years. The prevalence of SEO using tags for things that aren't even related to the material. I remember when you'd have five or six results that were ads but now it feels like that's still the case but then three pages of results are review articles written by arbitrage marketing that's just designed to get you to accidentally click an ad so they can make $0.003 in revenue.
1. fifty results loosely related to the game, but not relevant 2. dead pages mixed in 3. you find a forum thread, the only reply is "Google it, lazy ass" 4. you find a forum thread, the only reply is by OP, who says "nvm figured it out" 5. nothing else
Googling stuff, especially stuff like strategy or tips is a really painful process nowadays though. You can either slog through a sea of soulless content farms and meandering videos, or get a direct, specific answer from a genuine person. Easy to see why people prefer the latter
There's a channel on Youtube, related to DaVinci software. It's some girl, and pretty much all of her tutorial videos are at most 90 seconds long, and every single one is straight to the point and clear. Love her, but she won't love me back
Oh what do you mean, You don't like pulling up part 32 in a 50 part tutorial series to figure out where the fuck they moved a certain button this update?
I like the questions on Reddit because if the answer of what you are asking would spoil it people tend to nudge you to right direction while caring for not spoiling it for you. When you search in google there is a big chance that the results will just give you the spoiler answer. Also, for me it feels more like when I was a kid and I would get stuck in a game and I would ask a neighbour or school friend and they would nudge me in the right direction.
Let people play how they want. I would never do it but it's up to the individual if they want tips for single player games
I always assume that it's people just wanting others to share in their excitement of starting a new game. They probably don't want to just post something like, "I'm excited to play this game!" and instead lean towards a more conversation-oriented question like "What should I know?" so more people interact with their post
Why do you care about how others enjoy their single player games? Everyone enjoys stuff in their own way
There are some single player games where a bad build can sort of brick you. Or at make the game take significantly more time than it reasonably should. If I ever ask that question, I’m mostly just making sure it’s either A) not one of those games B) if it is, what types of builds are viable. Is it a game where you need to make an all around build and spread stats eventually or can you pick a theme and go with it. Also, is there some hidden settings that makes the game much more enjoyable. I.E rebinding the controls for some space games is pretty essential. Like in ever space you really want a button to turn off the inertia dampener, which isn’t bound by default, because it makes combat more fun.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a new phenomenon, because back in the day you had strategy guides and cheat codes and the like, but gaming culture nowadays with the internet, YouTube, Twitch streamers, etc. gamers are all about min max optimization of their gameplay experience over anything else. Everyone needs to follow a meta instead of figuring things out for themselves, and too many other people insist that metas are the only viable means to play through games, even furthering the narrative that gaming needs to be fully optimized. As the saying goes, given the opportunity, gamers will optimize the fun out of any game.
Because I don't want to spend 200hrs figuring out how elden ring works. Ie. I had no idea that parry was even a thing until I looked up beginner guides. Now it's my favourite thing
You wont get it, its a “gamers” thing
Idk. Maybe just to receive some acknowledgment and feel a part of the community i guess? It’s odd to me