The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
Me and Dk 64 but that game had so many little secrets that I got annoyed with trying to find them all. 😒
I’ve recently been obsessed with a streamer called AboutOliver. He played Minecraft for the first time about a year and a half ago, played his entire first season with no wiki or external knowledge, got a little tour of the community server (which he 99% forgot at the time Season 2 rolled around) and is now on Episode 75-ish of season 2. Still no wiki, no guides. He has figured out some crazy things about the game (which I won’t spoil), but is also completely clueless about some super basic features.
It’s been incredibly inspiring to just watch him figure things out, because he is exceptionally inquisitive and methodical by default (I think he’s a phd candidate in Astrophysics irl?). Made me realize the point of a game shouldn’t be to produce the optimal output, but that struggling and finding things out is exactly the point. Incidentally, that mindset also noticeably boosted my performance at work because I’m now one of the few people who will happily continue to tackle a programming problem over and over again, even if there are no helpful guides on it.
Long story short, here’s a link to watch the supercut of Olivers Season 1 Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ljemxyWvg8E
The total season 1 supercut is about 6 hours iircOR, if you are insane, here’s the link to the full-episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68V5Cxs_CvTpTY9o7KJ75nLPqlCRxze0
It’s 50 Episodes á 3-5h, great as background noise when doing something else.Ha! I watched him play Outer Wilds and it was perfect. It is the ideal game for someone like him because this game is all about exploring. But please play the game before you watch him play and don’t research anything beforehand or during playing.
Well…
But considering in modern Minecraft you already have a crafting book that says how to craft any item it’s not as needed anymore as before.
In the early times I believe it was to either know the recipe or to look iz up on the web.
Yeah… I’ve made comments before online about how walkthroughs/guides etc tend to ruin games. The response from left leaning folks was a ton of downvotes, largely with comments about how I was an asshole who wasn’t thinking about people with this or that disability that need that sort of guide.
I’m amazed you seem to be getting support for the sentiment. Just shows how much some groups hate AI I guess.
If you want to speedrun Idiocracy, an overreliance on AI seems a good way to get there.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
You spelled “RIP Civilization” in a weird way, but it tracks.
Beneath A Steel Sky has a help system now you can refer to, and I ended up using it a fair bit. The solutions often just pissed me off though, as they rely on you remembering a one-off bit of dialogue you saw (or skipped) days ago in real time. or were just nonsense.
When I walk around the floor at work now I often see other devs on their phones while they wait for the AI to do stuff. People are getting disengaged are forgetting skills already - this is unsustainable.
Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it’s more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.
Y’all - For nearly a quarter of a century Nintendo published Nintendo Power, a magazine that was a combination of self-hype and how to beat their own games. In the 90s, it was indispensable for any game worth its salt.
Nintendo used to run a 1-900 number for tips on games. You’d call a real human who would walk you through where you were.
Looking it up online is only “cheating” in the sense that it’s immediate and free. This stuff used to cost money.
Yeah, LLMs are like if you called the Nintendo hint line, and the person on the other end just made shit up.
The person on the other end might be making somewhat educated guesses, based on what they have heard people around talk.
But the process of “get the answer from another source instead of figuring it out” is the same
We’re entering an era where we need to decide where some lines are drawn.
How much prior understanding is acceptable to incorporate into our reasoning? If the answer has already been figured out, is it reasonable to use that, or should you do the work a second time?
If you consider figuring out how to play a game to be “work,” what are you even doing playing that game?
Well, as far as the author is aware it’s usually accurate.
except walkthroughs are much more accurate…
This is a extremely apt take
I prefer apt-get, but whatever floats your boat.
I feel like this is some programmer humour I’m too not-programmer to take
on Ubuntu, there is apt and apt-get for package managing. They do the same thing, mostly.
I have to force myself to not fall into the trap of trying to play a “perfect” game and instead to just let happen, what happens. Blundering through content and accepting temporary setbacks is more fun than following guides or save scumming.
But it also depends on game design:
With bg3 I missed a one of a kind item in act 1, a staple dnd item (ring of protection) that I was locked out off because I did quests in the “wrong” order. that gave me some anxiety, after which I started checking the wiki page before starting a new zone, which eventually sucked the fun out of the game, after which I abandoned my first playthrough.And then I found a mod that randomizes all loot, so I can just let happen again what happens, without that anxiety of losing access to unique loot because of game design.
I also fall into this trap semi regularly, a happy medium I have found is a missable items guide that doesn’t tell you how to play or where to go but it does tell you “make sure you get item X before going to place Y as that’s your last chance”
It means I can be happy to play sub optimally knowing that if I really want I can go back and collect anything I missed later.
This has been quite good for Clair obscur
You got upset because you missed a +1AC item? There’s so many much better items in that game I’m surprised this one matters so much.
I totally recognise playing the perfect game angle though, depending on the game I look up collectibles ahead of time, so that when I find the area I know there’s one nearby.
Nah, the knowledge that I could be locked out of unique items is what caused anxiety, not what I was actually locked out off (though I do think it’s a really good item for a ring). I played act 1 as a blundering fool, at the end of act 1 I checked an item list to see what I missed, so I could backtrack for what I could use. And then I destroyed my fun in act 2 by checking guides before starting an area.
OP attacks every subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine. It’s super effective.
it was so hard for me to play grim fandago without looking up the answers but i did it! 10 hours later and lots of critical thinking and i finally solved the first puzzle!
We played Leisure Suit Larry with my brother at somewhere under 10 years old without knowing one full sentence worth of English, and it took hours to even get the game to start. There was a quiz about US history and politics or something for age verification, and it took a lot of tries to guess our way through and memorize the answers. Didnt get that far in the game either.
That was vintage copy protection. They would print the answers and stuff in the back of the manual, so you could only start the game (or get past a certain point), if you have a legitimate copy of the game (or just a copy of the manual lol).
There were all sorts of creative copy protection schemes prior to DRM.
I remember AD&D Hillsfar had a decoder ring that you had to spin to match up the pair of symbols on the screen and type in the decoders output. It was actually kinda cool! I loved that game…
Yeah, I’m aware of all the manual and code wheel based copy protections, but I’m pretty sure that the quiz in Larry was just a rudimentary age check. There’s even a button combination to bypass it, which would have been nice to know at the time.
Lol same here. I still remember one question was something with “apple”.
Police Quest 2 had mugshots.
You had to look in the manual and type the correct name to start the game. That was their DRM. I remember praying it’d be Jessie Bains, because he was the only one I memorized.
Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.
The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can’t find the goddamn ladder.
In other words im with you
I dunno, I feel like I wouldn’t use a walkthrough on souls like games until the second play through. Part of the fun is the discovery, and its fine if you miss shit the first time.
I just mean when youre banging your head against the wall and need a hint where to go. I do this less and less now though, I’ve still only beaten one of them.
I agree and don’t typically worry so much about getting 100% in games, if i miss something that’s on me and fine.
I think souls likes are just not for me. I just want a cool story told in a relatively linear fashion. I’d take a linear 15 hour game over an open world 150+ hour game any day.
That’s not just Souls-likes though. And only Elden Ring is really open world in that way (I think, haven’t played much of any of them). What you’re meaning is that open world games aren’t for you, which is a lot more games than just Souls-likes.
I generally love open-world games, but really don’t like any of the Souls or Souls-like games. The whole thing of always being so focused on the enemy, having to time dodges and parries just isn’t how my brain works, and I lose interest and/or give up very quickly. I have no issue with hard games, but I feel a lot of people who love those kinds of games have some kind of masochistic trait that makes them keep exposing themselves to the shit those games drag you through. I don’t get super happy or feel like I’ve overcome something big with these kinds of challenges, it’s just “fucking fuck, it’s finally dead, I feel like shit and have used up all my consumables, that was not fun in any way. I need to go do something else because I almost had a panic attack from all this crap”. The story just ends up not mattering because there’s always this burden of forcing yourself to get past every millimetre of the game. I love really hard puzzles though, and stuff like platforming and so on, almost anything except that very Souls-specific soul crushing style.Most of em are pretty linear, really. Elden Ring is the exception. But like Bloodborne for instance, youre gonna go pretty much in the same order till you have to return to earlier areas to finish stuff. You’ve gotta explore a lot though.
Not trying to be like “LOVE THE THING THAT I LOVE DAMN YOU”, theyre totally not for everyone.
I also don’t wanna grind/retry a boss 500 times just to hear ‘git gud scrub’
Just cheese them tbh.
What’s the fun in that?
Fun is subjective. Cheese is coded, cheese is allowed to be fun.
I guess I just enjoy the difficulty of the boss fights in those games, so cheesing them feels like I’m robbing myself.
My personal integrity wouldnt allow that.
It would have to be very frustrating for me to resort that.Things I’d cheese for example in pokemon: Event locked pokemon.
Only the most braindead of gamers has a chance of bouncing off a single Souls fight more than maybe a dozen times. Two dozen if you’re especially thickheaded.
The thing about Soulslikes - and Fromsoft games in particular - is that they teach you new things primarily by killing you with them. Once you know whatever the thing is that this encounter is trying to teach you, you can blow through the entire thing at level 1 and people do it all the time. And I do mean “people” and not just professional streamers. SL1 is a popular challenge run for souls fans, specifically because once you know all the rules of the game it becomes very easy.
But there is no easing-in to learning new things in Dark Souls. You will get flattened into paste by some bullshit without warning, and it is up to the player to figure out a) why they died, and b) how to prevent that. Throwing yourself at the same brick wall 200 times with no change in strategy is a losing prospect no matter what game you’re playing, souls or otherwise.
The essence of “gitting gud” is literally just stopping for 10 seconds to think about why you failed last time. If you’re capable of that - and 99% of gamers definitely are, it’s a core component of game design - you’re capable of not only completing but excelling in Soulslikes.
People have been jerking off how difficult Souls games are for a decade and a half now and it’s never been true. Souls games are just rhythm games that don’t give you the rhythm onscreen. Find that rhythm (through observing patterns, and especially through listening to the boss fight music) and you’ll first-clear every single fight.
I’ve bounced off some fights way more than that. It’s not even about not getting what to do, my concentration just dies and I also get greedy (or in the case of margit in elden ring was insanely underleveled on top of that). Playing claire obscure on the highest difficulty while ignoring defense isn’t very different in terms of dodging difficulty, but since I couldn’t really get greedy and my brain can go off on a journey on my own turn it was pretty smooth and much less frustrating for me.
I do agree souls games aren’t super difficult, but they are unforgiving and if concentration isn’t your strong suit that will fuck you relentlessly. I still enjoy them personally though I’ve never completed one, there’s always some area that just annoys me too much to bother after a bit.
Interesting take.
Thing is I do enough of problem solving already so this just isnt my jam.
And if you like that genre/game series I wish you the best to getting more :)I was like you until I played Sekiro. That’s the one that made it “click” for me. Also very linear.
However, the combat and traversal are much different (better imo) than other From Software games.
How playable is it on controller (steam deck)?
That’s fair.
I’m sorry, I just can’t stop myself from launching into this spiel every time I hear a comment like your first one. There’s a huge swath of gamers that I feel like would actually love my favorite game if they weren’t scared away from it by gamer circlejerk. It’s not my mission in life to defend Dark Souls to people who don’t care about it, but I often assume that mantle despite myself.
At the end of the day though it’s just a game about self reflection and personal growth, and I like that.
Yeah this is absolutely true start to finish. Once you slow down and stop spamming buttons, and think, it becomes really surprisingly easy. Mostly. Some bosses are just gonna ruin your day for a bit. Till you figure out what youre doing wrong and adjust. Sometimes easier said than done.
Then, by the time you’ve finished like a single run of any game, youre totally ready to crush the entire genre catalog. You’ve got months of dungeons to explore if you want.
Sigh. Im so grateful for these games lol. Theres so much love and creativity in their DNA.
Oh yeah that boss music tip made a world of difference with Bloodborne. Once someone pointed it out on a flame-themed hunter boss that was giving me pause, i was amazed. Like, how the hell does that work so well??
I made it all the way through Dark Souls 1 and 2 and about half of 3 before I even knew that was a thing. I was getting curbstomped by Dancer of the Boreal Valley and went online looking for discussions about her. Lo and behold:
this video is a re-upload because it looks like the original was removed
Tl;dw - Dancer’s song is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 and she dances with her music. This gives her a crazy pattern that people always get got by because what feels like an opening actually isn’t. In order to defeat her you have to listen to her song and learn to dance with her.
Once I learned that it opened up an entire new world of understanding across every soulslike game I played and immediately halved my average number of boss attempts. No joke. Not every boss can be beaten blindfolded by just listening to their OST but it’ll give you good timing cues for the fight more often than it doesn’t.
That was a fun watch, thanks!
Soulslikes are great if you’re looking to scratch an itch for mechanical mastery, discovery, exploration, etc., but stories are not their strong suit. I’m not saying the stories are bad, just the delivery of them, unless you’re the type of player who wants to play detective.
First few games were delightful to me precisely because they didn’t beat you over the head with a story. It’s up to you the player to make your own meaning of the understated story.
I unironically think that The Witcher 2 is the best game in the trilogy for this exact reason.
Something something sense of pride and accomplishment
Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.
Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!
I’ve long argued that games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley with their seeming inability to actually teach you the game have become far too overreliant on Wikis and walkthroughs. Minecraft for example: its highly unlikely you will naturally discover the path to “winning the game” and defeating the Ender Dragon. Its arcane nonsense.
- Mine
- Craft
- Go to Hell
- Go to the End
- Kill the Dragon
The official Guide expects you to do this in ways that are 1 no longer possible and 2 rely on innate understanding of the physics of the game (specifically that beds explode when used outside the overworld [excuse me what the fuck how am I supposed to recognize that can be a weapon?]).
Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.
If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.
Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.
Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.
I think knowledge gated games are good, but not when there is no actual in-game method to discover the things you need to progress.
That case I advise you to never, ever play Noita.
There is no way the official way uses beds to kill the dragon
It is heavily implied in “Minecraft: Guide to The Nether and The End” (part of the official guidebook series published my mojang) that you’re meant to use beds to cheese the dragon. This is the easiest and most effective way to handle the Dragon, but its arcane nonsense, as stated in my previous comment t.
All of the Elden-Soulsborne games are like that but it never really bothered me. I would have missed tons of the game without the wiki as help, just because of how crazy their games are with hiding stuff
Agreed for wow, but for Runescape, many of the quests are just so arcane that I never in a million years would have guessed what to do for them
I actually replayed runescape classic as Ironman recently and surprisingly most quests can be solved without the wiki! It’s takes much longer though but so much more fun. You get to explore the world more and its a really good world with most characters having some personality and little areas that have you’d never visit otherwise.
In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.
I had a friend who had a whole scrap book of notes for Myst. I wasn’t dedicated enough 😅
I tried playing Riven which is the sequel to Myst. Couldn’t figure out what I was doing. So I just went back to playing Sim City.
I seem to recall enjoying Riven, but I suspect I never actually finished it and just gave up at some point.
Riven came out nearly 30 years ago so I think I can be forgiven for not remembering too well 👴
BRO this is literally normal life now. No one wants to figure anything out. Its why I hate llms. Breeds laziness like never before
Man, I was recently working with another senior. The guy has been in this job like ten years longer than me. And to be fair, we were working with a language that he isn’t familiar with, but I had a problem which wasn’t language-specific (basically, I had a user-provided timestamp and needed to guesstimate whether that’s winter or summer time).
And yeah, his first thought was to ask ChatGPT. On some level, it is a wrapper around Bing and I did a web search, too, so sure, let’s do another web search in case I missed anything.
But ol’ Chappity G spat out the same solution attempt, which I had also found initially, which wasn’t actually applicable there. So, we told it what the problem with that was, and it generated another attempt, which didn’t cover edge cases. The next time around, it generated a solution which used an entirely different time library. And so on.
The guy was absorbed for ten minutes trying to explain to the Magic 8 Ball what our problem was precisely and why its solution attempts were bad.
I’m not saying ChatGPT should’ve been able to solve this problem. Date/time handling is one of the hardest computer science problems.
It was more just that he was constantly pulling the slot machine, hoping it would suddenly spit out the perfect solution, when even just five seconds of independent thinking should’ve made him realize that there is no easily web-searchable solution and the spicy autocomplete cannot do the reasoning to come up with a solution of its own.
