I already was a dnd fan so I understood how character creation worked but still spent a good one and a half hour in the character creator. This is something I enjoy though.
Deep Rock is good at letting you ignore what you don’t care about. I’ve never needed a wiki for it. It’s just fun and silly co op action, with massive complexity mostly about trivial things.
Wing it, discovering that I’ve made a massive mistake is part of the fun, I don’t want to spoil any game with let’s plays. I don’t try to get the most optimal build I’m just looking to have fun. I use what ever gun I enjoy the most in borderlands, yeah when it starts to feel weak I swap but I’m not going to use a gun I hate because it does two more damage that one I love.
I just wing it at first, and figure stuff out as I go, even in online stuff. BG3 in particular, by the end of chapter 2 you’ll be pretty familiarized with mechanics. Inventory management is here, but worth doing sometimes. I just unload stuff from main character into someone else in the party.
Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you'll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.
BG3 handles failure better than almost any game I’ve ever played. Fuck around, find out. Be free of your need to always win and just play the game however you want.
Worst case you start over with a totally different character.
Playing out all the possibilities is half the fun!
Tell that to my TES: Oblivion character I picked only non combat skills as primary. Everything was fine when exploring landscape and forests, leveling peacefuly my alchemy, alteration or stealth and lockpicking. It was nice. Until I got to first oblivion gate and found out level scaling is a thing. Then I was f’d up pretty hard. Needless to say I never finished the game because of this.
It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it's a common complaint.
Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn't have the stats to do what you're wanting/what they're built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it's even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.
But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.
Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term "barrelmancy" is a thing.
I'm not gonna say there won't be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.
If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.
You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.
I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.
Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I'm saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don't work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.
If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.
That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn't require fighting.
Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You'll be fine.
It's a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I'm certain most people would be overjoyed to help.
Oblivion's levelling system was beyond fucked. The optimal way to play in terms of power is to pick primary skills that you know you won't use and then go out of your way to only level those once you've levelled other things enough to get maximum value out of the level up. Or, alternatively, just never sleep so that you never level up and play the entire game at level one.
Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.
The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they’re playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.
You could also try Twitch. Most smaller streamers are open to answering viewers’ questions (and bigger ones probably would be, too, but they just can’t because of volume.)
Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic and Overwatch are complex?
I play Dwarf Fortress. And I got into it before the Steam version gave it a functional UI. Maybe I’m just spoiled. I’ve been gaming since I was 3 or 4, so like 90% of what most games require is already ingrained in me. That last 10% is the stuff unique to a particular game; and recently I’m finding these unique things to be the only things not taught in a tutorial. And that is pretty annoying that they will teach the basic controls, which even a non gamer could figure out in mere seconds, but not a mechanic unique to that specific game that no other game has done before.
Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.
Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.
BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.
The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.
If you want a calm group of people to play with, DM me and we can trade Steam information (assuming you use that platform) - we typically need a 4th player anyway
Obviously if you don't enjoy it then that's 100% valid, but at least in terms of understanding what to do it's totally okay to play DRG without understanding anything beyond "shoot bugs and do whatever thing mission control most recently asked you to do". There's no need to play at a higher hazard if you don't yet know or just don't care to know about how to set up your weapons for maximum effectiveness or how to counter each type of bug and so on. Just play at whatever hazard you find fun and try things out until you find what you enjoy. There's no class or weapon that is non-functional without some other component. No wrong choices, so to speak. They're all just degrees of better and worse at any given job, and if you try something out on a mission and it doesn't work then the absolute worst possible penalty is just that you fail that mission and only get a little bit of xp and cash instead of a bigger amount.
Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun. I get analysis paralysis pretty badly (I’m the guy who is always worried he will be out of consumables when he needs them so he never uses them in the first place!) so researching a little beforehand helps me enjoy myself more. I don’t need to min/max the fun out of a game, but knowing I’m on the right track is really good for my enjoyment levels.
And this is very much a me thing, and that’s okay. We play games to have fun so play the way that’s the most fun for you. If you don’t like doing research before you play, but the game seems to require it, then play something else. It’s okay to not like a game. (I wasn’t super into BG3… shhh! Don’t tell the internet or they will burn me alive! Good game, but not for me.)
Personally, I really like rogue-lites these days. They’re games where you are meant to replay them and every run will be randomized in some way so that each one ends up being unique. (Hades, FTL, Nova Drift, those sorts of games.) The randomness makes it so that there’s no WRONG way to play, just better or worse choices for a given run, which takes that “stress” of making a wring choice away for me.
You gotta find what floats your boat and don’t worry about the other games.
Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun
Yeah, I don’t find that fun at all, and have no interest in such things, so I’m just trying to figure out if that’s what I need to do, because if so, I’m out, and I don’t want to start walking down that path and spend my valuable gaming time tearing my hair out because the necessary info simply doesn’t exist in the game. I just want to relax.
Honestly just being here reading all these responses and trying to figure out what “min/max” and “rogue-lites” (rogue-likes?) are is exhausting. I just want my games to have all the necessary information in the game.
There are lots of games out there, and just like any kind of entertainment, some will hold your hand and some won’t. Everyone has different tastes, different things they want to do with their time, different amounts of time and money, and there are games that cater to all of them.
Unfortunately, the only way to tell which is which without playing it first is by doing a little research.
So it seems like you’re a little stuck, you either play a game blind and hope it’s right for you, or you look into it beforehand to figure it out before spending your money. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect but hey, you do you. Good luck!
Well, there is a pretty large community of gamers who play games on Youtube and Twitch professionally. You could always watch someone else play it briefly to get an idea of what to expect. Once you eventually find some games you really like the style of, you will be in good shape. You can then ask for more targetted recommendations here on Lemmy, or look up reviews for games in a similar genre, or find streamers who play games you like and look through their old videos for similar games (they tend to stick to a style usually), etc.
First step, I think, is figuring out not what you don’t like, but what you DO like.
I just want my games to have all the necessary information in the game.
Something that I meant to say in my comment but slipped my mind; a lot of these games will have you learn by playing. IMO, games either show too much trying to show you everything or they don’t show you anything and have you learn the mechanics of the game and its engine.
It sounds like you are wanting some information from the game before you start it, but the game is going to do that by experience not by text, which is why so many people have said “oh that’s why we look it up online!”. They’re just doing the same thing you are, just not in the game. I understand not wanting to be in the game and then having to get taken out of it for something though.
It sounds like each game you mentioned you wanted information from the game before you started playing it, which is the same thing that everyone else has done just with the internet. Personally, I’m in the camp of jump in and go and then 40 hours in if there is still something the game hasn’t explained (or realistically, something that I skipped over) then I look it up. Otherwise, you spend all your time reading about what to expect instead of just having it happen to you.
This sounds like it might suit you as long as you give up some expectations. Like I said, from how you’re talking it sounds like you’re still trying to preload on information (like everyone else) but expecting it from the game. The game will show you eventually, you just gotta see the response from your actions and suffer the consequences!
FWIW it’s a wide range of genres out there. Games at this point are being made from decades of existing gamer techniques. There’s games like Monster Hunter where the game gives you an hour and half of learning the game and there’s still more to learn in entirely different aspects of the game (crafting weapons/armor/items and the actual attacks and monster patterns), there’s games like BG3 where there are character traits and specifics that are there for nudging you to play a certain way (where min/maxing is minimum amount of effort for maximum amount of gains - it’s not very ideal to have a strength warrior focusing on magic).
Then there’s games like Pathologic that do tell you exactly what you need to do, but the entirety of the game is made to dissuade you from playing it.
You should try Shadow Warrior. It is a first person slasher where all of your abilities are gained one by one and grow on top of each other. It tells you everything you need to know, no guesswork. Max Payne 3 is a third person shooter that is very straightforward. And Okami, a third person open-area puzzle explorer, where the game makes you think outside the box for abilities it has taught you how to use, and just a few points where you have to do an explicit objective before continuing.
Story based progression games akin to Borderlands but free from inventory and stats. No bothering with how many levels you have to get through before you can level up your abilities, just good old point A to point B action.
Tl;Dr don’t preload information from games, compile information from playing them
Hey, glad I had a good guess that was already up your alley! And sorry for some of the responses - unfortunately elitism has a high correlation to certain min/max communities.
Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).
While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.
I’ve been trying to play Guardians of the Galaxy but have been too busy with work and school since September. I only recently saw the movie based on a friend’s recommendation, and I loved it. Thought it would make a fun RPG, and sure enough there was already one, and it was on sale when I looked so I snagged it. Maybe I’ll finish it someday.
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