There are tons of games that don’t require that sort of knowledge base or study investment. It’s a minority that do. But you’re on Lemmy. This is a self selected community of extra thoughtful nerds. This community is more likely to be excited about games with homework than your average gaming community. I do genuinely love the research part of complex games. I like crafting builds and planning battles. I loved both Divinity Original Sin games and will love BG3 when I get there.
But sometimes I do just want a game for my hands to play while by brain takes a break. That’s why I spent most of the summer with Earth Defense Force 5, a 9/10 space insect exploding experience. Highly recommend it if you don’t want to fuck with the details.
You really need to put away the idea of having to min/max everything, especially in a single player game. Just make the choices as they come and if they aren’t perfectly optimal, who cares. Games are meant to be fun so if you are having fun then mission accomplished. If you still can’t shake the FOMO then yeah maybe the more complex games aren’t for you and that is okay too.
Oh yeah I know that, it just seems like these type of games are super popular.
I honestly think that’s just your circle. That does not describe the majority of the gamers I know or have known. I have always been in a minority for wanting to do math in my free time and have to find places online to discuss these games because usually nobody else in my life is playing them. Most of the people I know who played BG3 did so because it is popular, and they avoided as much of the math and homework as possible. And most of them are done with it.
I mean it’s all over headlines in the gaming community, and front page all the time in the Steam store, and all these gamers glowing about how great it is. So not necessarily “my circle” but just the gaming community as a whole.
BG3 is a huge exception. It’s more popular by far than most games of the sort. And still only two of the dozen gamers I work with has played any of it, and they are both done with it.
all these gamers glowing about how great it is
Where? If you mean online, yeah, online discussion and gaming publications focus on more complex games that more serious gamers are playing. There’s just more to say about them. And news sites are gonna pay more attention to exceptions to the norm like BG3. None of the many gamers in my life are talking about it. If you’re hearing about BG3 and other huge, complex games regularly, it’s because you are spending time in spaces where and with people who care about them. Because it’s not just everywhere.
I’m with you, the research is half the fun for me with complex games. But like others have said, BG3 is a great example of “choose your own” depth. You can absolutely stumble your way through the game and do just fine!
At the risk of inviting the internet’s wrath, when people talk about the difference between serious gamers and casuals, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about.
“Serious” gaming involves a particular set of skills and interests, such that the person is willing and able to just jump into some complicated new game and figure it out. And it’s not just that “serious” gamers can do that - the point is that they want to. They enjoy it. They enjoy being lost, then slowly putting the pieces together and figuring out how things work and getting better because they’ve figured it out. And they enjoy the details - learning which skills do what and which items do what, and how it all interrelates. All that stuff isn’t some chore to be avoided - it’s a lot of the point - a lot of the reason that they (we) play games.
You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything, and I can’t even imagine doing that. To me, that’s not just obviously bad strategy, but entirely missing the point - like buying ingredients to make delicious food, then bringing them home and throwing them in the garbage.
You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything
Uh, no, that’s not what I said at all.
My inventory is finite and at some point I have to choose what stays and what goes. Not only that but I have to sell enough things that I can continue picking up more items without leaving items on the ground in the middle of the map.
Then having to regularly stop and weigh the weapons in my inventory against the weapons on the ground and making choices I don’t even fully understand that come back to bite me in the ass later.
And what they're saying is that those elements are fun to the people who play these games.
Weighing different priorities to choose the best or preferred option for the future is flexing some very serious psychological muscles. Developing strategies to do it well is these types of people's version of practicing 3 point shots.
Reading you complain about it (which is fine, it doesn't have to be your sort of game!) is like listening to someone complain about how many times they have to throw the ball in basketball. "I just wanted to dribble and dunk, what are all of these other silly elements for? They're just getting in the way!"
If you want a really good comparison between these types of gamers and others, look at Path of Exile versus Diablo 4. Diablo took the mass-market appeal route, and de-prioritized many of the elements that more serious gamers enjoyed.
Now Path of Exile is a free to play money printing machine, and Diablo gets headlines for how poorly it's doing. There are many detailed analysis' online about why, and most of the reasons come down to removing the 'complicated' parts you're talking about.
And what they’re saying is that those elements are fun to the people who play these games.
In no way did I respond to that.
Weighing different priorities to choose the best or preferred option for the future is flexing some very serious psychological muscles. Developing strategies to do it well is these types of people’s version of practicing 3 point shots.
That’s all well and good but the game often doesn’t give you the knowledge required to make those choices thoughtfully. It feels like I’m expected to spend my days on internet forums and search engines just to figure out how to play the game.
If that’s the case, that’s fine, I will just avoid the game. But I feel like there should be some sort of disclaimer in the store.
Reading you complain about it
I haven’t complained about anything. I just asked a question.
My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it’s some sort of chore.
To me, it’s a lot of the fun.
I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory, since every time I come across something new, I have to stop and check it out and try to figure out what it is and what it does and what sort of advantages or disadvantages it might have. I enjoy that. So all along the way, I’m figuring out what I want to or think I should keep and what I want to or think I can get rid of, and not because a finite inventory demands it, but because that’s part of the point of playing in the first place.
Broadly, you’re asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games. I’m saying that we not only can and do, but that that’s a lot of the point. That whole process of sorting things out is a lot of the reason that we play in the first place.
My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it’s some sort of chore.
Repetitive gameplay is not fun for me, personally but more power to you. I’m just trying to figure out what exactly I’m missing before I invest time into this game.
I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory
Those are not the types of games I’m talking about. Borderlands is the worst example I can think of where you have to stop every 3 minutes because the ground is constantly just littered with weapons, each with a dozen traits that is, at no time, explained to you while playing the game.
Horizon Zero Dawn is another one.
Now obviously those games are very popular, which is precisely what I’m trying to understand.
Broadly, you’re asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games.
No it’s not. Obviously you do, or you wouldn’t play them. What I’m asking is how you sort it out.
Perhaps this conversation would be more constructive if you told us some of the games you do like, instead of the ones you don’t.
Because I’ll tell you right now, unless you prefer interactive novels which are only arguably games, every game is based on repetitive gameplay.
Specifically, building repetitive gameplay on top of repetitive gameplay is what makes games, games.
Like with chess. You have a repetitive “chess game” loop which has many “your turn” loops inside.
What I’m asking is how you sort it out
To address this specifically, this is what the community of the game is about. It’s why wikis are created and maintained. And so the answer would change based on which game you’re talking about and your goals in that game
For borderlands specifically, a few quick heuristics you can use is to ignore all weapons of not legendary color while in lower level areas, or to stop picking up lower tier items when you don’t need the cash, or to skip everything that isn’t a shotgun because that’s the only piece you need to update
I was speaking broadly but “repetitive” isn’t a binary quality, there is a spectrum.
this conversation would be more constructive if you told us some of the games you do like
Well, that would be a long list but my absolute favorite games are of a very specific nature. I don’t know if there’s a name for them. All the Devil May Crys (but especially DMC), God of War, Control, Jed: Fallen Order, etc. Basically third-person fighter games with combo attacks, a relatively clear direction (even when there are multiple available), and an easy-to-understand progressive skill tree. Anything with characteristics like “strength, charisma, durability” etc. tends to lose me very quickly because while those words have very clear and obvious meanings in the real world, it never explains what those things actually mean in the game and I find myself just upgrading them almost totally randomly.
It’s why wikis are created and maintained.
When I’m relaxing I don’t want to spend my time reading documents, personally. I never see any mention of “pick up and play-ability” in reviews and no one ever seems to complain about the complexity so I inevitably end up buying these games because gamers rave about them, playing for a few hours, and then getting bored/confused and dropping them, which ends up being a giant waste of time and money because I got zero enjoyment out of them.
You said BG3 was a gift, so it’s not costing you anything to not play something you don’t like.
Given what you’ve said, I would suggest avoiding anything with an RPG label anywhere.
For BG3, if you want to keep playing, you can skip the character creator. They have a dozen prebuilt options you can play without doing the detail work.
For inventory, you can ask your brother to handle it and send everything to camp.
But even with those, you’ll likely not enjoy BG3 because even the fighting mechanics are based around that type of complex decision making, making you pause all the time so that you can make those decisions.
It’s ok to tell your brother you don’t enjoy the gameplay. You don’t have to like it just because other people do.
For BG3, don’t search something about it, just start and play. You don’t need to know anything prior, however it’s a role-playing game so play accordingly what kind of character you created. You can save-scumming if you want if some desicion you made leads to something bad, though they all the part of the game. Just play and experience.
For games like Overwatch, it isn’t complicated at all. It just requires you to play it constantly and learn counter measures just by playing. Learning them is the fun part, overthinking about them not so much.
To be fair when I see “complex game” part, I was kinda expexting some advanced building games, something like Factorio, maybe RimWorld.
Anyway, also you don’t have to like any games even if they are overwhelmingly positive titles. Just find what you like and dig in.
I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).
Hey now factorio isn’t complex, just play it a lot and you’ll pick it up… I’m 2000 hours in and managed to finish a game in only 70 hours! I’m thiiiiis close to making train lines without constant crashes. Pretty soon I’ll feel ready to add in Bob’s mods to the mix. It’s… Simple…
When you have a lot of experience with games, you find that most things follow common trends and tropes. Like if I open a new shooter it’s a safe bet that shift is gonna make me sprint and things like that.
In Baldurs Gate specifically, it’s basically Dungeons and Dragons in a video game format, so if you know Dungeons and Dragons already that is a huge head start.
I got you. Nowadays I would look at the UI of a game first before jumping in. If it looks too complicated I just pass. My job is already complicated enough, I don’t need to make myself more stressed when I just want to have fun.
It’s just lots of experimentation. Lots of complex games are games that are not designed for you to make it through successfully on your first go. They’re designed to be complete game overs that you learn from and make it further the next time. Lots of games also have a lot of moving parts that you have to master each one individually before you can tackle the whole thing. There’s a reason Hitman speedruns are like 1 minute each level when most regular players can take well above an hour.
IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur’s Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.
First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it’s almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.
A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the “Send to camp” option for items. Grab them whenever, they don’t take up inventory space.
For me, it’s a combination of “just jump in and wing it” and building on top of working knowledge from previous similar games. But I’m very much a “learning while doing” person, so if I tried to research how to play a game first, it’s not like the knowledge would sink in. I build up a working knowledge by jumping in and trying stuff out, and a lot of knowledge has at least some cross-compatibility between games of the same genre, even if the game mechanics are a bit different. As I play a lot of games with my partner, we’re often both learning a new game at the same time, and you’d be amazed how often we’ll have a conversation that can be summarised as “I’ve discovered how to do X. It’s like Y from game Z, except you do A instead of B.”
When the game allows for it, I always play on the easiest difficulty setting while I’m learning, as that makes the game more forgiving of mistakes. There’s no shame in playing on easy mode, even for serious gamers. :)
BG3 is based on arguably the most user-friendly version of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (5e). Larian themselves also do a fantastic job at easing you into the mechanics via gameplay, so you can honestly jump in and just play something that sounds cool to you without worrying about having to min-max or optimize your character. The game lays out what you get on each level-up pretty well and it defaults you to being a single class, so you won’t have to worry about multi-classing unless you want to - and because it’s based on 5e, you can honestly get away with not optimizing your build that much, if even at all, and manage to do fine as long as your main damage (STR for melee, DEX for ranged and Finesse weapons)/casting stat (INT for Wizards, CHA for Bards/Sorcerers, and WIS for Clerics/Druids) is high.
Can’t speak on OW2, but with games like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide, I found it’s best to just play it and figure stuff out slowly from experience. A lot of it can sound complicated, but I found it’s easier to digest the complexity of the mechanics and systems a bit at a time as your experience with the game grows. Like with Vermintide, as an example, I recently started really diving in deep with Cleave, Stagger, and Frontline/Heavy Frontline/Tank property mechanics and numbers for melee weapons; you literally cannot see these things from the game’s UI, and starting out I had no idea these things even existed, and it only really matters once you start playing on the hardest difficulties, Legend and Cataclysm. If I had to figure out all that stuff early on, I would nope out of the game super quick lmao.
5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.
Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.
For destiny, I have no idea. I first played D2 when it launched and that was fine, but I attempted to pick it up again a year or two later and I was immediately lost.
For overwatch I agai haven’t played in quite some time. But for multiplayer shooters like that I try to go into a casual mode or training mode first and just get a feel for everything. Eventually you get the hang of things.
For RPG’s it depends. Some games can benefit from reading up online. For example I’m playing bloodborne right now and I had no idea how I wanted to spec out my character. So I looked up what weapons and abilities are in the game and made my decision based around that. If a game features a respec option, I’ll be more likely to just go in and wing it and change things up when I need to.
casual mode or training mode first and just get a feel for everything
These usually don’t have any explanation of the game mechanics though. Like you’d have to sit down and analyze all the character traits on some web forum in order to not get immediately slaughtered by other more experienced players, since it’s multiplayer only.
Getting repeatedly beaten in competitive multiplayer games is just kinda par for the course if you haven't learned the meta, strategies, etc. If you lack game knowledge and your opponents have that game knowledge, you will mostly lose.
If winning in the game is the only way you find enjoyment in them, then those kinds of games require significant investments of time and energy to "git good".
I say this as someone who is repeatedly shit on in every game of CoD I've ever played and will play in the future. That said, I don't gain particular enjoyment from winning alone - not that it isn't fun to win, just that I get just as much enjoyment from other aspects of the game.
It sounds to me, mostly, that these games just don't really appeal to your idea of what's fun.
Games like Baldur’s Gate assume you have at least some DnD experience. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time long ago and being really glad I played one session of DnD before it.
Oh wow, okay, good to know. Well my brother has agreed to play the co-op with me and help me out. Maybe I’ll learn to love it. Just not sure I want to 😂
I'm not so sure. I've not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn't been so into watching videos of other peoples' dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.
As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don't. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don't have a need to go over when you're not the one at the table.
Those aren't things OP would know enough about to even know they don't know, so I'm glad they have someone helping them. I don't consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they're starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I've played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob
I'm no D&D expert myself. I got through those other two BG games with a lot of frustration (and "narrative"/god mode for the last quarter of BG2), and pretty much the only things I didn't understand just from reading tooltips in BG3 were the numbers governing saving throw DCs and the to hit chance with certain spells.
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