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.
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?
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.
Plus with games never explaining how some of their mechanics work and not giving you any realistic way to experimentally determine it, why wouldn’t I look it up online?
A big one that comes to mind is stuff like attacks, armor, and HP. Games handle them differently and very rarely tell you exactly how they work.
I love Wind Waker so much. The Triforce quest toward the end gets some heat, but I think it’s great. Sailing around the open ocean and exploring the islands is the best part of the game. Wish they would have kept some of the cut content and had another dungeon or two, but still overall one of my favorite Zelda games.
The Triforce quest was somewhat nerfed in the remake. You get some fragments immediately instead of finding a map to them.
And the new sail kinda makes wind control useless for sailing which I’m honestly not sure I like. This is just a part of the game’s theme they cut, there is such a thing as too convenient IMO.
I don’t think I hate the triforce quest as much as I see others, as I do have some fond memories of it. Just it drags on a little too long. I disagree with the people who want it cut entirely, but I can respect their opinion. The cut content is so fascinating too. I remember hearing the Iron Boots were cut, and it’s always triggered this sort of morbid curiosity where I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to keep them.
That it was! It’s a shame Justin doesn’t really compete anymore. That’s how well he does in a game he doesn’t really practice like he did back in the day. That man could pick up a fighting game at Evo that he’s never played before, and he’d still get out of pools.
It’s an action adventure rpg where you whack enemies with ever more powerful sticks and weapons that takes place in a fully different location known as evermore, accessible through the lab of a secret scientist from some American town named “podunk” in the 60’s. Especially the lab, it feels eerie enough to be an end game area. The town of podunk is basically the setup so you don’t get to see much, but it’s cool to see a modern day location in an rpg that isn’t earthbound.
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?]).
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
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 actually played Noita before. I though I was doing pretty good by myself, managed to get quite deep. Then somebody told me about the outside map and all the parallel worlds and wow…
the thing about noita is that you think you’ve discovered the entire game and you’re impressed with how much there was to find, then you notice something and find another game to discover, then you watch a video on noita and realize you found roughly a fifth of the actual full game content
I’m gonna push back on this idea. Take Rimworld. It’s also a “have the wiki open” game. The game tells you how long plants take to mature, but there is a mechanic that plants “rest” a certain amount of time that isn’t mentioned anywhere, so the figure is just flat wrong for all plants by some factor (same factor for all plants). I love these types of games, but it’s not an excuse for relying on wikis to explain things.
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.
sometimes you just wanna know what to splice to finish your gardening collection instead of brute forcing every single combination of the 40+ plants that exist until you learn that grapes and oats grafted together make elderberries or something weird like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
There is a time and place for walkthroughs. I doubt I would’ve finished Portal 1 & 2 on my own without them because I absolutely suck at puzzles, particularly visual ones. But if I hadn’t, I would have missed out on the great story and enjoying the craft of the game.
I got this on my wishlist but I gotta wait to pick it up. Money doesn’t go as far as it used to so I gotta be more selective with when and how much I use. Even if the game is less than most AAA games nowadays.
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.
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