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.
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.
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.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn’t imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
I’ve been running Nobara on my machine for like a year and it’s been a really easy experience! The creator also maintains a popular build of proton and designed it to be pretty hands off.
I’m a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there’s no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.
So far I haven’t had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn’t display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.
As for distro side of things, I don’t know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what’s happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.
Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don’t change the language to a certain language because it’ll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I’ve played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that’s more or less thanks to the devs.
Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.
I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.
There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.
And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.
An excellent opportunity to reference a bit of true Internet culture: Old Man Murray’s dressdown of one of the puzzles in Gabriel Knight 3. The most relevant part is their final summary:
That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the “hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner”-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
desperados and commandos were both just that kind of game. i revisited desperados recently and the amount of mileage you can get out of “lie down in tall grass, quicksave, stand up, shoot, lie down” is frankly ridiculous.
I’ve been gaming exclusively on desktop Linux for more than a decade.
All my games work, either natively or (more often) using some variant of Wine. Most Steam games work with very little tweaking or none at all.
I occasionally have to apply workarounds for broken Battle.net updates (I run Blizzard games without Steam) but this doesn’t happen very often and usually only takes a couple days for the community to figure out a workaround. The last few updates haven’t broken anything new.
Games with certain anti-cheat systems, especially kernel-mode ones, are known not to work. I don’t care, because I wouldn’t allow such invasive and dangerous things to run on my hardware anyway.
When the answer is to grab the fork seventeen levels back, and to not use it on the dog 3 screens before so that you had it to look at after answering a riddle written backwards in Spanish that is actually an in-joke from the devs childhood you’re damn fucking right I’m not wasting my time to “figure it out”.
Video games are not reality, I can’t look at an easily surmountable barrier and just walk over it like I could in real life to solve the issue, I have to take some deranged imagined route by a dev. I can’t logically work my way out of a situation that is some guys bullshit idea of a solution.
I wish there were more options for “hints” instead of just giving you the walkthrough. I keep getting stuck in Subnautica, but I don’t want to just make a beeline to where I need to be.
Cheating always made games boring for me. I remember doing a cheat in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life to get all items, and it just evaporated any fun I had.
The best balance was a GameFAQs I printed out for Morrowind that just covered the first handful of quests of the game. Gave me tips for class and race selection, and just enough guidance to get my bearings.
I decided to use GPT to help me with gaming, specifically when I had little to no clue what to do or where to go.
What I did was write instructions in my prompt, asking it not to be too specific and not to give me a straight answer. Sometimes, I even asked it to be intentionally cryptic. That way, I could still make progress without ruining the fun, since the vague hints still left room for me to figure things out on my own.
The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there ^_^) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it’s achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it’s mechanics that much it’s not for me.
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