Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate.
I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.
I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it’s an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.
So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?
E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!
Yeah - I just jump in and wing it.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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Ok, then don’t play them. No one is forcing you.
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.
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.
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This is a complaint. One that other commenters have addressed.
It’s often an intentional and critical part of the vision of the game and why people play
Elden Ring, specifically, hides information from the player on purpose, intending for them to discover things through experience.
It doesn’t hold your hand at all and is arguably one of the better games in the last decade, in no small part due to features you are referencing.
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That particular decision was to keep them immersed in the game, and exploring.
But back to your warning label topic, what do you expect that to look like?
“E for e=mc^2”? Or “S for Seseme Street approved”?
We already have shenanigans in the rating system, this would be monumentally worse.
I am really curious what a metric for game complexity would even look like
It’s not, actually. You can send anything and everything to camp and decide about it later on. This includes camp supplies/food.
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