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I disagree with pretty much everything here. Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes th

I disagree with pretty much everything here. Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse. I would also argue most games are not really that grindy. It’s actually… rare to see in any single player game. If anything most games put you at risk of becoming too powerful too fast. If there’s a grind it is usually for the last 1% of content. And very few games actually try to sell you power ups for single player content. That’s really not a common thing as some people claim. Multiplayer games are a different beast, but you definitely don’t want cheaters there either. Not wanting long progression curves for multiplayer games is a reasonable ask. Allowing cheaters is not.

aloisdg 4y ago
> it just makes the game really boring. Oh boy no. Maybe for you. Maybe for some. With a bit of empathy should be able to imagine that not everyone think like you do. What if someone wants to play pokemon for the exploration, lore and care taking of pokemon. For that person, fighting and leveling is a chore. Maybe someone does not have the actual time for the grind before each arena. > Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless What if the grind was not a goal or what if we actually doesnt want to fight at all. Pacific run exists. Let's me skip dat boss if I want to.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Agreed. I spent dozens of hours playing GTA5 and literally never made any progress in the story. I had too much fun driving around like a crazy person, constantly using the cheat code to avoid dying.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  If you want to play Pokémon and not do the Pokémon battles then you’re on a weird edge case where it’s debatable whether you’re actually playing the game at all. If that’s what you want, sure, go ahead. That’s actually still very different. Removing fighting from the game vs doing it but with infinite health. The former is at least self consistent I guess.
  - pr0zac 4y ago
    They enjoy or get satisfaction from one part of the game without enjoying or getting satisfaction from another part. Being happy there are methods to skip or minimize the part they don't like is pretty reasonable. There's no reason in a recreational hobby to struggle through something you don't enjoy in order to do something you do. Personally I think the battles are the best part of Pokemon but if folks like the story, the exploration/discovery/search, or the collecting parts of Pokemon but don't like the battles it doesn't hurt me if they do something to minimize them and they aren't lesser for doing so.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Doesn’t hurt me if someone decides to shoot themself in the knee but I still have pretty strong opinions against it. Judging people by their choices is pretty much instinctual human behavior.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. Probably depends on the person and the game. If they're enjoying the game as an interactive storytelling medium, playing through it on god-mode is probably not significantly worse than struggling to win; it's no worse than a movie.
- rez9x 4y ago
  I prefer a little challenge, but it's clear there's a demographic for this with the 'journalist mode' in many new games.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I doubt it. There’s still a big difference between very low difficulties and god mode. God mode in the typical sense exposes the cracks in the game and breaks the immersion. And if you enjoy dicking around and abusing cheats that’s fine but it’s about on par with smothering fine dining with hot sauce. Or reading the summary of a novel rather than the book.
  - simion314 4y ago
    Or I played this game already 3 times and I don't care about the lockpicking mini-game since I already done it 100 times, or I already crawled on some stupid long cave levels where the developers just spammed spiders, I want to enjoy certain parts and not waste my limited time on the stuff I don't enjoy. Unfortunately few games have good modding tools, but the few games that have you will notice players using mods to "cheat" away parts that they no longer enjoy , like skipping some terrible level in Dragon Age Origins on repeat play-troughs. Other time saving mods are things like increase inventory capacity (it is not immersive anyway you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant).
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant Wasn't there a game where you could turn over your inventory to your dog, who would run back to a merchant, sell it, and return with the proceeds?
spookthesunset 4y ago
City builders like city skylines or sim city are much more fun with infinite money, at least for me. I could care less about the financial part, I just like building!
- bombcar 4y ago
  Especially since the "money" side of those games is always so very weak, you just need to learn a few steps and you'll effectively have infinite money anyway.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Yeah. Either I cheat myself infinite money or I set up a basic, in the black city, turn the speed as high as it'll go and go eat dinner. Functionally the same result, so why waste the time?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Sometimes I kind of wish the city simulator games had buildings and roads be free - the only money issue you had to worry about was balancing monthly maintenance expenses with taxes, as the cost to "build" isn't really a problem at all.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Sure, I buy that. But presumably you’re just interested in building cities, not completing challenges or a story mode or whatever. I’ve never played that specific title.
datalopers 4y ago
> Cheating in single player games is super lame Who cares? It's a single player game and doesn't affect other players whatsoever. People can enjoy it how they want.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Sure. People can also just waste their lives away on shitty drugs. It’s their lives and aside from some edge cases I’m willing to ignore it doesn’t affect other people. But maybe it’s not unreasonable to have an opinion that it’s a super lame choice. Maybe seems foolish. Or likely to lead to lesser appreciation of the art/life.
  - nullstyle 4y ago
gs17 4y ago
> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse. Yeah, cheating in Pokemon is what finally killed my love for the games as a kid. A friend wanted to show me his cool Action Replay, turned on every cheat and left my game saved in a state where it would be a lot of work to get back to "normal". Somehow it revealed all the grindy bits that I had been okay with up until that point. But it definitely does depend on the person. My friend was still having fun with his Pokemon games after. Another friend in high school seemed to get more fun out of typing the level skip code on Starcraft than beating the levels the intended way.
- Sakos 4y ago
  Weird. I'm disillusioned with games that have grind as a major pillar. So my most memorable games have been games like Soma or Outer Wilds. Can't say I like games as a whole any less, I just avoid a number of genres.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Like what games? Outside of mobile games I find this pretty rare.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. In many single player games, cheats are isomorphic to configurable difficulty options and allow you to tune the game to the challenges of interest.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Sort of. The lowest difficulty may be stupidly easy, not even requiring comprehension of the game mechanics. But it’s rarely so blatant that it would be described as a god mode.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Not all cheats are “god mode” and there are games that use various cheats the same way other games use multidimensional difficulty settings, as the means to disable or enable particular subsystems or dimensions of challenge (or bypass them, e.g., by providing infinite resources of one kind so that the system addressing that resource can be ignored.)
Arrath 4y ago
It's a good thing its a signle player game and someone cheating in their playthrough has absolutely no impact on your own enjoyment of the same game! I agree re: cheaters in multiplayer games, though. Except for the rare cases of "everyone gets to!" ala CoD:MW2 lobbies where the cheater/host set the game to where everyone could fly and shoot massively explosive rounds. That's good fun, for a few rounds.
pr0zac 4y ago
As I've gotten older and busier I've started using cheats and walkthroughs and methods to skip parts of games I don't enjoy much more often. I'm an adult with real difficulties and responsibilities and stressors. I spend 60+ hours a week running a startup. I have other hobbies like rock climbing and Magic to struggle against and push myself to get better at. I understand that the challenge can be a lot of fun, I finished both Hades and Doom Eternal on their hardest difficulty and really loved my time with both but sometimes a challenge isn't what I want out of a game and I just want to enjoy the story or explore the world or blow off steam. Video games for me are usually a relaxing past-time I enjoy in the small amount of free-time I have available and I'm often not willing to get frustrated slogging through slow sections or trying to overcome difficult ones. So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3. If you prefer playing games differently from me and want a challenge when I don't that's totally fine, I hope you're having a great time cause the way each of us play doesn't affect or take away from the other person experience or goal in any way. People are allowed to enjoy different things or even the same things in different ways and its super lame to call them super lame for something so inconsequential as how they play video games.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  > So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3. These all seem pretty reasonable to me. The first one is a desired difficulty level. The second one… well that one’s kind of on you depending on how granular it was. The third one is a desired game mode. The fourth one is just quality of life. Elden ring was poorly balanced imo. I would imagine if you’re less skilled an easy mode would still give you the full game. But I stand pretty firm that an infinite health mode would utterly ruin it. Save scumming because something went poorly vs repeatedly save scumming a high risk move until the dice fall favorably seems a little lame to me.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I rarely have time for video games now (work full-time while also trying to optimize for rock climbing). But I really enjoy "Let's Play"s of cinematic story-driven games (especially games which are fairly linear) I can watch on up to 2X speed, skip through sections where the player is grinding/leveling, managing inventory, toolbuilding, traveling long distances, or engaging in repetitive combat. I just finished Last of Us games 1 and 2 in ~12 hours total (playing would have taken closer to 50)

aloisdg 4y ago

> it just makes the game really boring. Oh boy no. Maybe for you. Maybe for some. With a bit of empathy should be able to imagine that not everyone think like you do. What if someone wants to play pokemon for the exploration, lore and care taking of pokemon. For that person, fighting and leveling is a chore. Maybe someone does not have the actual time for the grind before each arena. > Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless What if the grind was not a goal or what if we actually doesnt want to fight at all. Pacific run exists. Let's me skip dat boss if I want to.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Agreed. I spent dozens of hours playing GTA5 and literally never made any progress in the story. I had too much fun driving around like a crazy person, constantly using the cheat code to avoid dying.
oneoff786 4y ago
If you want to play Pokémon and not do the Pokémon battles then you’re on a weird edge case where it’s debatable whether you’re actually playing the game at all. If that’s what you want, sure, go ahead. That’s actually still very different. Removing fighting from the game vs doing it but with infinite health. The former is at least self consistent I guess.
- pr0zac 4y ago
  They enjoy or get satisfaction from one part of the game without enjoying or getting satisfaction from another part. Being happy there are methods to skip or minimize the part they don't like is pretty reasonable. There's no reason in a recreational hobby to struggle through something you don't enjoy in order to do something you do. Personally I think the battles are the best part of Pokemon but if folks like the story, the exploration/discovery/search, or the collecting parts of Pokemon but don't like the battles it doesn't hurt me if they do something to minimize them and they aren't lesser for doing so.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Doesn’t hurt me if someone decides to shoot themself in the knee but I still have pretty strong opinions against it. Judging people by their choices is pretty much instinctual human behavior.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. Probably depends on the person and the game. If they're enjoying the game as an interactive storytelling medium, playing through it on god-mode is probably not significantly worse than struggling to win; it's no worse than a movie.

rez9x 4y ago
I prefer a little challenge, but it's clear there's a demographic for this with the 'journalist mode' in many new games.
oneoff786 4y ago
I doubt it. There’s still a big difference between very low difficulties and god mode. God mode in the typical sense exposes the cracks in the game and breaks the immersion. And if you enjoy dicking around and abusing cheats that’s fine but it’s about on par with smothering fine dining with hot sauce. Or reading the summary of a novel rather than the book.
- simion314 4y ago
  Or I played this game already 3 times and I don't care about the lockpicking mini-game since I already done it 100 times, or I already crawled on some stupid long cave levels where the developers just spammed spiders, I want to enjoy certain parts and not waste my limited time on the stuff I don't enjoy. Unfortunately few games have good modding tools, but the few games that have you will notice players using mods to "cheat" away parts that they no longer enjoy , like skipping some terrible level in Dragon Age Origins on repeat play-troughs. Other time saving mods are things like increase inventory capacity (it is not immersive anyway you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant).
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant Wasn't there a game where you could turn over your inventory to your dog, who would run back to a merchant, sell it, and return with the proceeds?

spookthesunset 4y ago

City builders like city skylines or sim city are much more fun with infinite money, at least for me. I could care less about the financial part, I just like building!

bombcar 4y ago
Especially since the "money" side of those games is always so very weak, you just need to learn a few steps and you'll effectively have infinite money anyway.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Yeah. Either I cheat myself infinite money or I set up a basic, in the black city, turn the speed as high as it'll go and go eat dinner. Functionally the same result, so why waste the time?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Sometimes I kind of wish the city simulator games had buildings and roads be free - the only money issue you had to worry about was balancing monthly maintenance expenses with taxes, as the cost to "build" isn't really a problem at all.
oneoff786 4y ago
Sure, I buy that. But presumably you’re just interested in building cities, not completing challenges or a story mode or whatever. I’ve never played that specific title.

datalopers 4y ago

> Cheating in single player games is super lame Who cares? It's a single player game and doesn't affect other players whatsoever. People can enjoy it how they want.

oneoff786 4y ago
Sure. People can also just waste their lives away on shitty drugs. It’s their lives and aside from some edge cases I’m willing to ignore it doesn’t affect other people. But maybe it’s not unreasonable to have an opinion that it’s a super lame choice. Maybe seems foolish. Or likely to lead to lesser appreciation of the art/life.
- nullstyle 4y ago

gs17 4y ago

> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse. Yeah, cheating in Pokemon is what finally killed my love for the games as a kid. A friend wanted to show me his cool Action Replay, turned on every cheat and left my game saved in a state where it would be a lot of work to get back to "normal". Somehow it revealed all the grindy bits that I had been okay with up until that point. But it definitely does depend on the person. My friend was still having fun with his Pokemon games after. Another friend in high school seemed to get more fun out of typing the level skip code on Starcraft than beating the levels the intended way.

Sakos 4y ago
Weird. I'm disillusioned with games that have grind as a major pillar. So my most memorable games have been games like Soma or Outer Wilds. Can't say I like games as a whole any less, I just avoid a number of genres.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Like what games? Outside of mobile games I find this pretty rare.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. In many single player games, cheats are isomorphic to configurable difficulty options and allow you to tune the game to the challenges of interest.

oneoff786 4y ago
Sort of. The lowest difficulty may be stupidly easy, not even requiring comprehension of the game mechanics. But it’s rarely so blatant that it would be described as a god mode.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Not all cheats are “god mode” and there are games that use various cheats the same way other games use multidimensional difficulty settings, as the means to disable or enable particular subsystems or dimensions of challenge (or bypass them, e.g., by providing infinite resources of one kind so that the system addressing that resource can be ignored.)

Arrath 4y ago

It's a good thing its a signle player game and someone cheating in their playthrough has absolutely no impact on your own enjoyment of the same game! I agree re: cheaters in multiplayer games, though. Except for the rare cases of "everyone gets to!" ala CoD:MW2 lobbies where the cheater/host set the game to where everyone could fly and shoot massively explosive rounds. That's good fun, for a few rounds.

pr0zac 4y ago

As I've gotten older and busier I've started using cheats and walkthroughs and methods to skip parts of games I don't enjoy much more often. I'm an adult with real difficulties and responsibilities and stressors. I spend 60+ hours a week running a startup. I have other hobbies like rock climbing and Magic to struggle against and push myself to get better at. I understand that the challenge can be a lot of fun, I finished both Hades and Doom Eternal on their hardest difficulty and really loved my time with both but sometimes a challenge isn't what I want out of a game and I just want to enjoy the story or explore the world or blow off steam. Video games for me are usually a relaxing past-time I enjoy in the small amount of free-time I have available and I'm often not willing to get frustrated slogging through slow sections or trying to overcome difficult ones. So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3. If you prefer playing games differently from me and want a challenge when I don't that's totally fine, I hope you're having a great time cause the way each of us play doesn't affect or take away from the other person experience or goal in any way. People are allowed to enjoy different things or even the same things in different ways and its super lame to call them super lame for something so inconsequential as how they play video games.

oneoff786 4y ago
> So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3. These all seem pretty reasonable to me. The first one is a desired difficulty level. The second one… well that one’s kind of on you depending on how granular it was. The third one is a desired game mode. The fourth one is just quality of life. Elden ring was poorly balanced imo. I would imagine if you’re less skilled an easy mode would still give you the full game. But I stand pretty firm that an infinite health mode would utterly ruin it. Save scumming because something went poorly vs repeatedly save scumming a high risk move until the dice fall favorably seems a little lame to me.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
I rarely have time for video games now (work full-time while also trying to optimize for rock climbing). But I really enjoy "Let's Play"s of cinematic story-driven games (especially games which are fairly linear) I can watch on up to 2X speed, skip through sections where the player is grinding/leveling, managing inventory, toolbuilding, traveling long distances, or engaging in repetitive combat. I just finished Last of Us games 1 and 2 in ~12 hours total (playing would have taken closer to 50)