4 ms·

I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most

I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.

yamtaddle 4y ago
YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do. Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.
1980phipsi 4y ago
YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
moomin 4y ago
Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.
- Arrath 4y ago
  For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text
- klibertp 4y ago
  I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the author did all the math, compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious: the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end of the game...)
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.

I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.

yamtaddle 4y ago

YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do. Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.

1980phipsi 4y ago

YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.

moomin 4y ago

Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.

Arrath 4y ago
For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text
klibertp 4y ago
I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the author did all the math, compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious: the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end of the game...)
- tmtvl 4y ago
  With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.