4 ms·

In my personal experience, it strongly depends on both the genre, and also if it is the first playthrough. For example, for a point & click adventure, external

by tetha 2y ago

In my personal experience, it strongly depends on both the genre, and also if it is the first playthrough. For example, for a point & click adventure, external knowledge can destroy the immersion and overall spell of the game very quickly. I just get yanked out of the atmosphere and the puzzle solving mode and then the spell tends to be gone. One of the reason why one of my barely moving side projects would be a minimal spoiler hint system for games like these. On the other hand, games like DF, Technical Minecraft, more complex modded minecraft and such live and honestly thrive with the community, tooling and the wiki around. And it is no drawback - it makes it more fun and interesting. There are just so many mechanics in DF or in Gregtech to keep up with. And then there are more middle-ground-ish games, like Terraria, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon. Entirely playable and winnable without external information, but in a second run or after a certain amount of time, adding in external information can open your eyes to new levels of hilarity you never knew existed, or guide you towards the obscure niches of completion.

jajko 2y ago
I am currently playing the masterpiece Baldur's gate 3. You can totally do it without any prior knowledge, not looking at tips or how to solve some quests. But - you can easily mess up things for good in the story, sometimes its not clear in dialogs how big consequences may be, sometimes decisions from far past affect matters and story will go in directions you don't want. Its absolutely massive game in terms of decision trees and consequences. And without any prior knowledge one will miss many if not most not-in-your-sight mechanics and connections. The creativity with ie various fighting approaches you can find in reddit is mind-boggling. Seeing some characters die because you missed something is pretty common too and it pisses me off. Some people love playing it 3x through, or even more, getting better, playing with 1 character only. I have family, work, tons of passions so this is just a small time effort for me, I will never spend enough time to get really good at 3rd playthrough, I just grew up from such gaming and found more interesting stuff in our very short lives, to not end up later with deep regrets. Larian studios were smart enough to offer very generous saving system (heck you can save even mid fights, generally unheard of) and overall there is a lot of confidence their gameplay is very robust regardless how casual / hardcore gamer are you. And it works, dammit it works so well, no matter the approach. This is mechanics I can totally respect. In contrary, when authors force me to play only how they want and punish or block you for everything else, it shows me how shallow and unbalanced gameplay is, how little they trust it. Not everybody can do games like Larian, but sure as hell I wish they could.

by tetha 2y ago

jajko 2y ago

I am currently playing the masterpiece Baldur's gate 3. You can totally do it without any prior knowledge, not looking at tips or how to solve some quests. But - you can easily mess up things for good in the story, sometimes its not clear in dialogs how big consequences may be, sometimes decisions from far past affect matters and story will go in directions you don't want. Its absolutely massive game in terms of decision trees and consequences. And without any prior knowledge one will miss many if not most not-in-your-sight mechanics and connections. The creativity with ie various fighting approaches you can find in reddit is mind-boggling. Seeing some characters die because you missed something is pretty common too and it pisses me off. Some people love playing it 3x through, or even more, getting better, playing with 1 character only. I have family, work, tons of passions so this is just a small time effort for me, I will never spend enough time to get really good at 3rd playthrough, I just grew up from such gaming and found more interesting stuff in our very short lives, to not end up later with deep regrets. Larian studios were smart enough to offer very generous saving system (heck you can save even mid fights, generally unheard of) and overall there is a lot of confidence their gameplay is very robust regardless how casual / hardcore gamer are you. And it works, dammit it works so well, no matter the approach. This is mechanics I can totally respect. In contrary, when authors force me to play only how they want and punish or block you for everything else, it shows me how shallow and unbalanced gameplay is, how little they trust it. Not everybody can do games like Larian, but sure as hell I wish they could.