My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game… the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!
That seems kind of ridiculous that they technically make it all optional.
Dwarf Fortress.
Enough said lmao
I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!
My first time through Final Fantasy 8, I was a bit too young to grasp all the concepts. I missed the memo on the fact that you had to craft gear based on finding the weapon magazines so I ended up playing through the whole game with everyone using their base weapons.
FF7 Remake. I played the original but didn’t pay attention to differences in the remake. I went the entire game with only the Buster sword, and thus did not learn any new abilities. Still beat it though.
I did this exactly, I went through like half then realized that you learn new abilities by equipping weapons and using their ability 10 times.
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How can you be under leveled? Isn’t Alduin level scaled?
Yes and no.
Everything still has a minimum level. Alduin being the final boss is still pretty high level at his lowest level. Same with the Dragon Priests. Those dudes are almost impossible when you’re less than level 10.
If you just did the MQ and nothing else, even if you kill everything in your path during the dungeons, you’ll barely have leveled. You won’t level at if you just run through everything!
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When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.
I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.
Lol, that’s me who was leveling with some wierd protopal build at the same time
Frankly, I enjoyed WoW more when there was that “freedom” to do what you wanted with the specs and not have the theory police breathing down your neck. The game felt much more imaginative. Once I found out the only way a class worked was by going down a specific path, I was incredibly disappointed. Specs never felt fun to me after that. It always felt like the developers didn’t have time to complete the design and lobbed the ball over the fence to the player to “code in” the last pieces - since even from Vanilla there was really only “one way” to do it (according to the theory police).
Not me, but my wife got all the way to the end of Journey to the Savage Planet before discovering there is a skill tree you can invest in 😂
I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
Doesn’t Mirrors Edge have a forced tutorial at the beginning and it literally requires you to pick up a gun at some point? 🤔
To be fair, that game really isn’t about shooting or even taking out enemies. Taking their gun only slows you down!
I should go play that again. It’s got a great atmosphere (and soundtrack)
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There’s even an achievement for it.
Resident Evil Director’s Cut on PS1. I was fairly young and not very good at the “survival” aspect of the survival horror. I tried to kill everything I encountered and consumed copious amounts of ammo and herbs doing so. I reached a place where I had a single ink ribbon left, no ammo, health on the red, and confused on where I needed to go next. And I had to go do homework. So I used my last ribbon and saved.
I discovered next time I played that the way forward was through a tight corridor I missed filled with zombies who could now one-shot me. I tried and tried and literally was unable to get through. First time I ever learned the word “soft-locked” as my brother wheezed it out while laughing. Good times!
I also played that game by killing everything I saw; I just happened to also stumble into the fact that if you aim down while using the knife, it can one shot anything you hit. So it was easy af. lol
Haha whaaaat. After all this time, I had no idea that was a thing. Any enemy? Not bosses though, right?
The regular zombies and the dogs. Not the bosses. At least, I don’t remember… I saved my ammo for them, but that could have just been because I wanted to shoot them lol
I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like “wow, this game is so much easier now!”
Yeah, it wasn’t until my second time starting the game that I took in any of the combat tutorials
I finished botw with 250 hours game play and currently on totk and cannot dodge, parry or flurry rush to save my life.
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I forced my way through that cave in Blue/Red that was completely pitch black. I don’t know why I didn’t get HM Flash (I was a dumb kid). I remember listening intenselywith headphones to the noises that would be made from running into walls, along with counting each press of the d-pad so I could sorta figure out where I was. Still got lost often. I don’t know how many poor Zubats I murdered in that cave trying to get through it. Nor do I remember how long it took me to get to the other side.
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I played Pokemon games against other kids in battles, and I also never saw merit in the status effects. If it didn’t deal damage, it was just a waste of a move.
Now, my experience is solely from the original Red/Blue generation so maybe they’ve gotten a bit more complex, but the first games were shallow af.
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Honestly, most status moves aren’t worth it in normal, AI battles because the pokemon AI is so bad.
Sword dance and nasty plot are the exception. Use that once or twice and you can usually sweep the entire opponent team with one hits. They’re also fantastic in the raid features that the last 2 generations have had. A big meta in SV raids was belly drum + drain punch (which would easily heal the damage belly drum dealt). It’s practically impossible to win 6+ star raids without status moves. Some of them are so brutally hard that you have to go for cheese strategies.
Sleep Powder is the only one IMO. 75% hit rate and an expected 2+ turns of effect means it’s a good gamble vs a stronger opponent, plus it’s practical for catching Pokemon.
Well, that and Gen 1 Toxic + Leech Seed is pretty fun…
I played a substantial amount of Zelda TotK without the paraglider which made quite a few adventures a lot more treacherous, some borderline impossible, and some actually impossible. 😂
Wow, that’s awful lol. I explored a little and very quickly encountered a shrine where I figured out there must have been a paraglider cause it needed it (that might have been purposefully placed?).
But also, no paraglider means no map. I can’t imagine going for too long without progressing the story till you can reveal the map!
Heck, it felt like it was taking too long to give me the photo mode feature. I knew it had to be there, but I was expecting to get it much sooner and didn’t like missing opportunities to take photos for the compendium.
Black & White
It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.
I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.
Oh my god I never learnt this! That would’ve made the final level so much easier
I may have misunderstood, though. This is my vague memory of a friend trying to explain to me how I was supposed to have played the game after I gave up and uninstalled it long ago.
If you use your godhand to place a boulder in the midst of one of the villages worshiping you, the villagers will start praying and dancing and chanting and whatnot around the boulder. After a long enough time with the villagers charging the bolder, it would radiate with your divine presence. At this point, it is a ready “artifact”.
Artifacts don’t expand you influence zone directly, but they do a really good job of getting non-believer villagers to start worshiping you, which does extend your influence in a major way.
Ahh, thank you!
You can also throw that annoying immortal guy who somehow allows you to use your powers around wherever he is
Oh man, it’s time to give this game a replay one of these days.
Let’s go man. Can’t wait to get stuck at that tree puzzle again.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
Hah well today I learned. It’s recently occurred to me that I never beat any video games growing up because I didn’t read the instructions or learn how to play. FF7 is one of those games that I haven’t ever eaten even though I really really liked the game. Never even considered that you should have a trio of healer mage and fighter even though it makes total sense.