i play a lot of games hacked or with cheats and it's really striking how little actual Game there is in most games once you take out the constant slog of busywork they force you to do
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the Gamers have found this to yell at me. i'm talking about games where each scrap of plot is locked behind someone demanding yet another 10 loaves of bread, so you have to wait for the grain to grow, wait for the mill to grind it, wait for the oven to bake it, and by then it's like 3 days later
for what its worth some of my favorite games are designed around high difficulty gameplay that can stall a playthrough for weeks on the low end of skill but if someone cheated thru them i would be happy bc it meant they experienced the story and i could talk to them about it ^w^
I had the opposite problem in Assassin's Creed IV. Why are you making me do this tedious plot nonsense, game, I am a PIRATE and I want to be in the OCEAN doing PIRATE THINGS
yea genuinely this is not a problem that i run into outside of a couple rpgs? i play an action platformer or a visual novel and i can just jump over obstacles or read more words without having to craft something for it
There are merchants who can sell me rare gems, potions and other end products, but somehow I still have to go out and gather 6 moonberries or whatever on my own instead of exchanging cash for them as well
You're really cooking with this one, the tedious busywork is exactly why I don't play video games anymore. I like RPGs but they're all the same taskmaster nonsense with different skins
Im always ready to go to war with The Gamers about cheats and easy mode.
I like to game but I got a damn job - I ain’t going to use my precious free time to grind or replay a section a hundred times. It’s more of a time issue than a skill issue.
i'm aware games can't just be nonstop action and plot development and there needs to be a balance, i just simply don't believe the balance should be the player just staring at a countdown clock until they can fulfill yet another fetch mission from somebody is the way to do it
There are some games where that drip feed enhances the experience by giving you time to enjoy what you're doing but a lot where it's just busywork padding to make it feel more worth the money than it is (most long RPGs)
Way I see it, as long as you're having fun, do whatever. Your game, your rules
I gave up on fable 2 when I had to do the incredibly boring "job" mini games to get enough money to get enough life potions to play the game. Just because it's a job doesn't mean it has to be boring! It's a video game!
It only half solves your problem but if you grind a silly job just once for about half an hour straight, you can buy a weapon gem thing that steals enemy hp when you attack them and then you just waltz through the game.
honestly I *have* spent longer than that trying to walk past that one fucking stream in "King's Quest" without falling in and drowning, but that wasn't fun EITHER :D
Haha well I don’t remember how long it was. It’s cheesing the game a bit. You grind to get enough money early on. It’s like a 60hr action rpg so it seemed like a fine trade off to not flail like an idiot like I usually do.
You are right and you should say it. The nostalgia attached to grind is a lie told to a generation of gamers who grew up with ls2 not Atari and we wanted to pretend we had glory days
i surprised myself in really getting into elden ring. i don’t normally like things like that, find them prettt stressful, but yeah people get so gatekeepy over things like “pure experiences” or whatever
Iunno, even setting difficulty aside, they've never held any real interest for me
A bunch of monsters in a cursed realm where the UX is from 2002 and all the dialog is whispered incredibly slowly like the worst high school Dramatic Interp round I ever judged in college
What games are you playing exactly, that everything is locked behind pointless timers?
Maybe I'm talking out my ass here, but this sounds less like a "videogames in general" issue and more of a "you're exclusively playing a genre you don't like" issue.
The older I get and the more games I play, the more willing I am to cheat or ignore my way past anything grindy. I've got meetings at 6, I am not finding 100 hidden feathers to unlock a hidden story.
The Batman Arkham games are a great example of this being done right,imo. Especially Knight. The Riddler collectibles and side missions are just there, specifically for when you need a break from chasing main story beats, and they provide little bits of world building lore as rewards.
I honestly avoid games like this altogether, if I can. Didn't grow up on grindy games and have zero nostalgia or patience for it. My time left is finite. It's part of why I can't play real time strategy games (I'm also horrible at them).
mobile games are of course the fucking worst about this, where all the actual fun parts of the game are deliberately locked behind another 5 shitty match-3 levels, but once you identify it as a concept you can't unsee it and it's everywhere
my favorite game series that has no fat on it whatsoever is the monkey island games from lucasarts. they are a zillion years old but the puzzles are immaculate and the puns are still funny
The monkey wrench broke me as a preteen non English speaker. Me and my buddies were stuck until someone's older brother showed us a photo copied cheat guide.
'you do have to talk to every person and pick up every single thing' is another way of saying 'they ruthlessly cut everything that didn't move the game forward'
For me, it's Portal 2. Environmental storytelling, physics puzzles integrated into just moving from place to place, feels non-linear without actually falling into that "every place is the same" open world thing.
Savescumming was quick to get me pondering this. Even much of the "game time" is going through the motions UNTIL the part you died, when it's not navigating retry menus or watching unskippable setpieces play out.
Control from GoldenEye singlehandedly justifies savestates in retro collections. 7-8 minutes of the same fucking thing, then a randomised escort roulette where the game just decides you lose.
techmino is a tetris game with a mobile client and theres literally a console command to make all "levels" playable from the start. open source no microtransactions no subscriptions no upfront cost https://github.com/26F-Studio/Techmino
Hey, gamer here, and you're so right. A lot of games don't hold up if you get the tiniest peak behind the curtain, some special ones do. And some games just have fun loops.
There's also Soren Jorenson's famous quote about this:
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
I proudly defend your right to use cheats and play games however you want, and I have done so myself in the past too. But cheating can be considered "optimizing" to the extreme.
I agree that this is unpleasant, but it's a natural degeneration of F2P. Devs have to keep the lights on and pay salaries. If the game is "free" there has to be some trade. Maybe it's ads or microtransactions. If anyone is doing a story game on mobile I would love to know your secret.
Reminds me of enduring Griddlebot, Jimmy T's boss stage in WarioWare Move It. Similar frustration but involving robot arms to manage cooking. And the scrap of plot for completing the stage; the usual WarioWare fmv fanfare which features said character's conclusion, lightly humorous as they come 😭
Sounds like you're just playing trash level mobile games that put a mountain of work in front of you so you feel inclined to buy the shortcut microtranstions
nerds need to chill. it sounds like you're complaining about padding, which is a slog and you're completely right to dislike. i think they're mistaking bad game design for "challenge"and feel offended when others don't see it that way
This reminds me of cookie clicker, an idle clicker game in the browser. If you open devtools, it's not hard to give yourself points.... (There's actually an achievement for it!) .... Once you start adding max safe integer to your totals you can unlock the sheer insanity & full depth of the game.
A lot of games like to lean into realism, and while there is some merit and enjoyment to be found there, most of it diverts from what games are best at - being fantasy.
Pretty much all meters like food/thirst/sleep become chores, and games are full of busywork. I play games to escape that shit.
Fetch quests need to be left in the past. So many games rely on them to pad out the game. Would rather have a short, tight game than a boring long one. Going halfway across the map multiple times just to bring some random items to npc is not fun.
I particularly love delivery side-quests when the dispatcher and the recipient are so close together they could have literally thrown the item from one to the other.
No idea what game you’re talking about but typically, any game that makes me think “should I download a mod to remove this” more than once is typically deemed just not worth ANY of my time.
I immediately think of Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. The first maybe 3-6 hours were amazing with exploration and unlocking stuff. But then the game makes you keep finding new versions of the exact same forge to make new versions of the tools. Played to the end but devs should have cut half.
Final fantasy viii was goated by giving you not only a game mechanic that let you bypass grinding, but an optional encounter that would give you access to turning off all encounters
playing fallout 4 with junk/aid weight off (and sim settlements a large fully voice acted story and settlement building mod), and it's really fun. tons of stuff to do now that I'm not slogging loads of bullshit around all the time. gave myself a couple extra perk points too 'cause I'm cheeky.
the best thing about Fallout is that it comes with cheat codes right out of the box. Bethesda is just like "sure, go ahead and make yourself a Never Ending Fat Man, we don't give a shit."
I think that's part of the reason Bethesda retains so much goodwill as a company as well. It really was an excellent move on their part to offer modding tools for free.
yeah, but with starfield they're tryna microtransaction the mods. kinda makes it unfun. like I don't mind paying for a full-sized dlc with a bunch of new weapons, armor, etc. but paying like 6 bucks for a new spacesuit? fuck that.
Also, releasing the game without mod kits was ridiculous. "We're forcing you to play the game the way we want you to until some arbitrary time we choose to allow mods."
I agree their current uhhhhh behavior is rapidly depleting what good will remains. 😂 But I think initially what gave them such a shiny coating was, among some other things, how happy they were to let you mod their games. Things now with the create club and such is not good at all.
In survival mode, the stuff weighing you down aside from weapons is ammo, food and water. You're constantly carrying like 20 bottles of water and 30 pieces of food, at a minimum and don't get me started on how much ammo is weighing, when you want to carry 500 rounds of 3 different ammo types😅
Sim Settlements is one of the best "mods" ever made (should just call it DLC, at this point, haha). The integration into the world is phenomenal, and I replay the whole thing every time I re-download FO4.
yeah, I'm finally going to start sim settlements 2, episode 3 where you can convert settlements into "outposts" for war with the gunners and their mysterious backers.
This part totally lost me lol the worst part of the base game was settlements getting attacked and they made it into a whole even worse more annoying thing. Only miss in the mod though.
I've been playing steamworld heist 2 and it's still fun, but gee have they just taken the gameplay of 1 and added a bunch of busywork to make it longer
Don't you understand games are an act of self-flagellation?!?! You shall never gain enlightenment without regularly doing the virtual equivalent of putting thumb tacks under your nails!
This is actually one of the toughest hurdles story writers and quest designers have to surmount- how do I engage with the player with vomiting exposition or forcing them to “stay busy”? Interestingly, games whose core consists of multiple repetitive loops have to work harder to justify them.
i like save-related hacks, especially in old games. I'll beat my head against a wall fighting a boss, but i refuse to get dumped back to the title screen and watch some cutscene again before my next try.
The vast majority of modern mobile games are monetization machines masquerading as games. Heck this probably applies to the vast majority of AAA and live service titles as well.
I dont PC play so rarely get the benefit of mods. I also love a grind. I.e the min-max leveling of ps1 era PlayStation games and I do feel like modern games grind is more punitive as a mechanic of the game
Not to join in the dogpile, if there is one... but this really reads like "It's really striking how unchallenging the game is once you remove all of the challenge."
I mean, yeah, that's true. Agreed
Did you have a point beyond that?
You're removing the challenge, which is what makes the game fun
Thinking about that corny optimistic time in the late aughts when people were like "we can use the science of why games are fun to make work more enjoyable!!" And how instead we used that same science to make games less fun but more addicting
Games where I can carry 50 logs but no more or I'm overweight because carrying 50 is oh so logical and all, like just let me carry everything already. Also, fuck games without a pause feature.
I love the Assassin's Creed games. But they are basically the same four missions over and over. Making the replayability really bad. After that, I noticed a huge influxe of more games doing this. Just doing the same thing in a different place gets boring fast
100%. Every single game should have a "story mode" where you don't have to do dumb side quests to become level appropriate or get the loot that makes the game playable.
The Final Fantasy series has games on Steam with "quality of live" improvements, A JRPG without grinding?! Heavenly!
Good for you. Games are meant to be enjoyed. I, too, don't enjoy having to work harder during my downtime than I do at work. Am I the only one who recalled games that boasted a full 3 hours of play time and everything was designed to move the story forward?
Saw someone say that being an adult and realising you don't have time to grind for all these things. I use Cheat Engine so I can build in my games instead of spending 80% of my time gathering and crafting. I fully support this for SP games.
Most games are mental treadmills. Some have better scenery and dialogue but not many. We're heading towards a merger of Hollywood and video games. Just need solid holograms and we can have a holodeck.
Nah you right. Everyone jokes about Bethesda games being "fixed" by the modders, but once you've experienced one with even the simplest cheat mod it's nearly impossible to go back. They're such an unbearable slog even without the bugs. It's the exact same threadbare cycle for literally every game.
And while Bethesda is definitely one of the most guilty of committing this sin, it's far from the only company to do so. In fact I'd say it's the MO of the entire AAA industry for the last 20 years of gaming at least.
at some point gameplay turned into chores and it hasn't really gone away for some reason. achievement chasing obsessives maybe? people that want to equate dollars spent with time spent?
This is why I love games where progression is fully based on your knowledge of the game! (Outer Wilds)
There are some platforming things and puzzles but there is practically zero linear progression, and the only thing blocking you from progressing is your knowledge of the story
My favorite will always be star wars galaxies, a truly open world mmo. No quests, no objectives, just 250 skill points to spend on whatever. Architect, dancer, smuggler, doctor…you were only limited by your own imagination
We’ve come full circle most games from the arcade era are horrible to play now because they were designed to steal your quarters first now it seems the general populace has decided any game that doesn’t last at least 30 hours is worthless so developers have started bloating their games for no reason
playing games made before the iphone are so different from ones made now. you can really see the impact of microtransactions on them. stuff like timers, having to rely on energy for actions. they can work well as mechanics, but boy when they don't it's a slog.
my response wasn't about mobile games being shit at all? all i did was note that games have fundamentally changed as a result of microtransactions muddling otherwise useful mechanics to punish players for the crime of playing.
flash games is what you mean. we had an entire generation of that for a while before Adobe axed well.. Adobe flash, the mobile games before they were mobile games.
nah, i was thinking more about stuff like popcap games. bejeweled, burger shop, insaniquarium, cake mania, etc. stuff where timers were more a time management mechanic rather than a way to punish players for playing. i miss old casual games so much!
At first I was offended because I mostly play survival games and that's the main point of the game... Then I realized you meant fetch quests and shit and. Eugh. I despise that nonsense. Give me story not a grocery list.
i beat all the rivals in the new early access tokyo xtreme racing and it didn’t award enough points to unlock all the cars. either i replay the entire game to try more cars or i cheat a bunch of bp and money in. choice seems clear
Is this a specific genre of games you have this experience with? If so, could be worth examining if you like that genre. Or if they're singleplayer cheat away who cares.
Sometimes the busy work can be fun if done well. I really enjoy it in RDR2 for example, but I generally dislike mmo's for it 😅
I'm not sure what types of games you play, but I believe firmly there's no such thing as cheating in a single-player game. Who's getting cheated? The computer? You, for having more fun?
It's so infuriating to pay $50+ dollars for a game that I can't play through because I can't get through a puzzle whose only solution is "have good eyesight". No one else is losing out by giving me the option to adjust my brightness or skip that element!
I like playing Plate Up on the steam deck, but at that size, I just can’t tell what some of the orders are. But they made an accessibility mode that has the first and/or second letter and it’s so much more fun now!
I recently ventured back to 8-bit gaming to start finishing off 40 year old " played but never finished" gaming debts. I've found that cheating in games of this era should be a last resort. It makes many games 3-5 minutes long and any sense of progression is completely lost.
I'll die on the hill that you're wrong there. You're cheating yourself out of the fun you would have had playing the game as intended (assuming you're playing a good game that is. It doesn't seem like this person is).
Back in the day I had a cheat disk called codebreaker for the ps2-
Opportunity cost. Every time you do anything one way, you're "cheating yourself" out of whatever fun you would have had doing it (or anything else) any other way.
It's exactly as true for me to say you have robbed yourself by not cheating. It's an empty statement. Vacuous. Logically meaningless.
The only reason to hold, much less express, this opinion is if *your enjoyment* is impacted by what other people are doing, which suggests some arrested development on your part. Sounds like you've got some stuff to work out.
I hope you learn to enjoy games for their own sake. They're a lot of fun.
Easy or hard, if you're enjoying the (single-player) game, you're playing it right for you. My wife and I play games at very different difficulty levels, but we both have fun. And you're right that it's not just about winning, but I would argue that most people aren't using cheats to claim victory.
I can see your point that games can be less fun if you aren’t challenged or “earned it” but also a lot of the things cheats used to be for; have become parts of games. Not a lot of dying and starting the game over. And for people who want that there is a whole genre
That depends entirely on the game. In fighting games, the purpose is to improve so you can win against others, in some narrative games the purpose is to experience the story. Horror games want you to experience different types of stress depending on the type of horror its aiming for.
wrong. the purpose for the creator is to craft an experience and make something people love to play. the purpose for the player is to *play*, to experience that crafted vibe and fall in love with playing it.
my purpose in fighting games is to make my friends laugh hard enough to get one good hit in
it's not a homework assignment, or an honor-bound obligation to play a game.
if your enjoyment of a game is based on strict competitive play against other people, ranked multiplayer and leagues exist, and i'd agree cheating in those is wrong because it's violating agreed rules for mutual fun.
You didn't ask what the purpose of the creator or the player is, you asked what the purpose of the game is. I answered the question you asked, but you expected answers for questions you didn't ask?
I remember staying Shadow of the Colossus on PS2, spending an hour trying to beat the first boss with no success, and giving up and never playing it again. That's not good for anybody.
bored with games. It was like the color had gradually been drained out of them and I just couldn't figure out what was going on, after all, I was winning, I was beating the games, and that's all that matters right?
Eventually I left the cheat disk laying around somewhere and someone stepped on it.
I couldn't use it anymore and at first I was upset, but what I found was that I was having fun with games again. Imagine that, games become fun when you have to actually engage with their systems or risk failure.
While gaming as a whole is a hobby for everyone, not every game is for everyone. If there's a game you can't enjoy because of its difficulty, then that's a shame but there's more out there.
My friends really like x-com and talked about it all the time back when it was exploding.
I tried x-com again and again, but I just don't like it. The fact that you can completely brick yourself if your good agents die made the game intolerable for me. I wanted to like it, but I couldn't, so I accepted that and moved on to different games. There's nothing wrong with that.
So you’re saying there was a particular activity you didn’t enjoy, and as a result you substituted it for another activity that you did enjoy? That’s so cool I think the person above was describing the same thing
You're correct, there's nothing wrong with that. However, logically, you have to agree there's also nothing wrong with somebody else, with a different personality to you, deciding they want to play it anyway and using cheats to get to the end, and enjoying that experience.
When I was a kid I used to quit most games I played due to reaching a difficult spot I did not have the skills or the willpower to overcome.
I have managed to finish so many single player games as an adult by being willing to cheat through what used to be hard locks and it is -so much better.-
But I dare say you're getting pushback from people here because you said we're 'wrong' and you'll 'die on the hill', as opposed to the actual truth, which is 'your experience and values differ from ours and that's okay.'
It's the part where you imply we're all somehow deluding ourselves that sucks
You're not funny or interesting. Everyone is pointing and laughing at you and anything you say in response will only embarrass you further. Do everyone a favour and don't bother replying. End on a high note, please.
you seem to be thinking that if i didn't use the accessibility options, i would be playing the game normal style, where the reality is i would not be playing it at all
No, we’ve done this one already. Difficulty is an accessibility issue, this has been settled. You’re years too late to this; go back in time to Sekiro’s launch.
I'll defend the opposite hill. I played WoW for years and years, and somewhere in WotLK, somebody introduced me to botting. My enjoyment in that game skyrocketed the instant I didn't have to spend hours fishing, mining, jewelcrafting, making elixirs and feasts and could just do what I wanted.
I didn't bot to make a bunch of money or sell gold - one of the ways I never got caught was I didn't sell most of the things the bot obtained - I used them to supply raids and dungeons. But removing that obnoxious grind from the game required to raid make the game so much more fun.
In single player games, there are two ways to do something, the intended way and the unintended way, and whether that unintended way has cheats doesn’t matter imo
If you enjoy the intended way, cool, and if you enjoy the unintended way, also cool that’s why gaming is fun
True. Its your time business,your time linvested,so its your enjoyment and only yours. Its like spying on your neighbor and bitching at him for watching shows you dont like😄
The Elder Scrolls games have an in-world concept for when a game character is aware that they are in a game. It is limited to player characters and a couple of gods. It’s called CHIM and players have decided it means “cheating happens in multiplayer” (because it lets you use mods, cheats etc)
There are in-game lore books describing upheavals of time and history that are intended to be about the player reloading a save file. There’s a god that obliquely talks to you about using the modding kit that comes with the game. It’s a very good time
It made less sense in that era as most games were way slimmer and more skill/repetition focused back then. The feature bloat in modern games really impacts my desire to use cheat codes/mods.
Ark is a great example, Love it, but vanilla version is a slog. QoL Mods make it much more manageable.
Playing outcast as a kid in a house without internet I figured out how to edit files as text and thus how to find the values for coins in chests and change them, all because I got sick of climbing every single rooftop to find money. Game was good but the learning experience was 10/10.
I also printed a thick bunch of pages containing all the commands I could find for unreal engine and spelda many hours fucking around in Unreal and Rune, cheating and just generally messing with stuff.
Borderlands is my favourite example for this, where the NG+ playthrough is a very enjoyable game, but the first playthrough is such a messy slog, noone I know finished it without cheats or speedrun/farming strats
i played the original borderlands when it came out. and a few years later. and then some years after that when i really enjoyed BL3. and then a fourth time when i decided i was really gonna finish it this time
It took me a few years as well and half a dozen abandoned savegames across BL1 and 2. Finally seeing speedrunners and people with thousands of hours of in-game time, made me realize that they're playing a completely different game than me.
Running past everything, save the main quests, investing every little bit of currency into ammo capacity of your primary, leveling almost exclusively by farming bosses. It goes against how the game wants to be played, but it's the most tolerable way to get to NG+. Then your characters abilities >>
>> start to become useful and the gear requirement increase is less steep, which makes the game really fun at that point. BL3 made some attempts to fix this, but it's nowhere near enough in my eyes.
I agree. I always download cheats that skip the stupid hacking mini games in games like Fallout or Cyberpunk. Not only are they just boring and repetitive, but, they stop the gameplay flow. Especially when it's fast paced like CPNK2077
Games are funny that way. Take basketball, for instance. If you take out all the running and the dribbling and the passing and the shooting, what have you got left?
that's one of the things i like the most about indies/shorter games that don't bother with runtime padding. i will gladly take 10 hours (or less) of quality over 40 hours of phoned in copy and paste
I just finished Stray and it was great. Robots in fantastic outfits, you get to scratch things and knock over paint cans, the quests actually move the narrative forward, so good.
not necessarily? If, say, you started a game of Pokemon with all level 100 legendaries, then the game isn't going to be fun since you can just mash A to win every battle and there's no reason to catch new pokemon. The fun part of the game is in the journey, getting better and catching new Pokemon.
But grind is integral to the experience, since the whole point is that you catch a Pokemon and *make them better* by battling, so that your level 5 Charmander becomes a level 70 Charizard by the end. If you skipped from level 5 to 70, you lose the progression of getting better over time.
I tire of running my cabaret club, perhaps I will go to the batting cages, or defend my friend's construction business from rival companies by hiring NJPW stars. Or maybe I'll go to the bathroom at the arcade and play a game designed to help me better aim my pee stream.
Oh buddy. It's going to get considerably weirder. (Also sorry in advance for Kiwami, it's a little messy given how old the game it's based on is. 3 also has a weird upscaling bug that messed up the combat)
You're going to have a lot of very very strange fun.
Somewhat related aside: a lot of games in antiquity sucked. They were basically dice and gambling.
The ones that had "fun" mechanics are the ones that continued to evolve into chess/backgammon/go/etc.
i mean, if you remove all motivation to overcome a game's systems by circumventing them then that's a pretty natural conclusion. a game is the sum its systems.
I love and hate cheats. Love using them to get around things like limited carry weight and improve fast travel. But it's a difficult balance. Too much and you risk losing the challenge, the experience, the mystery, or the fun.
I like to think that's what rich privilege is like, and it helps explain why they do such stupid and extreme things for entertainment as they've trivialized the rest of their life struggles and want to feel like they achieved something
I like tennis except for all the tedious hitting it over the net part. I like to replace the net with a single row of Legos. (Also my opponent is usually legally dead.)
I'm fond of replaying most of the old Pokemon games but with 100% catch or catching an evolved form of something you needed a mechanic like trading to get cause, come on.
Same here. I'm playing X4 Foundations (had the game on my wish list for years) and over 800 hours into my first play-through.
It was at about 100 hours before I installed any mods, but then went and found almost every QoL mod I could find. I gave it a good go first, but it's so much more fun now.
I've been playing a whole slew of nostalgia 00s shooters with cheats. When you can just mow down enemies with no regard for your own health, the campaign gets cut from like 9-10 hours to 2-3.
Hmmmm... I can kinda see where you're coming from, but I think partly it is just some games having padding in them, but it also might be a case of how we look at these things
I always think back to that quote "If given the Chance, Players will optimize the Fun out of a game"
Lately, at least for some liver service games, it's turned in to organized online hate mobs will torment devs untill they take the fun out of the game : (
i was thinking this. i understand there are games where the gameplay can feel monotonous; that’s a fair critique against game. but you can’t take the gameplay out of the game, and then be like, “there’s no game here.”
I can't stand this. The effort that studios put into balance and playability is instantly lost as soon as you're dumb enough to turn on God status. There's a reason most play testers don't last long in their careers, it's boring af.
Pends on the mood I'm in and what game I'm playing. Rpg where I have to level up to hit the next plot quest? That's fine, unless it necessitates interacting with boring and unrewarding quests.
Fps with login quests or dailies? Miss me with that nonsense.
I'm currently playing the first Kingdom Come. Great story and setting.
Using 5x experience mod and one that let's you save at any time.
The idea that anyone would ever slog through this game as intended, a buggy grind fest where you will just consistently lose an hour of progress, is insane to me
one of my biggest gaming laughs of all time happened from KCD
it was at the beginning, just after i had gone out into the town and run a fetch quest for the dad. i came back to the house and accidentally punched the horse, resulting in about 5 minutes of unseen chaos as it stampeded through town.
i was going about my business after, still trying to figure the game out, when some guys showed up and accused me of murdering someone. they arrested me and locked me in a tiny jail cell and i was stuck there as the village caught fire and i eventually burned alive
this was about an hour in and i had not been told how to save yet
i started laughing when i heard the people screaming about the fire because i knew i was losing every second of progress i had made and i kept laughing all the way through my unpreventable death
Depends on the game. If you're playing a FPS (singleplayer) with godmode and all weapons and infinite ammo, would defeat the purpose of the game. But I agree on unnecessary wait times.
Tedious shit can be a fine(-ish) mechanic in a game but I think the best solution is not fully removing the grind but making it gradually easier. Craft one $thing? You remember the recipe now, no need to put things in neat piles first. Crafted five? You can now put a hundred of them in a queue.
It's the difference between the "hard" technical minecraft modpacks that just force you into a tedious progression loop that never gets less tedious despite the numbers going up, and a game like Factorio that actively rewards you for automating everything by making things less tedious.
Yep agree. I'm not saying that the microtransaction-to-skip type games, and other treadmill games that are just time-sinks couldn't benefit from some shortcuts. But if you just spawn rare items instead of earning them, or use godmode/noclip to bypass a challenge... I mean... why bother playing?
I mean, I spawn in rare items all the time when playing Borderlands games because I have a day job and don't have time to farm 8 hours for a God roll of my favorite legendary, and generally find mobbing a lot more fun than farming one boss for hours.
Ten $things? You're so good at crafting you make them ten times as fast now. Ran out of sticks? Pay someone half a coin to do boring tree chopping shit for you and keep things stocked - etc etc etc.
It's so true though. I just finished a game that was pretty short (only 6 levels) and had other padding (too much banter for the sake of banter), but I'll give it credit for not having daily quests or any of that nonsense where you collect objects for SIX WEEKS to complete one quest in the chain
playing with cheats is how you enable "story mode" on games without it & also how you enable "ultra hardcore" mode on games that don't have it, via cheats called "mods". haters btfo, cheats are good bc games are for having fun the way you want
It was one of my all-time favourite games as a kid, and since I didn't have the internet or access to tips back then, I'm only finding this out right now! 🤯
Almost totally agree -- and I do cheat all over the place. But if /invulnerable, you just banished the whole game and why not do something else? Other times, yeah, having to spend 9 game hours "mining" is just abusive game design.
I was ready to grab a pitchfork but your example is fair. Every survival/crafting and/or "cozy" game has a major problem with time wasting. The intent is that you'll do some other task while you wait, but most don't because there's so much shit to juggle that you forget what you started with.
I know this thread is controversial, but thank you for saying this. If XP in Runescape for instance was boosted by even 3-4x, there would be no game. Or there would, but it would be like a 100 hour RPG max. Instead it's like 5000 hours.
It's called immersion. I depend on that busywork; I play games to escape chronic nerve pain. That busywork helps connect "me" to the events bc it feels like I'm taking part in them. Not just godily passing by them.
I work full time and have 2 kids under 10. If a game pisses me off with busy work, I am absolutely going to find a trainer and turn on every cheat that doesn't fully break the game.
I don't have time to be doing the same shit over and over for little reward.
There are some games where that repetition is the point, and those ones I'll play properly because they're often short and even failure is rewarded. Roguelikes similar to Noita and Caves of Qud.
Drew Gooden has a recent video about media wasting people's time and directly references NBA2k where it just makes the game borderline unplayable unless you give them 70 more dollars to bump your stats, and yep. yes. exactly.
yes! You remove the skinner box and it lays bare that they wanted you to play it like a job and not something meant to entertain you. My pet peeve of a lot of modern games (especially a lot of open world games.) I do kinda give Tears of the Kingdom a pass because the core playset makes it fun anyway
A game is a voluntary obstacle, so the busy work is a defining element. Yet, I totally respect how cheats modify the work so person can experience a story or a setting. And I also respect the value the achievement of advancing the challenges as intended. A truly great game has you seeking both.
I once read an article about one of the big game franchises (halo? Can’t remember) and it talked about using heat maps to optimise time to certain tasks. Ever since then I can’t play a game without feeling like a rat hitting a lever for a pellet
Tbh I'm 38 and I just no longer have patience for the slog part of games. Shin Megami Tensei games started including dlc that take out like 75% of the grind and it makes them all better experiences
I've played Skyrim through a hundred fucking times, then I got a mod that lets you fly as a Vampire and the game top to bottom takes like maybe 20 hours to do EVERYTHING.
Part of this is the first part I think. Once you know where stuff is in those games they all become super short for only the critical path because the real game is the exploration. I could probably beat Fallout 3 in like 4-6 hours. But that would be missing the point.
Right? My main Skyrim game had 170 hours I had done everything and I one or two-shotted the last dragon. Could have finished the game any time after 20-25 hours. Wouldn’t trade it fer nothin. Never played the fallouts (I knaur!!).
I don’t know if I could do another Bethesda game after my Skyrim jams. If I am going to be spending that much time in first person it needs to be a more conventional shooter.
I need to become a vampire then turn the Solitude Bards College into the Theatre des Vampires from Interview. I've done this again and again and I have no plan to stop.
That's why the most fun I had in the last year was with emulators. Playing Samurai Warriors 1 Right now, way more diverse content than the sum of the last launched Samurai and Dynasty Warriors.
I really enjoyed playing age of empires 2 with unlimited resources. Even though you have all you can need, still takes some skills to win against AIs hehe, plus building mini-cities is fun
I recently played through Horizon Forbidden West, I loved the combat and story but goddamn they didn't need to pad it with so many pointless side missions (and I still skipped the worst ones)
I passed this on to a friend who does much more gaming than me, and his response is significant: "As a long time player, I've come to see the many required achievements to advance the story as annoyances preventing me from completing the game's narrative."
As for why this is, my take is that game narratives are pretty thin. The busywork makes the player feel they have accomplished something, even if it is essentially trivial. From a creation perspective, it is easier to do this than to add meaningful activity to the player experience.
I had a friend who used to always use cheat codes in GTA style games and once you have a Blackhawk helicopter and unlimited rocket launcher ammo for 20 minutes the whole game stops having any meaning, you gotta take the trickle of content or else there’s nothing left
You did. This was more to Miranda's observation of the game becoming meaningless as well as me taking umbrage to a perception of fake superiority in a few posts.
ok so you answered that question. to be clear, you accused OP of being a cheater who "broke" a game and doesn't understand the basics of how they work, even though her actual complaint was explicitly about "busywork." then you suggested she's egotistical and entitled. this is obviously rude
I mean, if you're trying to see the story, those kinds of things aren't going to really do much even in GTA. It sounds like your buddy just wanted to cause havoc and that's not really playing those games even if you're manually going to where that shit drops.
That's pretty silly. Ammo and health management in DOOM is a key part of the gameplay. Gathering resources to use for crafting and building is a core element of Minecraft. Play how you like but it's ridiculous to call any of that "busywork."
I cheat engined Balatro and Peglin to have a ton of $ (bc those games are intentionally quite stingy w it) & the actual gameplay wound up being pretty trivial most of the time when I could just buy good cards/orbs w/o budgeting*
*I lost my big money Balatro run when I just didn't have high enough $
Yeah, replaying the classic Final Fantasies with the boosters enabled made me realise how spartan those games really are, storywise. Not that I mind, compared to modern games they're blisteringly paced.
I like to do this too because I'm more of a story enjoyer than anything. I don't want to fuss or grind really. I'm playing a game right now on "Story Mode" and I couldn't be more thankful it exists!
And wooo does that make a certain contingent so angry! Which simply makes me want to do it more.
do u also kind of check out of a game once you've figured out what the game loop/progression is gonna be like for the the rest of the game bc the number of games i've ditched in the end game...
Maybe I'm wrong, but my perception is that busywork descends from MMOs, where it sort of made sense. You needed some shallow shit to do with a few friends, where you're mostly talking to each other. Turned out it's an easy template to make what appears to be a bigger game, except it's all bullshit.
I hate roguelikes but many become extremely fun after finding the save location and manually managing save files to make it not a roguelike. Many of them then become more like puzzle games and are often much more fun.
I installed Fallout Shelter, which is a mobile game but Steam added it to their games library. So I installed it, modded it so I could have complete access to the caps, cards, and all of that stuff you pay real money for, and I ended up using $15,000 worth to "beat" the game.
This is just any open world game. Spiderman, Horizon, RDR2, etc. The point of them is that if you enjoy the gameplay loop, you can do it lots. If not, there's plenty of other games out there! Or, you can just cheat/mod on PC since it's single player, and do whatever you like :)
That popping sound you heard were my eyes rolling so hard they popped out.
There are plenty of ways to have fun games. Lots have been tried. Some are great. I’m a one game guy and will play the same game a lot of diff ways and it’s all good. If you constantly need a new thing, you do you.
My second playthrough of BG3 used the “give yourself Superman stats” and “unlimited party size” mods, and it was glorious fun. You know, what games are supposed to be. Fun.
i did this on every play through after the first, i love the world and story way more than i love most of the combat so being able to treat it like a storybook kept me coming back to try different routes
I love that we have the option of whether or not we want to kill an entire stronghold of goblins. We’re not obliged to, heck we can even trade with them!! That’s arguably the best part of the game. The ability to choose.
Prepare the lemon juice then, because it gets worse! I came across what looked like a lovely tender rack of ribs. They were indeed ribs, just not of a typical BBQ variety. RIP the dwarf they belonged to.
Absolutely. A series of grind tasks with the ocassional bit of storyline in-between sums up a LOT of gaming. If I wanted to grind for enough resources to afford a Mortician's Codpiece to give to someone I'd, you know, do my dayjob instead of play a game.
Weight limits are fine if done right. Their point is to limit your inventory so you have to make interesting choices in what to bring.
They only become a problem if the game is badly designed.
I really enjoy the immersive feel they can give to the powerscaling: that moment where you realize something you were psyched to find 20 hours ago isn't even worth the inventory space when you find it now.
BG3 did not need to have carry capacity and it only added tedium to the game. Being able to insta-send anything to camp and be able to go back and at any time means that it just exists to be annoying
It does make the boss areas more challenging though; since you don't have access to the camp, you do have to consider what you will likely want, and not say, switch in a party member with no consumables last minute, or go to the House of Hope without the Orphic Hammer.
I mean, boss areas are eh, there was one difficult boss for me and that was mostly due to my misunderstanding of some of the mechanics not with resources. Consumables can be swapped between characters as easily as sending or retrieving items to/from camp
House of Hope with the Orphic Hammer was severely lessened in impact due to the healing points and additional cleric given. I'm sure at tactician (whatever the highest difficulty+iron man mode is) there's more thought required but the game vomits so many scrolls, potions, and arrows at you
I think weight limits make a lot of sense if you're playing on survival mode in fallout 4 or whatever, but that's one of those things they should just let you toggle on and off for any difficulty lower than that.
I don't need Blorpo the Tragic Sniper Man to lament about his lost wife and trip every mine I'm trying to defuse, please just carry my shit to the hoard and come back for more shit
One of the first things I did the second time I played Skyrim was download a mod that let me just shove items into my horse like a second, mobile inventory. Tired of fast-travel to dungeon -> dragon -> 100lbs dragon bones -> fast travel to home -> deposit -> fast travel to dungeon -> dragon...
Almost the opposite of this I feel is New Vegas. Its probably my favorite game and if you boil it down it’s all fetch quest but the writing and decisions make it all feel important and worthwhile
I think that most action-adventure RPGs are just a series of fetch quest, it’s just that some (like New Vegas and Morrowind) are good enough at world design and building with good enough dialogue and settings to make you forget that 70% of the quests are go to x to get/speak to y.
It's more room to shoe-in ads for mobile games, but this problem is one of the reasons I liked Hardspace Shipbreaker so much, (aside from the stellar BGM.)
It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I really enjoyed how repetition is mitigated by making each new teardown its own (mostly) unique puzzle.
I played the original Dragon Warrior on an emulator. When I didn't have to keep going back to town to save, I was surprised at how small a game it was.
yeah, i agree. subnautica is a great example of a game that holds up even if you mod the hell out of it. there's enough cool exploration and story that you can really enjoy the core of the game while disabling the parts you don't like. in my case, i disliked being forced into the prawn suit
unfortunately, modding the time and/or energy aspects of stardew messes with the game balance. there really isn't a lot of story or world when you remove the time constraints. it's fine (the farming/crafting loop is mostly what people want) but i would love a more story-focused farming game
Try Coral Island and My Time At Portia/Sandrock (its sequel) for that 😊 There's still farming, especially in CI but it and the My Time At... games offer a lot outside of it storywise.
Np, incidentally I gave myself a trillion monies in Coral Island at the start which takes out the grind needed on your farm (plus various mods) to free up your day to do what you want. Now over 200 hours later I still have game/story content left to see. The townies are lovely & varied in there.
Bold of you to use Monopoly, a game swindled out of The Landlord's Game, a game that was explicitly designed to illustrate the way landlords extort their tenants.
Comments
I'm not out here trying to skip the part where I position the Tetris blocks
I like to game but I got a damn job - I ain’t going to use my precious free time to grind or replay a section a hundred times. It’s more of a time issue than a skill issue.
Way I see it, as long as you're having fun, do whatever. Your game, your rules
We didn't
We were in shitty grinds
"waiting" is not a skillful act in most games that demand it
like i have no hate for people liking difficult games but there’s also a sizable group of people that get enjoyment from a more chill time.
A bunch of monsters in a cursed realm where the UX is from 2002 and all the dialog is whispered incredibly slowly like the worst high school Dramatic Interp round I ever judged in college
Maybe I'm talking out my ass here, but this sounds less like a "videogames in general" issue and more of a "you're exclusively playing a genre you don't like" issue.
Like if I'm playing Star Trek Fleet Command I want to explore, stop making me grind
If I'm playing Gardenscapes I just want to grind levels, get that story out of my way
Highly recommended.
...
...
'you do have to talk to every person and pick up every single thing' is another way of saying 'they ruthlessly cut everything that didn't move the game forward'
That game needs a remaster like yesterday.
I remember the "behind the wall" scene in the first Monkey Island. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. 😂
If you didn't play the reboot from a year or two ago it's nostalgia done right. A love letter to the genre and fans but still a great game on its own.
banjo dueling
flaming sushi boat wrangling
"pull finger"
XIII after five retries: extremely irritated speedrunning bulldozer man who's SO FUCKING HAD IT with the dialogue
There's also Soren Jorenson's famous quote about this:
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
also i play with them in solo games when the anxiety is too great for the game to actually be FUN
really like how spider-man games approach the whole accessibility thing where a lot of those QTE and button mashes can be removed so the game is fun
Pretty much all meters like food/thirst/sleep become chores, and games are full of busywork. I play games to escape that shit.
I mean, gaming is how I relax too, I sometimes want a game to just be "do this for 1.5 hours and then you'll get a treat".
2. player.modav carryweight 9999999
I'm not spending hours carrying gear back and forth to sell. Or having all of my weight taken up by different weapons and armor sets I use.
There are, of course, some funny glitches and bugs, but nothing game breaking and nothing worse than Bethesda themselves.
Don't you understand games are an act of self-flagellation?!?! You shall never gain enlightenment without regularly doing the virtual equivalent of putting thumb tacks under your nails!
Anyway, yeah, story mode, every time, at least.
I mean, yeah, that's true. Agreed
Did you have a point beyond that?
You're removing the challenge, which is what makes the game fun
If you had started off talking about how irritating it is to "grind" on video games, you'd find more support
You did actually use the word grind in your post but I'm talking the generic term "grinding" wrt video games
What you describe is "grinding away"
The games that I play, when I cheat... stop being fun
Comparing cheating to e.g. a mobile game that puts ads in between you & the fun parts of the game is confusing the issue
Sounds like you're mostly mad at ads
Same tbh
I’m talking about Gamers. Capital G. The ones that complain about easy modes.
The Final Fantasy series has games on Steam with "quality of live" improvements, A JRPG without grinding?! Heavenly!
kinda like that too
lets YOU , ME ,and everyone play as they like
then go ahhh neato or this wont be good
Like people didn’t grow up using all the cheats in goldeneye and gta
They were sone of the best parts
Only time cheating matters is online multiplayer especially ranked stuff.
There are some platforming things and puzzles but there is practically zero linear progression, and the only thing blocking you from progressing is your knowledge of the story
Well I mean..more than one reason.
Cheat Engine over here keeping me sane.
"If i took the loot drops out, would the game still be fun"
And with rare exception like Diablo or Shadow Warrior 2, the answer is almost always no.
You're welcome.
Sometimes the busy work can be fun if done well. I really enjoy it in RDR2 for example, but I generally dislike mmo's for it 😅
The busy work wasn't fun for me.
Meanwhile, I enjoy the little *ding* of levelling up in RPG's to the point that I get upset if it takes too long. Lol.
I will die on this hill.
Back in the day I had a cheat disk called codebreaker for the ps2-
It's exactly as true for me to say you have robbed yourself by not cheating. It's an empty statement. Vacuous. Logically meaningless.
I hope you learn to enjoy games for their own sake. They're a lot of fun.
my purpose in fighting games is to make my friends laugh hard enough to get one good hit in
if your enjoyment of a game is based on strict competitive play against other people, ranked multiplayer and leagues exist, and i'd agree cheating in those is wrong because it's violating agreed rules for mutual fun.
You didn't ask what the purpose of the creator or the player is, you asked what the purpose of the game is. I answered the question you asked, but you expected answers for questions you didn't ask?
As a dumb little babby child I used cheats for every single game I played, because hey, they let me win more easily, so why wouldn't I use them?
I didn't quite realize why at the time but I found that I was getting really-
Eventually I left the cheat disk laying around somewhere and someone stepped on it.
Well no, you need to use salt as well. The contrast from the salt helps bring out the sweetness of your baked goods. Videogames are a lot like that.
My friends really like x-com and talked about it all the time back when it was exploding.
... Right?
I have managed to finish so many single player games as an adult by being willing to cheat through what used to be hard locks and it is -so much better.-
It's the part where you imply we're all somehow deluding ourselves that sucks
Difficulty is one of those topics that sets people off no matter how softly you walk on the eggshells.
a game that isn't fun doesn't get more fun if you bash your head against it
If you enjoy the intended way, cool, and if you enjoy the unintended way, also cool that’s why gaming is fun
If the alternative is spending time grinding, then the cheat is just a time save.
If the alternative is rage quitting the game entirely, then cheating is saving my afternoon.
woke: you finish morrowind when you read a bunch of Metatext and kill vivec also
Ark is a great example, Love it, but vanilla version is a slog. QoL Mods make it much more manageable.
it took me 15 years to finish borderlands.
It’s fun. :)
Please don’t take this as a negative, this shit rules
...they're not all winners.
You're going to have a lot of very very strange fun.
Local homeless want me to manage them in Pokemon ripoff battles ->
I get an animal crossing island to manage ->
Island has a farm and forage area ->
I am now operating a labor camp using vagrants to support my tropical resort.
I am shooting you with an orbital laser powered by friendship.
The ones that had "fun" mechanics are the ones that continued to evolve into chess/backgammon/go/etc.
the notion that a games value is based on logins per day
It was at about 100 hours before I installed any mods, but then went and found almost every QoL mod I could find. I gave it a good go first, but it's so much more fun now.
I always think back to that quote "If given the Chance, Players will optimize the Fun out of a game"
Oh, and Balatro, of course.
Fps with login quests or dailies? Miss me with that nonsense.
It's all about the effort/reward ratio imo
Using 5x experience mod and one that let's you save at any time.
The idea that anyone would ever slog through this game as intended, a buggy grind fest where you will just consistently lose an hour of progress, is insane to me
it was at the beginning, just after i had gone out into the town and run a fetch quest for the dad. i came back to the house and accidentally punched the horse, resulting in about 5 minutes of unseen chaos as it stampeded through town.
i started laughing when i heard the people screaming about the fire because i knew i was losing every second of progress i had made and i kept laughing all the way through my unpreventable death
I don't have time to be doing the same shit over and over for little reward.
Games have limitations to create tension and stakes, obvious padding aside.
This seems to come with a certain type of ego and sense of entitlement.
You're just cheating.
Not my intention, really.
No fighting in the mentions.
Also, I would believe that what makes padding is different for different people?
*sighs*
In which case, do it now and let us both move on.
*I lost my big money Balatro run when I just didn't have high enough $
And wooo does that make a certain contingent so angry! Which simply makes me want to do it more.
It's all a money sink.
If you feel like it’s a slog then you’re playing the wrong game.
There are plenty of ways to have fun games. Lots have been tried. Some are great. I’m a one game guy and will play the same game a lot of diff ways and it’s all good. If you constantly need a new thing, you do you.
if i'm playing KXR you better believe the british raj is losing
They only become a problem if the game is badly designed.
I don't need Blorpo the Tragic Sniper Man to lament about his lost wife and trip every mine I'm trying to defuse, please just carry my shit to the hoard and come back for more shit
It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I really enjoyed how repetition is mitigated by making each new teardown its own (mostly) unique puzzle.
I mean, no one cared why Marvin Gardens was in hock, you just wanted to buy it so you could build hotels and jack up the rent!
😁
It was just me trying to be funny.
Don't take it seriously.
That's what the '😁' was for! 😁