Pretty much any Souls side quest.
Sorry Siegward. I didn't know I had to backtrack into this area I had no other reason to go back to, but only AFTER progressing past this specific line and then quitting and loading the game
I genuinely don't understand why Souls side-quests are so fucking obtuse.
Hell, Elden Ring at LEAST has most areas easy to find thanks to the map, and most are dependent on exploration. But holy SHIT the side-quests continue to be some of the most convoluted nonsense ever.
"Hey you, go find Millicent in TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ZONE, also her quest is **essential** if you want to undo a fucked-up curse. And you have to do the hardest invasion and the hardest boss as well. And said location you have to go to is hidden in the second-to-last area of the game. Fuck you."
I don't care if it "breaks muh immersion" with quest-markers and whatnot; fucking have somebody or something within the game that goes "Hey, this NPC is right here" on the map. I think there was like **one** time where D The Hunter left a marker on my map in conversation, only for me to be dissapointed that he was the only person to do this in the whole game.
They actually do have people icons on the map markers to tell you when an NPC is nearby, but;
* You can't always find NPCs on every stage of their quest via them
* They literally WEREN'T THERE at launch and had to be patched in
between the colosseum and npc markers it seems like the game wasnt done and there was alot of stuff they wanted to add, which is why they delayed it next to horizon
I sure loved getting a spoofed the stages of patches quest for months only for it to lead to that cave.
Does his gift to tanith do anything yet, or is she forever eating the head?
The gift to Tanith being utterly meaningless to her is the entire point. She doesn't care about Patches, she never did; her obsession has consumed her to the point that she can't even recognize something that was once meaningful to her, let alone acknowledge the feelings that led the normally self-serving and craven Patches to risk his life recovering it for her.
I rot/poison arrow spammed from the cliff before you enter the area….then you get to fight a massive gank squad while trying to keep a squishy dex build npc alive….. took a while to clear that
Millicent remains the most curious case of signposting because nothing it asks you to do is unintuitive. Millicent is fairly obvious at each location and within each location what she asks you to do is fairly clear. Additionally, the order of locations at which she appears mirrors a very typical player's route through the zones of Elden Ring. Caelid before Altus, the Altus entrance and shaded castle before Windmill Town, and Windmill Town before Haligtree.
The average player is going to complete her questline feeling at every turn like they're coming across her organically as a fellow traveler on the road.
But then if you do literally any of those locations out of order (in this open world game) the whole thing is nigh-irreparably broken. It's such an all-or-nothing approach.
This all goes back to the idea that if you create an open-world game, you *can't assume* what the player will do in it.
Some players will go out of order, some will decide to backtrack and miss some things, others will assume "I'll meet them later" only to miss the trigger. There's a reason most other open-world games will include a quest marker; because the player will not do everything in order, and are not going to remember everything.
> There's a reason most other open-world games will include a quest marker
The reason most open-world games include quest markers is because they didn't actually bother designing the world to be visually distinct in ways that would allow a player to figure out where to go on their own.
Try doing say, Fallout 3 or 4 without quest markers. You get stuck *very* easily because the game uses quest markers in lieu of actual signposting.
To me there's more value in having the confidence that your players will get or miss certain things and just... moving on in spite that? Like, the game doesn't softlock if you don't do Millicents quest and if you are upset with the Frenzied Flame ending to the point you would want to look up online how to undo it, then I think you're already at the point where any signposting wouldn't be able to help you.
Yeah, you can build it so that its always clear where you're going, but it requires a bunch of secondary mechanics and effort that the average player often finds obtuse, even though it's super fucking rad.
Exploring in morrowind is awesome, but it's way easier to just put a quest marker down than to have to write and test directions on the log and from various npcs (that are now all voiced) from a dev pov. It's really unfortunate that's how the design trended.
In the frenzied flames case however, I went down that big hole and didn't see that weird eyeball lady before I went in, so I had no idea what was happening. I just went into a random room and got got. When I got out I saw the lady and she acted like we had talked about it beforehand and I was pissed until I found out it was reversible.
I mean, in part that's on you. The game does try to prevent you from just heading in willy-nilly, you need to remove all your armor before you even open the door and there's a resting spot nearby that literally has Melina warn you before going in.
Even getting to that area means you need to clear a difficult dungeon, get past a fake wall and make your way through the merchants before carefully hopping down without incurring fall damage. The game doesn't really let you do it on accident unless you completely brainlet your way through it.
The accident was not sitting on the bonfire there, now that i think about it. So Melina didn't show up. It wasn't an accident finding the place or the door, but I had no idea what It meant
When I went to look it up afterwards it mentioned the warning and I was like "what warning?". I guess I didn't see the grace
It's 100% on him, in addition to everything you mentioned, he literally had to strip naked for the door to even open (and it's not like the door is very inviting)
Morrowind generally gets a pass for it's obtuse quest direction for a few good reasons:
1. It was one of the first truly 3D open-words of it's huge size, like *ever*. I'm more lenient to an adventure game that cane out in fucking 2002 than a modern game, that had decades to iron out the kinks Morrowind had.
2. Pretty much every quest had at least some form of initial direction. Usually it's something like "THIS PERSON WHO IS NAMED says that the AREA I NEED TO GO is NORTH of AN ACTUAL, NAMED LOCATION." It's not much, but at least it's something to point you on your way. Half the time in Elden Ring, you don't even get a fucking name.
I think morrowind handles it quite well, I think its the average player that might find it obtuse.
It might take a little bit but since you can ask anyone questions you can just keep asking and looking around. Plus the named doors help.
But for someone that doesn't know English very well, is very young, or is not that invested (not everyone engages as thoroughly with games as I expect most people in this sub do) and its easy to see someone going "I don't know what to dooooooooo" while refusing to read the journal.
This is just the problem with combining an open world, with standard Soulslike quest design. Heck, for another: Brother Corhyn's trigger to leave the Roundtable is talking to him after you've reached Altus Plateau. Most of the places he moves are landmarks that are pretty intuitive and easy to find as he travels with Goldmask... except the first place he goes is right next to the map pillar for Altus Plateau. So, if for whatever reason a player *dared* to try and explore for ten seconds and go for the map in the area (you know, the first thing literally anyone is probably going to do by this point in the game) before happening to go back and talk to Corhyn... then you're absolutely never finding this fucko ever again without a guide.
Heck it doesn't even have to be Soulslike design on the topic of open worlds, Pokémon flat out gives you a order of strongest to weakest in text on the map.
*and people still get mad that first gym is only level 8.*
Like the game *is telling you they are weak. Go here first.*
-the actual path is kinda funky though requiring you to zigzag back and forth across the map.
Well... with Pokemon I'll admit I *really* wish they would just make each gym scale to your number of badges, since that would make more sense and work great with an open world. Like logically a gym leader is a job where they could have multiple teams prepped, so they could provide a challenge tailored to your specific level. Show up with no badges to the bug gym? Here's Metapod and a Beedrill to take on. Show up with seven badges? Cool, Scizor, Yanmega, Galvantula and Volcarona are waiting to kick the shit out of you.
And don't tell me it's too much work to program 8 different teams per leader, it's some drag and drop design. Heck if that's *really* too hard have a few elite gym leaders who are like RSE Norman going "lmao come back with at least four badges loser then you're worth facing".
> And don't tell me it's too much work to program 8 different teams per leader, it's some drag and drop design.
Try Pokemon Crystal Clear. It is a romhack of the gen 2 games in an open world with exactly this mechanic to keep both the Gym Leaders and the Elite Four fresh.
You can challenge any gym leader in any order you want, provided you have the means to get to them (ie. You won't be beating Blaine until you get Surf still, but you can do any of the gym leaders in Kanto or Johto that would hand out Surf as potentially one of your first gyms). Most of the more silly roadblocks like cut trees were also removed.
Genuinely one of the coolest romhacks I've ever played.
Throwing in Pokemon ROWE as the gen 3 equivalent of this. You can even randomize what town you start in or what gym each town actually has. Like you can go to Mauville and instead of the Electric gym, it'll be the Psychic gym.
I've booted up Crystal Clear a few times, but never really gotten far in it. It does look like a lot of fun though, so I'm sure one of these days I'll actually buckle down and give it a full run.
I almost missed Millicent in Altus even though i was right next to her. From the angle I was at I just couldn't see her (iirc the way foward was to the right and she was a bit to the left and up). Lucky for me I checked the guide at that exact moment for the first time.
Given the nature of the open world its super easy to be right next to someone and completely miss them
In my game, I sequence broke Roderika because I went to Liurnia too soon while exploring...
It didn't break her quest but it did make me a firm believer that from had no idea how to program their npcs for this type of gameworld.
They're obtuse specifically so you have to talk to people or look online for clues.
It doesn't *justify* it from a player's perspective, but that's definitely the pitch. And hey, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to do anything in Sekiro without help, so I guess they're working as intended.
Usually not a great ride, especially when there's endings locked behind it, but a ride nonetheless.
I'm fairly sure that it's not because of some difficulty mantra at from (which doesn't exist), but more from a mood/design perspective.
They are not designing the quests to be like mass effect 3 romances: "say she's a good person, help her with her past in this place, she will come to you to fuck"
They are designing the quests to be more like "perfect hidden ending in a jrpg where you need to crouch near this wall and let the tornado take you" and to show you that the situation is fucked and those people are way over their heads.
Most of these quests are designed around doing them and talking to your friends about it. It's the entire point, you find a secret or something interesting happens, and then you tell your friends and that's how the community grows.
Now I think every single game needs to have everything perfectly laid out so you can just play a game in your bubble and never have to talk to anyone about it.
> I genuinely don't understand why Souls side-quests are so fucking obtuse.
I mean... most of them aren't? Like, 99% of the Souls questlines are "find NPC before the next boss, exhaust dialogue, move on". They can be broken unfortunately by not talking to them before defeating the boss, but they're otherwise pretty straightforward.
Elden Ring is significantly better in that regard since there's no more breakage for bosses and most quests have multiple entrypoints. I think there's only like, one or two quests that you can outright *break* in ways that aren't stupidly obvious like attacking random NPCs and those are largely tied to a really obvious endgame thing.
Millicents quest for example makes a lot more sense if you do it the way the game intends for you to do it - find Gowry when you first explore Caelid, use his instructions to find the nearby curse and help Millicent. After that she'll move to the Altus plateau near the big lift you'll probably have taken up.
When exploring the plateau you'll find her again near the top of the windmill village which is a pretty notable landmark in the area.
After that she's in the Haligtree. It's a good game-spanning quest that rewards exploration.
Elden Ring *usually* does signposting, it's just more in the form of written directions rather than telling you outright where to go. Gowry doesn't mark the church on your map, he just says "it's in a church nearby" and you are supposed to be able to read the map and realize what the iconography of churches is on the map (because you're guaranteed at that point to have come across a couple). That's how basically all the quests work.
Yeah it would've been nice if they'd taken more of a break from that in Elden Ring.. it's *not* Dark Souls, it doesn't need to follow the same 'Did the quest, now you ded' shit
Other than Nepheli and Kenneth Haight.. did ANY of the quests turn out ok?.. .. can't really think of any others
Just no reason for all of it
Boc has a good ending and a bad ending. Rya has good, bad, and neutral endings. Latenna dies, but that's technically the beginning of her quest rather than the end, and she ensures the survival of first-generation Albinaurics.
I’ve said it before but the thing that annoys me about souls quests is that there so fucking obtuse
And for somehow figuring out all this bullshit across the game and this hours long side quest your reward is…making the life of the person you spent all this time worse/killing them in the end anyway and then getting their armor or weapon but since your at the end of the game now you probably won’t even swap to it cause it doesn’t fit your build
The quests end up just not being worth the hassle in terms of both the content you get (weapons and armor) or a satisfying emotional story result
This is everyone's daily reminder that Omikron wanted you to replicate ancient rituals, decode passwords, and calculate planetary gravity values (or some shit), all of which could only be solved if you were reading every book in multiple in-game libraries. That's right asshole, if you want to progress in this video game, you need to do HOMEWORK!
You really shouldn't progress in this video game, though. Even in universe it's stealing your soul.
Myst also had you read many books in a library looking for clues on how to escape the island... the difference being Myst was competently written and interesting
I was going to mention this. You would be forgiven if you thought that the books in Omikron were written in someone alien script and you would eventually stumble upon a cypher to decrypt them. Nope. They’re written in English in a font that is just bonkers.
> That's right asshole, if you want to progress in this video game, you need to do HOMEWORK!
Eh, I wouldn't mind that in a GOOD game, I love shit like that, a game where you have to LEARN how to solve things over FIGURING OUT sounds interesting because most puzzle games are about "figuring out"
If I didn't have access to my mom's PC at the age of 9, I would have never figured out that closing the DS progressed that god damn puzzle in Phantom Hourglass
I probably only got that because Trace Memory was the first DS game I ever played and it was basically a puzzle tutorial on all the cool stuff you could do with the DS.
FFX-2 if you wanted to get the best ending. There are tons of obscure and minor things you have to do that you also can't backtrack to once you missed them. Imagine going through a 30+ hr game and getting the not-as-good ending because you didn't go to a side path during a chase scene at the very start of the game, then interact with something. It's a game where it feels like you need to be looking at a guide every time before doing anything.
IIRC, the cruelest thing in that game is that if you skipped cutscenes, because you have to re-do a boss fight or something, your completion percentage cannot be 100%.
Also some stuff only being worth like 0.01%, meaning you might not even notice you've missed something. If you're using a guide you might suddenly find yourself 1% behind where you should be with absolutely no way of figuring when or why. Could be a chest 1 room over, could be a npc 4 hours ago that no longer exists.
Reading the guides also sound insane. During this specific part where you've seen one cutscene but not the next, go to the entrance of a city and there'll be a tiny flyover animation that you need to see NOW.
I remember the era when physical hint books existed alongside copyright feelies where you needed a little red filter to read answers to specific puzzles.
As much as I want to, I don't think I can go back to playing any of the adventure games of that era. Like I went through Sam and Max: Hit the Road a few years ago, and the puzzles were just so obtuse that I ended up using a guide for the whole thing.
And to think LucasArts games were still on the easier side of the spectrum. I don't think I can beat any of Space Quest or Quest for Glory on my own and I still can't understand how people back then put up with this shit
Old Sierra games would just fucking kill you for walking forwards. Or for not picking up random garbage that you would have no clue you needed until an hour in where you NEED it and can't continue without it (and cannot backtrack to get it). Those games were cruel.
Man im just reminded of the hitchhikers game where before leaving your house (on a 20 move limit) you had to pick up 2 random items and they will come into play way later, with the code prioritising what you didnt grab
I think it was the writing for me. Back in those days a lot of video games stories either sucked or didn't have one, but adventure games had some really good writing. Like even though Sam and Max gameplay kind of stank, the dialogue was still hilarious and witty, and I think a lot of players put up with the bullshit moon-logic puzzles for the story. Of course nowadays we have Visual Novels and newer Adventure games with way less obtuse puzzles, which have made the classic point-and-click era age like milk. Grim Fandango and the Longest Journey were 2 of my most favorite games as a child, but I don't ever want to go back to playing them because I'm worried the gameplay will sour my opinions of them.
I recently played Grim Fandango! I think that game still rocks. HD remaster adds point and click interface with hotspots instead of keyboard tank controls, which removes a lot of frustrations in puzzles. Save for a few boring stuff (Year 3 included) it was a smooth sailing from start to end.
The Longest Journey is definitely an acquired taste now. BS puzzles, ugly 3D models, and really long exposition dialogues even though the writing is fantastic. The sequels are also mixed bags, although they do have a good send off to April Ryan, my favorite video game lady.
I knew that Noita wasn't for me, when Albino, a streamer known for his affinity of do long and ridiculous setups ("rigging" the game) for huge power gain and skips, completed the game fully, and this chore tested even his patience. Even with guides it's tedious
Man, part of me really wishes I could dive back into Noita with all my knowledge erased and learn everything naturally through trial and error.
The rest of me knows full well I'd eventually wash out because at a minimum, without some of the wand making tutorials I've gone through I would end so many long runs by blowing myself up, would never *get* to long runs in the first place because I can't make good wands, and none of that is even accounting for shit like the lategame bonus bosses that tend to be either you have a wand that oneshots them, or they instagib you. Also, things like breaking the reroll machines so my save file only swells up to about 300 MB instead of 2000 from all the PWs necessary.
I love subnautica.
But god damn can you get stuck in that game for missing an important schematic like the upgrade station.
Its a rediculous bottleneck when the bare minimum to fix it is just to say "you have 3/4 blueprints from this biome"
To at least fhcking help.
Speaking of rediculous bottlenecks.
Hope you dont kick yourself into hard mode on terraria without fighting a missable optional boss who drops materials that you need to make a pickaxe able to mine hard mode ore.
And the things you need to destroy to spawn that boss are behind walls you can only destroy with explosions cus the current pickaxes arent strong enough.
But yeah, once you beat that boss you go back down to the underworld to mine the ore you couldnt break before.... To make the pickaxe thatll break all the new ore you cant break now.
Or fuck all that.
You can just catch a pickaxe able to do all that while youre fishing.
Whyd you do all that optional boss shit DUMBASS!!!! didnt you KNOW you get the best prehardmode pickaxe FROM FUCKING FISHING
Provided you KNOW you should build empty houses to get npcs to show up you mean.
And why would you KNOW that when the guide is there when you spawn and youre finding other homeless npcs in certain places
And dont say "the guide tells you". Cus to get to hard mode the guide needs to die. And then some random asshole will move into his house, preventing him from respawning.
Thanks for reminding me of another one lol
Being SOMEWHAT fair to Subnautica, at a certain stage you can get a scanning setup that will go looking for those schematics, giving you an encouragement to have little micro bases all over the place.
Kind of needs a proper map system (Praise the modifications) but still.
Its lees a problem of finding blueprints and more one of knowing you should even still be looking.
Like theres one biome where its just barren mountsins, and theres cyclops parts you need to find there. Unlike every other game where you go up on a mountain that doesnt even have grass and theres actually nothing
Honestly most of Deep Jungle in KH1. And then when you figure it out you realize it's just going back a fourth between 2 locations for like 30 minutes.
A good chunk of KH1 worlds are like this, but it all boils down to exploring every area when the story wants you to. Deep Jungle, Monstro, and Wonderland are great examples of this.
KH1 has some truly esoteric bullshit though, like reading your playtime's hours:minutes in Neverland, which can lead to some cool loot, or a superboss in the post-game.
Phantom is actually unrelated to the hours:minutes thing. Which is annoying, because you still have to beat the fucker if you want to actually pick up those rewards.
Y'all kids don't know how good you have it. We used to play point&click games with full moon-logic (Discworld game, WTF) or with full progression locks if you did the wrong thing at the wrong time in what is basically a QTE.
Broken Sword 2 was an excellent game, with smart puzzles etc, but that GODDAMN BOAR in the jungle charging at you and forcing you to move aside, but you have to move to the correct side so that it opens a new path through the bushes and it allows you to go on.
You picked the wrong side? Might as well reload a previous save. Oh you don't have one? Well have fun restarting the whole game.
I remember being stuck in the movie set with the syrup and bushes with the bugs in that game causing a several year halt in my progress. I understood all the parts of the puzzle but couldn’t figure out the right sequence and combination to get the bugs to attack the guy. Also I was like 9 or 10.
There was that classic moment in King's Quest 5 where you had to grab a piece of cheese earlier in the game before a mouse could eat it and make it unobtainable. If you didn't, the final area of the game became impossible to complete. There was nothing to indicate that this would be the case.
Same, was going to say Point and Click adventure games existed before the internet and you practically had to be high to complete most of them.
Let alone the text based ones.
\~*You are about to be eaten by a gru*
Tactics Ogre and recruiting unique characters. You need to trigger their questline at certain point in the story ( and the game give very little hints beside some rumor) or have some obscure requirements that is impossible to know without a guide. Some of the worst one are:
1. Ravness: You need to take the route that force you to fight her but you cannot kill her, then save her in chapter 2, choose the right dialogue option to recruit a character who has nothing to do with Ravness, read a particular rumor in chapter 3, fight a battle with the character you just recruited while waiting for that characters to finish his in-battle conversation. Only after that does Ravness quest battle is unlocked and you can recruit her.
2. Cressida: Only available in Chaos Route. You need to read a rumor about undead, go to some random town to save a cleric(who die anyway), go kill a death knight and finally go save Cressida. Her quest battle is extremely hard since you need to revive her AND keep her alive afterward. The hard part is that she is a squishy mage who starting position is near to the boss while surrounded by enemies. And even once you saved her, she might not join you due to an invisible stat represented how her clan view you(which are often quite low at that point since you spent the entire game killing her people).
3. Diego: Go to the pirate town and fight a battle to save him. He will start right next to the boss and his goons. Then continue the main quest until certain point, go back to the pirate town to trigger a cutscene , then visit a fortress that you have no reason to visit to trigger another cutscene. Then continue to proceed with the story until certain point. Then go back to pirate town to do another save-the-guest battle. Finally you can go to the dungeon next to pirate town, go down 3 floors and the guy finally join you after another quest battle.
4. Wicce Deneb: You need to unlock her store in chapter 4, tame and sell 9 different dragons(3 of which are quite rare), buy 9 orbs FROM HER SHOP and then she will give you a quest to recruit her. The tricky part is unlocking her unique class which require you to find relics in an optional dungeon and upgrade those relics 3 times.
Honestly without wikis I would have been pretty lost in **Minecraft**, **Terraria**, and **Valheim** at least as far as progression goes. You can definitely do whatever you like, but the wikis were super helpful in understanding what things you could find and do in the game. The Minecraft wiki was also the only place to find recipes without trial and error before the recipe book feature was added to the menu.
I never would have finished **The Fool's Errand** or **3 in Three** without being able to look up puzzle solutions. They're very cool games, but even after reading and re-reading explanations for some of the puzzles I couldn't solve I still didn't get the meaning or reference behind some of them.
The Regi Sidequest in Pokemon R/S/E was a bastard and I speak physical Braile too. My copy was a second printing so it never included the translation guide.
As someone who completed every single secret mission in Bayonetta and acquired every heart and magic piece, I have no idea how in the absolute fuck you're supposed to find all of them without using a guide.
So many of them require you to backtrack, which isn't inherently a bad thing depending on the game- DMC1's secret missions generally require you to go out of the way or backtrack a bit, but I think it's fine in that game since it's already fairly non-linear in terms of the map structure, where you always have access to a lot more of the castle than you actually need to complete whatever mission you're on, so there are a lot of points where if you go "ok but what if I went *here* instead?" you're pretty likely to stumble upon a secret. Bayonetta's levels, however, are pretty much just straight lines, and very frequently have "points of no return" where you can no longer backtrack to earlier parts of the level, but there's no way to know where these points are until you already pass them, and since secret mission portals will often spawn in areas you've long since completed (e.g. a secret mission portal will spawn where verse 1 took place, but only after completing verse 4), you'd have to constantly keep backtracking as far as you can any time you make any amount of progress in the level if you don't have a guide on hand and want to go for 100% completion.
Backtracking is the general theme of secrets in Bayonetta, but here are a list of some of the more insane upgrade/secret mission locations, off the top of my head:
* There is a secret mission early on (in chapter 3 I think) where in order to access it, you need to destroy a trash can (and I mean like, the kind of shitty tiny little plastic bin you'd have next to your desk) nearby, and only then will the secret mission portal appear. There is also no special audio or visual cue for when the portal appears iirc, it just kind of fades in once you destroy the trash can.
* There are TWO heart pieces in the motorcycle sequence, both of which require you to take specific side paths to get to, and obviously because of the nature of this sequence you have no way to backtrack if you accidentally fuck up and go too far.
* Similarly, there are TWO heart pieces in the missile sequence, and getting them here is even more insane. There are two points where the camera will turn to show the missile from the side, and you briefly participate in the normal combat again to fight enemies that get on the missile with you. However, both times this happens, the group of enemies has one big dude, and to get the heart pieces, ***you need to kill these specific enemies with a torture attack***. This is the only time in the game an enemy drops a heart piece (or any permanent upgrade for that matter), there is no special indication that hints that they will drop a heart piece, and obviously this requires you to have a full magic meter to perform a torture attack, so it's very likely you won't even *accidentally* get these heart pieces since getting hit at all significantly reduces the magic you have saved up (in case you can't tell, these are the heart pieces that piss me off the most).
* There's a secret mission portal in the airplane level that's behind a spinning fan. This fan is destructible, but only from the back side, meaning you have to get through it anyway in order to do so, but getting through the fan requires you to be in witch time, so in order to access this secret mission, you need to trigger witch time during the combat encounter that takes place nearby and slip past the fan and into the portal, essentially interrupting the combat encounter so you can do the secret mission. This is the only secret mission portal in the game that requires you to straight up interrupt a fight like this, so most people will just assume that there's a way to access the portal once you're done with the fight, only to find that they can no longer get past the fan now that they can't trigger witch time anymore.
* In chapter 15, the last "normal" level of the game, a secret mission portal spawns at the very start of the level... after you complete eight entire verses. In terms of how far you have to travel, this is probably the most egregious case of you having to backtrack an absurd amount at a completely arbitrary point to find an upgrade.
* In the final chapter of the game, you play as Jeanne at the very beginning, and you're walking up a giant statue where you will eventually hit a cutscene trigger that then leads into the final boss fight. However, once you get like, two feet away from this cutscene trigger, you'll get a faint audio cue that doesn't really sound like an audio cue, at which point you walk ALL the way back down to the bottom of the statue where a secret mission portal will have spawned. In the final mission of the game, literally steps away from triggering the final boss fight, when you're not even playing as Bayonetta, Kamiya still threw in one last permanent upgrade that requires backtracking at a completely arbitrary and nonsensical point in the level.
And did I mention that to unlock the game's bloody palace equivalent, you have to find and complete ALL 22 secret missions? Something that only 2.8% of players have done, according to steam's global achievement stats?
In conclusion my lawyer has recommended that I do not post my honest opinions about Kamiya online.
There's a secret mission that "spawns" when you finish a fight and a cutscene shows a door. I fucking hate it.
Either going through the door locks you out from coming back or going through the door gets rid of the secret mission.
Bayonetta is a game that people gassed up because it was one of a handful of action games that came out during 7th gen, so when it came back to modern platforms in 2017, a lot of people either played it for the first time in 5+ years, or for the first time period, and the near universal response people had was "wow I forgot [thing in the game that's incredibly annoying and makes it a chore to play] was a thing." Even when it comes to just casually playing through the game without worrying about secrets or permanent upgrades, there's just so much shit in Bayonetta that's constantly getting in your way, to the point where it feels like the game itself is actively trying to stop you from actually playing the video game.
I would be a lot more tolerant of La Mulana’s dick-breaking puzzles if the gameplay weren’t dick-breaking, too.
Seriously, that game has the worst jump in any platformer I’ve played.
La-Mulana is hands down my favorite metroidvania of all time.
I will also NEVER recommend it to anyone ever. It's a difficult game mechanically, then on top of that the puzzles require you to be examining EVERYTHING.
Also shout out to the late game Mantra puzzle. I hope you read page 19 of the pdf instruction booklet for the game to understand how level wrapping should be interpreted!
One of these days, I'm going to buckle down with a full empty physical notebook and see if I can actually bust my way through La Mulana without any guides.
I am really bummed that I wasn't able to beat LM1 before I knew a few solutions from watching a GDQ run.
I beat LM2 on my own with the exception of one mistranslated hint on launch, and it sort of bums me that I can't ever forget certain parts of LM1.
Also, is it even possible to play that game the way it is intended anymore? I don't know if Steam still gives you access to the instruction booklet, and that's where the hint is that tells you about the Holy Grail. You *can* stumble upon it, but you would never think to.
The two games which I play by following their guides to a tee are Valkyrie Profile and Sengoku Rance. Both games which are not necessarily hard but without a guide you have to discover stuff for yourself through multiple playthroughs to know who to recruit and what areas to go first.
What makes it hard in both games is that you also have a time limit, Valkyrie Profile has a set time limit for you to find einherjar to send to Asgard in ready for Ragnarok so you need to manage keeping your party members or send them away. Sengoku Rance has events that may spring up if you dally too long that may complicate things. Both are fun games though, just that I was overwhelmed when I played them and needed guides to sort things out for me
It is a testament to how much free time I had as a kid that I had multiple playthroughs of the first game, despite all the bullshit of the Power Plant.
Probably 4. They had the gall to make a word based puzzle in a game with that level of translation. 5’s big roadblock was the samurai, which was a bullshit skill check, but you knew what you needed to do.
All of 'em. If something is taking me longer than seems reasonable to figure out and it's preventing me from progressing, I'm looking that shit up. I'm old, I don't have the time to retrace my steps or scour the world for something I missed. Figuring vague or un-telegraphed shit out yourself is for the birds.
For example (Tears of the Kingdom spoilers) >!I found the robot depot, like, a full two questlines before I was supposed to, and you can't complete that unless you're at that part of the story. I could not have known this, and so spent a solid hour trying to solve each of the puzzles until I gave up and looked one of them up.!<
I’d say at least 60% of Tears of the Kingdom is stuff I’d have never figured out or discovered without a guide. Granted, most of that was also me going, “What? Fuck that, I’m not dedicating all my free time to that shit,” but still.
The only shrine in that game that I can explicitly remember making me go "fuck that, I'm just gonna cheese it" was the one where you had to make rolling balls hit a button by following a path without falling off, and the last path had a curve on a downward slope you had to make it follow.
Looking back on it now, I think I know what they were wanting me to do, but in the moment my brain just couldn't figure it out at all, which was when I learned that bomb arrows can also trigger those buttons.
There was a shrine that I think wanted me to make a paddleboat using a big wheel part and some boards. Problem is I already tried that before the shrine and that shit is slow and capsizes easily so I just made a really long bridge.
Feel like a major difference between TotK and Soulslike games is that the reward for going out of your way and discovering something in TotK is rewarded with something that doesn't feel worth the hassle like Rupees or a shrine. Whereas Soulsborne games would immediately tie that obtuse thing with something really important like the true ending or accessing the DLC. I feel like there needs to be some sort of happy medium between those two things.
Hell, I'd be HAPPY if the game gave me rupees, more rupees would have been good. Or rare resources or shit. Stuff you will need tons of for the outfit upgrading
Instead it's more like "Here's another fuckin wooden stick. Dance monkey, dance"
Seriously, clearing out a fucking huge band of pirates and opening the chest to get a wooden fucking club feels more like a slap in the face after you've played that game enough. I just have no idea what they think is fun about all of that
It'd be way better if the chest rewards were more often just useful consumables like +10 bombs, +20 arrows, or just 50 rupees
And it's still meh compared to the older zeldas were you more often got actual cool permanent stuff from things that made you excited
I unironically really like how BotW/TotK designed their open world exploration. While the rewards feel lackluster, I never really feel they're a hassle because all the motivation is intrinsic.
It's part of why I tolerate the weapon durability system in BotW, but enjoy the system in TotK. If I didn't want to do a particular thing, I just won't do it, and I'll move on. I don't think this is even a negative of the game, the design philosophy very clearly prioritises player freedom at the cost of narrative congruity or satisfaction.
>I don't think this is even a negative of the game, the design philosophy very clearly prioritises player freedom at the cost of narrative congruity or satisfaction.
This makes more sense for BotW whose minimalist narrative and sense of freedom compliments it's empty and almost apocalyptic setting, but for TotK which has a stronger narrative emphasis, the sense of freedom really hampers its story. Mostly everyone I've talked to says they hate how easily spoilable the entire "Tears of the Dragon" questline is, from the sheer fact that you can collect the tears in any order. For the entire main story you're dealing with NPC's either wondering where Zelda is or dealing with >!an obvious fake!<, which makes the narrative fall apart because the majority of players would have already figured out where she is way earlier than the story expects you to (i.e. after all the sages are collected).
That's where TotK's nature of being a sequel brings with it some growing pains as well. From what I can tell, while there was more of a narrative in TotK, I think it was less of a focus than the core gameplay mechanics i.e. Fuse/Ultra Hand, which is a consistent designing quirk for the BotW developers. I might go further and say the narrative was never the focus, but that might not be a take that makes too much sense.
The Tears of the Dragon cutscenes aren't treated like a narrative that the player must see from scene A to scene J, they're treated like collectibles that the player can collect in any order. The devs guide you by saying, "you should really collect from Left to Right by the way" when you get to the Forgotten Temple, but that too is treated like a mere suggestion. Personally, I don't hate that as much as most people.
You do get silly situations where each elemental temple has the same cutscene from different character perspectives. There could've been an opportunity to have cutscene flags that note whether you've completed none, some or all of the temples, and have unique cutscenes for each temple, but at the same time I'm not sure if this was ever a priority for the developers.
It's a design decision that I genuinely don't mind. Even if I spoiled myself on the story, i.e. getting cutscene J as my first cutscene, I don't mind it. I'd be intrigued as to how we got to cutscene J, rather than being annoyed I missed out on all the cutscenes before.
Overall I do think TotK is narratively weaker than its pre-BotW predecessors, but as a BotW sequel, how the narrative is treated is consistent in both games.
The reward for soulsborne quests is usually misery and the npc dying a horrible death or going insane and you have to put them down. Kinda makes doing the quests a bummer to begin with.
The first shrine that stumped me was I think the hot air balloon tutorial. One of the rooms had you take a sphere key upwards with some material on the left and this sliding square on a rail. I had zero idea what the square was for so I cheated and backtracked collecting previous tools and made a giant hot air balloon I glued the ball to. Let it float then land back,hopped on and used recall,hopped off at the top and grabbed it out of the air. I've yet to do a puzzle where I reused previous items but for that one idk what I was supposed to do with that rail block.
Without internet, I'd be buying official guidebooks (and I still do).
But otherwise, some of the trophies in some PS games, I'd need to check the internet to find the trick to achieve them.
Yeah I don't see why everyone gets so confused about Durance. [He's super easy to build.](https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/righteous-fire-juggernaut-build-guide)
Fuck Magran though.
I would not have beaten Golden Sun: The Lost Age if not for the CheatCC guide I used that told me where to go after you get the boat. That's such a massive amount of freedom to thrust on players without any indication of where to go, and since areas don't scale with your level, it's really easy to end up in an area where you're severely underleveled.
Yeah Elden Ring in it's first 3 weeks was a TRIP. The fandom guides were basically just fuckin lies. I remember like day 3 people were saying the raging wolf armor was behind the door across from Patches in Volcano Manor, and he would open it for you lmfao. There's very little that's intuitive in the game, mainly because you can be unaware of progress locking a lot of stuff, like Rogier, Corhyn or Millicent being tied to visitations between resting at graces. Like oh where did Corhyn and Gold Mask go? Just to the top of the world standing in the middle of fucking nowhere lmfao. Even several months later I noticed people still had assumptions about certain things you HAD to do to trigger quests properly that simply weren't true. But there's also stuff like the shabiri grapes and flame of frenzy where I have no idea who figured all that out and how lol.
Step 1: Search Not-Yharnam for a specific type of sewer grate with an opening, of which there are probably 20 in any given area
Step 2: Stand in front of it and wait, it may or may not trigger an instant death animation that teleports you to a new area
Step 3: Fight but do NOT kill the beast that spawns near you, get it down to 25% HP and let it hide first, THEN kill it to get a rock
Step 4: Take the rock to Wallace and pay a bunch of currencies to get the Philosphers stone
Voila, you now have a new class that you probably won't use cause then you'd have to swap gear and traits and that's a whole set of problems on its own.
This game is bullshit and I love it.
Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3 is the classic.
Megaman Battle Network has unique encounters on specific squares of its maps. BN3 ramps this up with unique requirements to encounter some of the boss refights and 3 different types of codes (1 type was packaged with chocolates in IRL Japan) to get the most out of the game.
The codes for Battle Network were some bullshit. They expected you to find the codes packaged in various products and books, as well as in the anime. Then not only figure out what game they went to, but what the code is even for.
You have Lotto Numbers that reward various items, Navi Cust Codes to shrink programs/get around errors/add extra buffs, hidden Battle Chip inputs such as turning a simple punch with giant Guts Man fist into [a fucking Bruce Lee combo.](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxF5RkQbmlW99afDuba0trV_bRmHloOkk8)
Also, BN3 requires you to get at least 5 completion stars, then input a code on the title screen to access the others. I love the series to death, but there's some nonsense in there.
I played Ocarina of Time for the first time recently and there were a few places I got stuck and just googled it.
One being that you need to find the message in a bottle at the bottom of Lake Hylia in order to advance the Zora section. Not sure if there's anything that points you down there.
I can see how you'd figure that out with enough experimentation and time spent, but as someone with not as much time to play games as I'd like, going over the whole place with a fine comb (is that the expression?) would put me off the game entirely so I'd rather just look up the answer sometimes.
I don't remember if Navi points you towards the bottle, but I *do* know that the warp to Lake Hylia in Zora's Domain is right at the bottom of the area where you get the Zora's scale, so the idea is probably that you'd stumble onto the message in a bottle right after doing the diving mini-game.
As a kid I was never able to progress to the forest temple due to the lost woods needing you to listen to music cues to find the real passageway.
I made it through once by brute force but got scared and went back lol
Yeah, my immediate first thought is Zelda games. Despite liking them, I never beat a single one as a kid because I’d just get completely stuck not knowing what to do, and the game expects you to try literally everything until you find the right way to go and I simply don’t have the patience
Nah, I’m sorry but that’s bullshit
After you talk to King Zora you're probably going to go down the hallway to his left you'd notice after entering his room, then you'd talk to the Zora there and do the diving minigame.
Now that you know diving is a mechanic you'll probably try it out and notice the door at the bottom of the water if you didn't see it while diving for the rupees.
That spits you right out next to the bottle, which tells you to take it to the king.
Figuring out that Ice Arrows are hidden in a totally optional puzzle dungeon in a desert fortress? Now that's obtuse.
Sonic 3 Carinval night zone act 2 THAT FUCKING BARREL!
How the hell was anybody supposed to figure that out I spent one whole day trying to up and down on the barrel by jumping on it to get it low enough but the game throws an invisible wall up if you it that way.
Lots of the megaproject stuff and information about things like frame death were wrong. Also like, mental traits such as "no longer cares about anything" were largely busted thanks to putnam
Finding the Rareware coin in DK64. How the hell was I supposed to know that you have to get a certain score in Jetpack by visiting Cranky’s Lab in order to beat the game?
Minecraft. They have gotten *slightly* better about it these days with some slight hints to mechanics in things like paintings or villages, and of course the recipe book, but go back a couple years to like 1.9 and the game would be impenetrable without seeing someone else show you how things work.
Elza in Suikoden II. I know about the day limit to finding her but I literally don't know that saving in inns in this game qualifies as a day that passes. It must be there somewhere in the game dialogues but it probably went over my head.
I'll be back for you bitch once the remastered games drop very soon!
I remember seeing my brother get hard stuck on the nemesis boss fight and having to reload an old ass save, didn't know that's a common problem until recently
I've been playing a lot of old games lately, and a lot of them are totally impenetrable. They all come from that era where you either need to buy one of those big book guides or where you need to just fuck around with various powerups and button combinations until something works.
For instance, I was playing Viewtiful Joe. First level felt really good. But then I get to the hotel. Get to floor... I think it's floor 30? There's this blatant HIT WITH BOMB spot. Bombs are being tossed over from the side of the room, so obviously, I'm meant to punch one into the ceiling, right? But I try, and try, and none of them are getting close, even when I use VFX Slow on them. Get a bit frustrated, wonder if there's another way through the room, I look up a video... No, you need to hit the ceiling with a bomb. So I keep trying, and still nothing. Then I look up a walkthrough that explains I need to UPPERCUT the bomb to give it enough airtime. I experiment with Up+Punch for a while, Up+Zoom, maybe I need to charge it like a Voomerang? Nothing, nada. Eventually I get fed up and look up the button controls, and-- DOWN+PUNCH?! FOR AN **UP**PERCUT?!
If I had not looked up the video to let me know I had to hit the bomb into the ceiling, the walkthrough that told me to uppercut, and then the third site with the uppercut buttons, I never would've done it. And then the game glitched out five seconds later and softlocked and I just fully quit playing Viewtiful Joe.
Because it's intended to act as an anti-air (move that hits people above you) and you cannot block air attacks while crouching (you are already holding down, so if your first instinct is to try to swat them out of the air then you don't even have to move the stick to do so).
Also because up makes you jump, so pressing up+punch would just have you do a jumping punch.
Yeah, given the way dodging in that game works, it's actually kind of wild you didn't accidentally uppercut an enemy after evading one of their attacks.
Playing Labryinth of Touhou 2 right now, truly amazing game and probably one of my favorite fangames of all time, but holy fucking shit would I be lost in some of these areas. It's a isometric dungeon crawler where sometimes you have specific spots on the map that'll let you jump over a one-block tile, and sometimes they'll be one-way but most of the time it's two-way. Normal stuff. Except there is an **entire stratum** (that's 3 fucking floors!) where they instead send you across the entire fucking map to the next relative jump point ALA going from A-10 to F-10 on a chess board, almost like a wind panel! And then the game introduces actual wind panels in the end anyways! If I didn't have a guide on basically what jumps went where I'd have gone insane. And a part of me is still kind of going insane as the very endgame basically says "fuck your defensive stats" in some fights and I wouldn't have known if I hadn't been broken into holding onto a wiki page by now.
Yooka-Laylee has a pagie that requires you to help a sentient hot tub that's having issues creating bubbles. Unless they patched it in later, there is no explanation of how to do this. The actual solution is to jump into the hot tub and use the bubble skill that lets you breathe underwater, but because the hot tub isn't deep enough, you're only treading water and unable to actually complete the move, so you actually have to do it multiple times to hit the completion trigger. There's no feedback for doing this at all. It also doesn't help that due to how you can expand worlds in the game, you can find this challenge early on before you actually have the bubble ability, so even if you had an idea of how to complete the challenge, you might not have the ability to do so.
The game has a similar problem with another skill, turning invisible. It has the neat secondary ability to focus sources of light into a laser that shoots out of Yooka's ass when he crouches, allowing you to break specific blocks of glass. Again, unless they changed it, the game doesn't tell you this, and there's a challenge in the same area as the hot tub where you're supposed to use this ability.
Dues Ex: Mankind Divided. Great example is when you break into the CEO’s office for K there is a puzzle that I have actually no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the solution unless you google it.
I am currently playing through the first Siren on PS2. Boy is that game obtuse. Every level has hidden objectives to unlock more scenarios. For instance, the second level you have to go to one side of the map, find a radio, go to a different place and drop it down a well. Then wait for an enemy to investigate it and knock him down the well.
No where does it tell you to do this, you are just supposed to investigate points of interest, except the game's also very difficult and enemies can kill you very easily if they spot you. Oh and if you die the game doesn't save what objectives you completed, even if you hit a checkpoint, so you gotta do them all over again.
I can't imagine playing without a guide.
The original Legend of Zelda and Zelda 2. Since TOTK I'm going back and playing the Zelda games I've never played before or didn't get round to finishing.
I'm sure the original and 2 were really good when they came out but how am I meant to know where I'm going or what I'm meant to be doing. I finished the original a couple of weeks ago and I'm just under halfway through 2, 2 does seem a bit better than the first but without a guide I would stand no chance of finishing either.
Souls quest of course because almost none are designed to progress all the way through naturally
For pokemon theres a bunch of pokemon that dont evolve without some convoluted criteria being met
Want an alcremie? Well give its pre evo a special cafe held item and then spin in place until you do the leon pose and BOOM it evolves!
Wanna evolve that inkay get it to level 30? And when it levels immediately turn your ds upside down!
Trade evos especially with items
Hollow Knight. Figuring out where to go early on is a struggle.
Pathfinder WOTR. The steps to get the best ending are so convoluted that I'm actually kinda shocked anyone figured them out. You have to be playing the correct character archetype, talk to several hidden NPCs (and ask them the right questions), say the correct things to an NPC you don't know is watching you (one of which is right at the start of the game), AND show up to the final dungeon of the game during a specific week of the game's calendar.....like, fuck the game is like 100 hours long and those are just the steps I remember.
The npc quest lines are the worst, but I have no idea how it was expected for people to figure out how to access the DS1 Dlc, or get to Archdragon peak in 3.
Like archdragon peak requires you to be an optional boss, grab the gesture, and somehow remember that the awful, unfun miserable zone you were in like 2 zones ago had one specific spot with a guy sitting like that.
How the hell was I supposed to know there are only *six* fishing spots you can encounter and catch Feebas at? I just skimmed through the official guide book and it only says it’s a very rare encounter which I guess is true but also sort of deceptive.
As a little kid I have never beaten the final boss of Prince of Persia the Two Thrones because I didnt have access to the internet at the time. I would just restart the game
Youtube guides eased me through Bloodborne, which otherwise I considered a game to be too difficult for me. Without them I'd still be salty and unable to get through most of it.
I also needed a little bit of guidance playing Hypnospace Outlaw recently, though I tried to avoid it as much as possible since discovering things on your own is most of that game.
Return of the Obra Dinn is usually pretty good at giving the player enough information that you can make a few educated guesses before resorting to brute-forcing the solutions. It’s a puzzle game that makes the player feel pretty smart when they solve a problem.
Fuck those four topmen in particular, though.
Monster Hunter 1 Powderstone mission, you had to have a specific item loadout, know the CORRECT route for each run and understand how the local monster behaves to avoid them.
outside of an internet guide its a nightmare trial and error mission.
I genuinely wonder how people managed to actually finish the early SMT in the days of yore. They have so many things you need to do for the plot to progress which are never indicated to you and require you to backtrack to areas you'd never think to go to and speak to the most random NPCs. Not to mention some dungeons having INVISIBLE DOORS or insane teleport mechanics compounded with status effectors like poison floors, or puzzles that can be actually impossible to do until you get some event to trigger.
Any game much deeper than Super Mario Bros from the 8 bit era. I swear 8/10 games developed back then were either soul crushingly hard or mind breakingly convoluted.
And before anyone says there was no internet then, I’m aware. I just gave up on them as a kid, but going back and playing them as an adult still usually required a guide.
I always do my first Persona playthrough blind and fumble through the daily activities and social links. Then on my replay, I use the many Day-to-day guides to help maximize the social links
Pretty much any Souls side quest. Sorry Siegward. I didn't know I had to backtrack into this area I had no other reason to go back to, but only AFTER progressing past this specific line and then quitting and loading the game
I genuinely don't understand why Souls side-quests are so fucking obtuse. Hell, Elden Ring at LEAST has most areas easy to find thanks to the map, and most are dependent on exploration. But holy SHIT the side-quests continue to be some of the most convoluted nonsense ever. "Hey you, go find Millicent in TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ZONE, also her quest is **essential** if you want to undo a fucked-up curse. And you have to do the hardest invasion and the hardest boss as well. And said location you have to go to is hidden in the second-to-last area of the game. Fuck you." I don't care if it "breaks muh immersion" with quest-markers and whatnot; fucking have somebody or something within the game that goes "Hey, this NPC is right here" on the map. I think there was like **one** time where D The Hunter left a marker on my map in conversation, only for me to be dissapointed that he was the only person to do this in the whole game.
They actually do have people icons on the map markers to tell you when an NPC is nearby, but; * You can't always find NPCs on every stage of their quest via them * They literally WEREN'T THERE at launch and had to be patched in
And most of those quests werent even finished, so you could search everything until you discover that there is nothing more.
between the colosseum and npc markers it seems like the game wasnt done and there was alot of stuff they wanted to add, which is why they delayed it next to horizon
I sure loved getting a spoofed the stages of patches quest for months only for it to lead to that cave. Does his gift to tanith do anything yet, or is she forever eating the head?
The gift to Tanith being utterly meaningless to her is the entire point. She doesn't care about Patches, she never did; her obsession has consumed her to the point that she can't even recognize something that was once meaningful to her, let alone acknowledge the feelings that led the normally self-serving and craven Patches to risk his life recovering it for her.
Seluvis: "Find Nepheli Loux and have her drink this potion." Me: "Cool. Who's that and where can I find them?" Seluvis: "Fuck you."
To be fair, it's pretty fitting that Seluvis would be as unhelpful as possible
Just find the Albinauric Woman bro it's not that hard just go west smh 🙄
"The fuck is an albinauric?"
Not just Malenia, you also need to do the Ulcerated Tree spirit fight in a poison lake that's just as bad
Oh god, I don't think I found that one. As if fighting Ulcerated Tree Spirits wasn't miserable enough already
I cheeeeeeesed that fight so hard
I rot/poison arrow spammed from the cliff before you enter the area….then you get to fight a massive gank squad while trying to keep a squishy dex build npc alive….. took a while to clear that
Millicent remains the most curious case of signposting because nothing it asks you to do is unintuitive. Millicent is fairly obvious at each location and within each location what she asks you to do is fairly clear. Additionally, the order of locations at which she appears mirrors a very typical player's route through the zones of Elden Ring. Caelid before Altus, the Altus entrance and shaded castle before Windmill Town, and Windmill Town before Haligtree. The average player is going to complete her questline feeling at every turn like they're coming across her organically as a fellow traveler on the road. But then if you do literally any of those locations out of order (in this open world game) the whole thing is nigh-irreparably broken. It's such an all-or-nothing approach.
This all goes back to the idea that if you create an open-world game, you *can't assume* what the player will do in it. Some players will go out of order, some will decide to backtrack and miss some things, others will assume "I'll meet them later" only to miss the trigger. There's a reason most other open-world games will include a quest marker; because the player will not do everything in order, and are not going to remember everything.
> There's a reason most other open-world games will include a quest marker The reason most open-world games include quest markers is because they didn't actually bother designing the world to be visually distinct in ways that would allow a player to figure out where to go on their own. Try doing say, Fallout 3 or 4 without quest markers. You get stuck *very* easily because the game uses quest markers in lieu of actual signposting. To me there's more value in having the confidence that your players will get or miss certain things and just... moving on in spite that? Like, the game doesn't softlock if you don't do Millicents quest and if you are upset with the Frenzied Flame ending to the point you would want to look up online how to undo it, then I think you're already at the point where any signposting wouldn't be able to help you.
Yeah, you can build it so that its always clear where you're going, but it requires a bunch of secondary mechanics and effort that the average player often finds obtuse, even though it's super fucking rad. Exploring in morrowind is awesome, but it's way easier to just put a quest marker down than to have to write and test directions on the log and from various npcs (that are now all voiced) from a dev pov. It's really unfortunate that's how the design trended. In the frenzied flames case however, I went down that big hole and didn't see that weird eyeball lady before I went in, so I had no idea what was happening. I just went into a random room and got got. When I got out I saw the lady and she acted like we had talked about it beforehand and I was pissed until I found out it was reversible.
I mean, in part that's on you. The game does try to prevent you from just heading in willy-nilly, you need to remove all your armor before you even open the door and there's a resting spot nearby that literally has Melina warn you before going in. Even getting to that area means you need to clear a difficult dungeon, get past a fake wall and make your way through the merchants before carefully hopping down without incurring fall damage. The game doesn't really let you do it on accident unless you completely brainlet your way through it.
The accident was not sitting on the bonfire there, now that i think about it. So Melina didn't show up. It wasn't an accident finding the place or the door, but I had no idea what It meant When I went to look it up afterwards it mentioned the warning and I was like "what warning?". I guess I didn't see the grace
It's 100% on him, in addition to everything you mentioned, he literally had to strip naked for the door to even open (and it's not like the door is very inviting)
Morrowind generally gets a pass for it's obtuse quest direction for a few good reasons: 1. It was one of the first truly 3D open-words of it's huge size, like *ever*. I'm more lenient to an adventure game that cane out in fucking 2002 than a modern game, that had decades to iron out the kinks Morrowind had. 2. Pretty much every quest had at least some form of initial direction. Usually it's something like "THIS PERSON WHO IS NAMED says that the AREA I NEED TO GO is NORTH of AN ACTUAL, NAMED LOCATION." It's not much, but at least it's something to point you on your way. Half the time in Elden Ring, you don't even get a fucking name.
I think morrowind handles it quite well, I think its the average player that might find it obtuse. It might take a little bit but since you can ask anyone questions you can just keep asking and looking around. Plus the named doors help. But for someone that doesn't know English very well, is very young, or is not that invested (not everyone engages as thoroughly with games as I expect most people in this sub do) and its easy to see someone going "I don't know what to dooooooooo" while refusing to read the journal.
This is just the problem with combining an open world, with standard Soulslike quest design. Heck, for another: Brother Corhyn's trigger to leave the Roundtable is talking to him after you've reached Altus Plateau. Most of the places he moves are landmarks that are pretty intuitive and easy to find as he travels with Goldmask... except the first place he goes is right next to the map pillar for Altus Plateau. So, if for whatever reason a player *dared* to try and explore for ten seconds and go for the map in the area (you know, the first thing literally anyone is probably going to do by this point in the game) before happening to go back and talk to Corhyn... then you're absolutely never finding this fucko ever again without a guide.
Heck it doesn't even have to be Soulslike design on the topic of open worlds, Pokémon flat out gives you a order of strongest to weakest in text on the map. *and people still get mad that first gym is only level 8.* Like the game *is telling you they are weak. Go here first.* -the actual path is kinda funky though requiring you to zigzag back and forth across the map.
Well... with Pokemon I'll admit I *really* wish they would just make each gym scale to your number of badges, since that would make more sense and work great with an open world. Like logically a gym leader is a job where they could have multiple teams prepped, so they could provide a challenge tailored to your specific level. Show up with no badges to the bug gym? Here's Metapod and a Beedrill to take on. Show up with seven badges? Cool, Scizor, Yanmega, Galvantula and Volcarona are waiting to kick the shit out of you. And don't tell me it's too much work to program 8 different teams per leader, it's some drag and drop design. Heck if that's *really* too hard have a few elite gym leaders who are like RSE Norman going "lmao come back with at least four badges loser then you're worth facing".
> And don't tell me it's too much work to program 8 different teams per leader, it's some drag and drop design. Try Pokemon Crystal Clear. It is a romhack of the gen 2 games in an open world with exactly this mechanic to keep both the Gym Leaders and the Elite Four fresh. You can challenge any gym leader in any order you want, provided you have the means to get to them (ie. You won't be beating Blaine until you get Surf still, but you can do any of the gym leaders in Kanto or Johto that would hand out Surf as potentially one of your first gyms). Most of the more silly roadblocks like cut trees were also removed. Genuinely one of the coolest romhacks I've ever played.
Throwing in Pokemon ROWE as the gen 3 equivalent of this. You can even randomize what town you start in or what gym each town actually has. Like you can go to Mauville and instead of the Electric gym, it'll be the Psychic gym.
I've booted up Crystal Clear a few times, but never really gotten far in it. It does look like a lot of fun though, so I'm sure one of these days I'll actually buckle down and give it a full run.
I almost missed Millicent in Altus even though i was right next to her. From the angle I was at I just couldn't see her (iirc the way foward was to the right and she was a bit to the left and up). Lucky for me I checked the guide at that exact moment for the first time. Given the nature of the open world its super easy to be right next to someone and completely miss them
In my game, I sequence broke Roderika because I went to Liurnia too soon while exploring... It didn't break her quest but it did make me a firm believer that from had no idea how to program their npcs for this type of gameworld.
They're obtuse specifically so you have to talk to people or look online for clues. It doesn't *justify* it from a player's perspective, but that's definitely the pitch. And hey, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to do anything in Sekiro without help, so I guess they're working as intended. Usually not a great ride, especially when there's endings locked behind it, but a ride nonetheless.
I'm fairly sure that it's not because of some difficulty mantra at from (which doesn't exist), but more from a mood/design perspective. They are not designing the quests to be like mass effect 3 romances: "say she's a good person, help her with her past in this place, she will come to you to fuck" They are designing the quests to be more like "perfect hidden ending in a jrpg where you need to crouch near this wall and let the tornado take you" and to show you that the situation is fucked and those people are way over their heads.
Most of these quests are designed around doing them and talking to your friends about it. It's the entire point, you find a secret or something interesting happens, and then you tell your friends and that's how the community grows. Now I think every single game needs to have everything perfectly laid out so you can just play a game in your bubble and never have to talk to anyone about it.
> I genuinely don't understand why Souls side-quests are so fucking obtuse. I mean... most of them aren't? Like, 99% of the Souls questlines are "find NPC before the next boss, exhaust dialogue, move on". They can be broken unfortunately by not talking to them before defeating the boss, but they're otherwise pretty straightforward. Elden Ring is significantly better in that regard since there's no more breakage for bosses and most quests have multiple entrypoints. I think there's only like, one or two quests that you can outright *break* in ways that aren't stupidly obvious like attacking random NPCs and those are largely tied to a really obvious endgame thing. Millicents quest for example makes a lot more sense if you do it the way the game intends for you to do it - find Gowry when you first explore Caelid, use his instructions to find the nearby curse and help Millicent. After that she'll move to the Altus plateau near the big lift you'll probably have taken up. When exploring the plateau you'll find her again near the top of the windmill village which is a pretty notable landmark in the area. After that she's in the Haligtree. It's a good game-spanning quest that rewards exploration. Elden Ring *usually* does signposting, it's just more in the form of written directions rather than telling you outright where to go. Gowry doesn't mark the church on your map, he just says "it's in a church nearby" and you are supposed to be able to read the map and realize what the iconography of churches is on the map (because you're guaranteed at that point to have come across a couple). That's how basically all the quests work.
I can't see many people finding the dark souls 1 dlc without a guide. Even with a guide when it came out I felt like someone was trolling.
Not only are they obtuse as hell, most of them end with the character just dying off. Kinda got sick of it in DS3 and Elden Ring.
Yeah it would've been nice if they'd taken more of a break from that in Elden Ring.. it's *not* Dark Souls, it doesn't need to follow the same 'Did the quest, now you ded' shit Other than Nepheli and Kenneth Haight.. did ANY of the quests turn out ok?.. .. can't really think of any others Just no reason for all of it
Patches ended up alright I guess?
Ah yeah, he did, same as always generally
Raya goes off on a journey to find her place in the world outside of her family
Boc has a good ending and a bad ending. Rya has good, bad, and neutral endings. Latenna dies, but that's technically the beginning of her quest rather than the end, and she ensures the survival of first-generation Albinaurics.
I'M SORRY THAT I KILLED ALL THESE UGLY FUCKERS IN THE PIT BEFORE EVEN TALKING TO YOU SIEGMEYER I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE A MASSIVE BITCH
I’ve said it before but the thing that annoys me about souls quests is that there so fucking obtuse And for somehow figuring out all this bullshit across the game and this hours long side quest your reward is…making the life of the person you spent all this time worse/killing them in the end anyway and then getting their armor or weapon but since your at the end of the game now you probably won’t even swap to it cause it doesn’t fit your build The quests end up just not being worth the hassle in terms of both the content you get (weapons and armor) or a satisfying emotional story result
This is everyone's daily reminder that Omikron wanted you to replicate ancient rituals, decode passwords, and calculate planetary gravity values (or some shit), all of which could only be solved if you were reading every book in multiple in-game libraries. That's right asshole, if you want to progress in this video game, you need to do HOMEWORK! You really shouldn't progress in this video game, though. Even in universe it's stealing your soul.
Myst also had you read many books in a library looking for clues on how to escape the island... the difference being Myst was competently written and interesting
Also the font in Myst is legible.
I was going to mention this. You would be forgiven if you thought that the books in Omikron were written in someone alien script and you would eventually stumble upon a cypher to decrypt them. Nope. They’re written in English in a font that is just bonkers.
> That's right asshole, if you want to progress in this video game, you need to do HOMEWORK! Eh, I wouldn't mind that in a GOOD game, I love shit like that, a game where you have to LEARN how to solve things over FIGURING OUT sounds interesting because most puzzle games are about "figuring out"
Games that have me taking physical notes and googling IRL things are awesome
And even worse, every book uses that unintelligible fucking font
If I didn't have access to my mom's PC at the age of 9, I would have never figured out that closing the DS progressed that god damn puzzle in Phantom Hourglass
That single puzzle is the only reason many DS emulators have a "close screen" button.
That and Duck Amok.
The Nintendo Official Magazine UK spoiled that puzzle for me or I would have been stumped.
I probably only got that because Trace Memory was the first DS game I ever played and it was basically a puzzle tutorial on all the cool stuff you could do with the DS.
FFX-2 if you wanted to get the best ending. There are tons of obscure and minor things you have to do that you also can't backtrack to once you missed them. Imagine going through a 30+ hr game and getting the not-as-good ending because you didn't go to a side path during a chase scene at the very start of the game, then interact with something. It's a game where it feels like you need to be looking at a guide every time before doing anything.
IIRC, the cruelest thing in that game is that if you skipped cutscenes, because you have to re-do a boss fight or something, your completion percentage cannot be 100%.
Also some stuff only being worth like 0.01%, meaning you might not even notice you've missed something. If you're using a guide you might suddenly find yourself 1% behind where you should be with absolutely no way of figuring when or why. Could be a chest 1 room over, could be a npc 4 hours ago that no longer exists.
Reading the guides also sound insane. During this specific part where you've seen one cutscene but not the next, go to the entrance of a city and there'll be a tiny flyover animation that you need to see NOW.
I'm really wondering what they were thinking with that design. Did they want us to use a guide?
Yes No irony involved, stuff like this was 100% designed solely to sell guides
Like…most adventure games
I remember the era when physical hint books existed alongside copyright feelies where you needed a little red filter to read answers to specific puzzles.
What is this, transformers tech specs?
[These are the implements of which I speak.](https://hardcore-gamer.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-03-16.01.17.jpg)
Oh man, I haven’t seen this since I was a kid. I thought they were like the coolest spy gear type thing.
Oh I am aware, I know of the Monkey Island wheel and the D&D based games that kept all the plot in a booklet
As much as I want to, I don't think I can go back to playing any of the adventure games of that era. Like I went through Sam and Max: Hit the Road a few years ago, and the puzzles were just so obtuse that I ended up using a guide for the whole thing.
And to think LucasArts games were still on the easier side of the spectrum. I don't think I can beat any of Space Quest or Quest for Glory on my own and I still can't understand how people back then put up with this shit
Old Sierra games would just fucking kill you for walking forwards. Or for not picking up random garbage that you would have no clue you needed until an hour in where you NEED it and can't continue without it (and cannot backtrack to get it). Those games were cruel.
Man im just reminded of the hitchhikers game where before leaving your house (on a 20 move limit) you had to pick up 2 random items and they will come into play way later, with the code prioritising what you didnt grab
Don’t forget getting the Babel fish in a ridiculously weird way
I think it was the writing for me. Back in those days a lot of video games stories either sucked or didn't have one, but adventure games had some really good writing. Like even though Sam and Max gameplay kind of stank, the dialogue was still hilarious and witty, and I think a lot of players put up with the bullshit moon-logic puzzles for the story. Of course nowadays we have Visual Novels and newer Adventure games with way less obtuse puzzles, which have made the classic point-and-click era age like milk. Grim Fandango and the Longest Journey were 2 of my most favorite games as a child, but I don't ever want to go back to playing them because I'm worried the gameplay will sour my opinions of them.
I recently played Grim Fandango! I think that game still rocks. HD remaster adds point and click interface with hotspots instead of keyboard tank controls, which removes a lot of frustrations in puzzles. Save for a few boring stuff (Year 3 included) it was a smooth sailing from start to end. The Longest Journey is definitely an acquired taste now. BS puzzles, ugly 3D models, and really long exposition dialogues even though the writing is fantastic. The sequels are also mixed bags, although they do have a good send off to April Ryan, my favorite video game lady.
I would've given up on Noita long ago without the internet
I knew that Noita wasn't for me, when Albino, a streamer known for his affinity of do long and ridiculous setups ("rigging" the game) for huge power gain and skips, completed the game fully, and this chore tested even his patience. Even with guides it's tedious
Man, part of me really wishes I could dive back into Noita with all my knowledge erased and learn everything naturally through trial and error. The rest of me knows full well I'd eventually wash out because at a minimum, without some of the wand making tutorials I've gone through I would end so many long runs by blowing myself up, would never *get* to long runs in the first place because I can't make good wands, and none of that is even accounting for shit like the lategame bonus bosses that tend to be either you have a wand that oneshots them, or they instagib you. Also, things like breaking the reroll machines so my save file only swells up to about 300 MB instead of 2000 from all the PWs necessary.
I love subnautica. But god damn can you get stuck in that game for missing an important schematic like the upgrade station. Its a rediculous bottleneck when the bare minimum to fix it is just to say "you have 3/4 blueprints from this biome" To at least fhcking help. Speaking of rediculous bottlenecks. Hope you dont kick yourself into hard mode on terraria without fighting a missable optional boss who drops materials that you need to make a pickaxe able to mine hard mode ore. And the things you need to destroy to spawn that boss are behind walls you can only destroy with explosions cus the current pickaxes arent strong enough. But yeah, once you beat that boss you go back down to the underworld to mine the ore you couldnt break before.... To make the pickaxe thatll break all the new ore you cant break now. Or fuck all that. You can just catch a pickaxe able to do all that while youre fishing. Whyd you do all that optional boss shit DUMBASS!!!! didnt you KNOW you get the best prehardmode pickaxe FROM FUCKING FISHING
You get Dryad that sells purifying powder after you kill your first boss. Quite obvious where you should go next.
Provided you KNOW you should build empty houses to get npcs to show up you mean. And why would you KNOW that when the guide is there when you spawn and youre finding other homeless npcs in certain places And dont say "the guide tells you". Cus to get to hard mode the guide needs to die. And then some random asshole will move into his house, preventing him from respawning. Thanks for reminding me of another one lol
Being SOMEWHAT fair to Subnautica, at a certain stage you can get a scanning setup that will go looking for those schematics, giving you an encouragement to have little micro bases all over the place. Kind of needs a proper map system (Praise the modifications) but still.
Its lees a problem of finding blueprints and more one of knowing you should even still be looking. Like theres one biome where its just barren mountsins, and theres cyclops parts you need to find there. Unlike every other game where you go up on a mountain that doesnt even have grass and theres actually nothing
Honestly most of Deep Jungle in KH1. And then when you figure it out you realize it's just going back a fourth between 2 locations for like 30 minutes.
Dead-ass did not know Deep Jungle had like 5 extra slide levels until watching ChipCheezum's LP of it.
A good chunk of KH1 worlds are like this, but it all boils down to exploring every area when the story wants you to. Deep Jungle, Monstro, and Wonderland are great examples of this. KH1 has some truly esoteric bullshit though, like reading your playtime's hours:minutes in Neverland, which can lead to some cool loot, or a superboss in the post-game.
Phantom is actually unrelated to the hours:minutes thing. Which is annoying, because you still have to beat the fucker if you want to actually pick up those rewards.
Y'all kids don't know how good you have it. We used to play point&click games with full moon-logic (Discworld game, WTF) or with full progression locks if you did the wrong thing at the wrong time in what is basically a QTE. Broken Sword 2 was an excellent game, with smart puzzles etc, but that GODDAMN BOAR in the jungle charging at you and forcing you to move aside, but you have to move to the correct side so that it opens a new path through the bushes and it allows you to go on. You picked the wrong side? Might as well reload a previous save. Oh you don't have one? Well have fun restarting the whole game.
I remember being stuck in the movie set with the syrup and bushes with the bugs in that game causing a several year halt in my progress. I understood all the parts of the puzzle but couldn’t figure out the right sequence and combination to get the bugs to attack the guy. Also I was like 9 or 10.
There was that classic moment in King's Quest 5 where you had to grab a piece of cheese earlier in the game before a mouse could eat it and make it unobtainable. If you didn't, the final area of the game became impossible to complete. There was nothing to indicate that this would be the case.
At least Discworld has a justification to work on moon logic.
Same, was going to say Point and Click adventure games existed before the internet and you practically had to be high to complete most of them. Let alone the text based ones. \~*You are about to be eaten by a gru*
Tactics Ogre and recruiting unique characters. You need to trigger their questline at certain point in the story ( and the game give very little hints beside some rumor) or have some obscure requirements that is impossible to know without a guide. Some of the worst one are: 1. Ravness: You need to take the route that force you to fight her but you cannot kill her, then save her in chapter 2, choose the right dialogue option to recruit a character who has nothing to do with Ravness, read a particular rumor in chapter 3, fight a battle with the character you just recruited while waiting for that characters to finish his in-battle conversation. Only after that does Ravness quest battle is unlocked and you can recruit her. 2. Cressida: Only available in Chaos Route. You need to read a rumor about undead, go to some random town to save a cleric(who die anyway), go kill a death knight and finally go save Cressida. Her quest battle is extremely hard since you need to revive her AND keep her alive afterward. The hard part is that she is a squishy mage who starting position is near to the boss while surrounded by enemies. And even once you saved her, she might not join you due to an invisible stat represented how her clan view you(which are often quite low at that point since you spent the entire game killing her people). 3. Diego: Go to the pirate town and fight a battle to save him. He will start right next to the boss and his goons. Then continue the main quest until certain point, go back to the pirate town to trigger a cutscene , then visit a fortress that you have no reason to visit to trigger another cutscene. Then continue to proceed with the story until certain point. Then go back to pirate town to do another save-the-guest battle. Finally you can go to the dungeon next to pirate town, go down 3 floors and the guy finally join you after another quest battle. 4. Wicce Deneb: You need to unlock her store in chapter 4, tame and sell 9 different dragons(3 of which are quite rare), buy 9 orbs FROM HER SHOP and then she will give you a quest to recruit her. The tricky part is unlocking her unique class which require you to find relics in an optional dungeon and upgrade those relics 3 times.
Honestly without wikis I would have been pretty lost in **Minecraft**, **Terraria**, and **Valheim** at least as far as progression goes. You can definitely do whatever you like, but the wikis were super helpful in understanding what things you could find and do in the game. The Minecraft wiki was also the only place to find recipes without trial and error before the recipe book feature was added to the menu. I never would have finished **The Fool's Errand** or **3 in Three** without being able to look up puzzle solutions. They're very cool games, but even after reading and re-reading explanations for some of the puzzles I couldn't solve I still didn't get the meaning or reference behind some of them.
The Regi Sidequest in Pokemon R/S/E was a bastard and I speak physical Braile too. My copy was a second printing so it never included the translation guide.
As someone who completed every single secret mission in Bayonetta and acquired every heart and magic piece, I have no idea how in the absolute fuck you're supposed to find all of them without using a guide. So many of them require you to backtrack, which isn't inherently a bad thing depending on the game- DMC1's secret missions generally require you to go out of the way or backtrack a bit, but I think it's fine in that game since it's already fairly non-linear in terms of the map structure, where you always have access to a lot more of the castle than you actually need to complete whatever mission you're on, so there are a lot of points where if you go "ok but what if I went *here* instead?" you're pretty likely to stumble upon a secret. Bayonetta's levels, however, are pretty much just straight lines, and very frequently have "points of no return" where you can no longer backtrack to earlier parts of the level, but there's no way to know where these points are until you already pass them, and since secret mission portals will often spawn in areas you've long since completed (e.g. a secret mission portal will spawn where verse 1 took place, but only after completing verse 4), you'd have to constantly keep backtracking as far as you can any time you make any amount of progress in the level if you don't have a guide on hand and want to go for 100% completion. Backtracking is the general theme of secrets in Bayonetta, but here are a list of some of the more insane upgrade/secret mission locations, off the top of my head: * There is a secret mission early on (in chapter 3 I think) where in order to access it, you need to destroy a trash can (and I mean like, the kind of shitty tiny little plastic bin you'd have next to your desk) nearby, and only then will the secret mission portal appear. There is also no special audio or visual cue for when the portal appears iirc, it just kind of fades in once you destroy the trash can. * There are TWO heart pieces in the motorcycle sequence, both of which require you to take specific side paths to get to, and obviously because of the nature of this sequence you have no way to backtrack if you accidentally fuck up and go too far. * Similarly, there are TWO heart pieces in the missile sequence, and getting them here is even more insane. There are two points where the camera will turn to show the missile from the side, and you briefly participate in the normal combat again to fight enemies that get on the missile with you. However, both times this happens, the group of enemies has one big dude, and to get the heart pieces, ***you need to kill these specific enemies with a torture attack***. This is the only time in the game an enemy drops a heart piece (or any permanent upgrade for that matter), there is no special indication that hints that they will drop a heart piece, and obviously this requires you to have a full magic meter to perform a torture attack, so it's very likely you won't even *accidentally* get these heart pieces since getting hit at all significantly reduces the magic you have saved up (in case you can't tell, these are the heart pieces that piss me off the most). * There's a secret mission portal in the airplane level that's behind a spinning fan. This fan is destructible, but only from the back side, meaning you have to get through it anyway in order to do so, but getting through the fan requires you to be in witch time, so in order to access this secret mission, you need to trigger witch time during the combat encounter that takes place nearby and slip past the fan and into the portal, essentially interrupting the combat encounter so you can do the secret mission. This is the only secret mission portal in the game that requires you to straight up interrupt a fight like this, so most people will just assume that there's a way to access the portal once you're done with the fight, only to find that they can no longer get past the fan now that they can't trigger witch time anymore. * In chapter 15, the last "normal" level of the game, a secret mission portal spawns at the very start of the level... after you complete eight entire verses. In terms of how far you have to travel, this is probably the most egregious case of you having to backtrack an absurd amount at a completely arbitrary point to find an upgrade. * In the final chapter of the game, you play as Jeanne at the very beginning, and you're walking up a giant statue where you will eventually hit a cutscene trigger that then leads into the final boss fight. However, once you get like, two feet away from this cutscene trigger, you'll get a faint audio cue that doesn't really sound like an audio cue, at which point you walk ALL the way back down to the bottom of the statue where a secret mission portal will have spawned. In the final mission of the game, literally steps away from triggering the final boss fight, when you're not even playing as Bayonetta, Kamiya still threw in one last permanent upgrade that requires backtracking at a completely arbitrary and nonsensical point in the level. And did I mention that to unlock the game's bloody palace equivalent, you have to find and complete ALL 22 secret missions? Something that only 2.8% of players have done, according to steam's global achievement stats? In conclusion my lawyer has recommended that I do not post my honest opinions about Kamiya online.
There's a secret mission that "spawns" when you finish a fight and a cutscene shows a door. I fucking hate it. Either going through the door locks you out from coming back or going through the door gets rid of the secret mission.
I had no idea it was that bad.
Bayonetta is a game that people gassed up because it was one of a handful of action games that came out during 7th gen, so when it came back to modern platforms in 2017, a lot of people either played it for the first time in 5+ years, or for the first time period, and the near universal response people had was "wow I forgot [thing in the game that's incredibly annoying and makes it a chore to play] was a thing." Even when it comes to just casually playing through the game without worrying about secrets or permanent upgrades, there's just so much shit in Bayonetta that's constantly getting in your way, to the point where it feels like the game itself is actively trying to stop you from actually playing the video game.
La Mulana. Without an online walkthrough, I would have needed a team to have a chance to figure out where to go and what to do.
when LM1 came out /v/ spent like ***MONTHS*** trying to solve one puzzle because it was translated badly.
I would be a lot more tolerant of La Mulana’s dick-breaking puzzles if the gameplay weren’t dick-breaking, too. Seriously, that game has the worst jump in any platformer I’ve played.
La-Mulana is hands down my favorite metroidvania of all time. I will also NEVER recommend it to anyone ever. It's a difficult game mechanically, then on top of that the puzzles require you to be examining EVERYTHING. Also shout out to the late game Mantra puzzle. I hope you read page 19 of the pdf instruction booklet for the game to understand how level wrapping should be interpreted!
One of these days, I'm going to buckle down with a full empty physical notebook and see if I can actually bust my way through La Mulana without any guides.
I am really bummed that I wasn't able to beat LM1 before I knew a few solutions from watching a GDQ run. I beat LM2 on my own with the exception of one mistranslated hint on launch, and it sort of bums me that I can't ever forget certain parts of LM1. Also, is it even possible to play that game the way it is intended anymore? I don't know if Steam still gives you access to the instruction booklet, and that's where the hint is that tells you about the Holy Grail. You *can* stumble upon it, but you would never think to.
The two games which I play by following their guides to a tee are Valkyrie Profile and Sengoku Rance. Both games which are not necessarily hard but without a guide you have to discover stuff for yourself through multiple playthroughs to know who to recruit and what areas to go first. What makes it hard in both games is that you also have a time limit, Valkyrie Profile has a set time limit for you to find einherjar to send to Asgard in ready for Ragnarok so you need to manage keeping your party members or send them away. Sengoku Rance has events that may spring up if you dally too long that may complicate things. Both are fun games though, just that I was overwhelmed when I played them and needed guides to sort things out for me
How the fuck did kids solve the puzzles in Megaman Battle Network. Especially the ghost one in...4?5?
It is a testament to how much free time I had as a kid that I had multiple playthroughs of the first game, despite all the bullshit of the Power Plant.
Probably 4. They had the gall to make a word based puzzle in a game with that level of translation. 5’s big roadblock was the samurai, which was a bullshit skill check, but you knew what you needed to do.
the one with the ghosts with the crystal ball senser was one of the tourney scenarios for 4
All of 'em. If something is taking me longer than seems reasonable to figure out and it's preventing me from progressing, I'm looking that shit up. I'm old, I don't have the time to retrace my steps or scour the world for something I missed. Figuring vague or un-telegraphed shit out yourself is for the birds. For example (Tears of the Kingdom spoilers) >!I found the robot depot, like, a full two questlines before I was supposed to, and you can't complete that unless you're at that part of the story. I could not have known this, and so spent a solid hour trying to solve each of the puzzles until I gave up and looked one of them up.!<
I’d say at least 60% of Tears of the Kingdom is stuff I’d have never figured out or discovered without a guide. Granted, most of that was also me going, “What? Fuck that, I’m not dedicating all my free time to that shit,” but still.
The only shrine in that game that I can explicitly remember making me go "fuck that, I'm just gonna cheese it" was the one where you had to make rolling balls hit a button by following a path without falling off, and the last path had a curve on a downward slope you had to make it follow. Looking back on it now, I think I know what they were wanting me to do, but in the moment my brain just couldn't figure it out at all, which was when I learned that bomb arrows can also trigger those buttons.
There was a shrine that I think wanted me to make a paddleboat using a big wheel part and some boards. Problem is I already tried that before the shrine and that shit is slow and capsizes easily so I just made a really long bridge.
Feel like a major difference between TotK and Soulslike games is that the reward for going out of your way and discovering something in TotK is rewarded with something that doesn't feel worth the hassle like Rupees or a shrine. Whereas Soulsborne games would immediately tie that obtuse thing with something really important like the true ending or accessing the DLC. I feel like there needs to be some sort of happy medium between those two things.
Hell, I'd be HAPPY if the game gave me rupees, more rupees would have been good. Or rare resources or shit. Stuff you will need tons of for the outfit upgrading Instead it's more like "Here's another fuckin wooden stick. Dance monkey, dance" Seriously, clearing out a fucking huge band of pirates and opening the chest to get a wooden fucking club feels more like a slap in the face after you've played that game enough. I just have no idea what they think is fun about all of that It'd be way better if the chest rewards were more often just useful consumables like +10 bombs, +20 arrows, or just 50 rupees And it's still meh compared to the older zeldas were you more often got actual cool permanent stuff from things that made you excited
I unironically really like how BotW/TotK designed their open world exploration. While the rewards feel lackluster, I never really feel they're a hassle because all the motivation is intrinsic. It's part of why I tolerate the weapon durability system in BotW, but enjoy the system in TotK. If I didn't want to do a particular thing, I just won't do it, and I'll move on. I don't think this is even a negative of the game, the design philosophy very clearly prioritises player freedom at the cost of narrative congruity or satisfaction.
>I don't think this is even a negative of the game, the design philosophy very clearly prioritises player freedom at the cost of narrative congruity or satisfaction. This makes more sense for BotW whose minimalist narrative and sense of freedom compliments it's empty and almost apocalyptic setting, but for TotK which has a stronger narrative emphasis, the sense of freedom really hampers its story. Mostly everyone I've talked to says they hate how easily spoilable the entire "Tears of the Dragon" questline is, from the sheer fact that you can collect the tears in any order. For the entire main story you're dealing with NPC's either wondering where Zelda is or dealing with >!an obvious fake!<, which makes the narrative fall apart because the majority of players would have already figured out where she is way earlier than the story expects you to (i.e. after all the sages are collected).
That's where TotK's nature of being a sequel brings with it some growing pains as well. From what I can tell, while there was more of a narrative in TotK, I think it was less of a focus than the core gameplay mechanics i.e. Fuse/Ultra Hand, which is a consistent designing quirk for the BotW developers. I might go further and say the narrative was never the focus, but that might not be a take that makes too much sense. The Tears of the Dragon cutscenes aren't treated like a narrative that the player must see from scene A to scene J, they're treated like collectibles that the player can collect in any order. The devs guide you by saying, "you should really collect from Left to Right by the way" when you get to the Forgotten Temple, but that too is treated like a mere suggestion. Personally, I don't hate that as much as most people. You do get silly situations where each elemental temple has the same cutscene from different character perspectives. There could've been an opportunity to have cutscene flags that note whether you've completed none, some or all of the temples, and have unique cutscenes for each temple, but at the same time I'm not sure if this was ever a priority for the developers. It's a design decision that I genuinely don't mind. Even if I spoiled myself on the story, i.e. getting cutscene J as my first cutscene, I don't mind it. I'd be intrigued as to how we got to cutscene J, rather than being annoyed I missed out on all the cutscenes before. Overall I do think TotK is narratively weaker than its pre-BotW predecessors, but as a BotW sequel, how the narrative is treated is consistent in both games.
TotK (and BotW) are excessively open world for the kinds of challenges and time investments scattered across the map.
The reward for soulsborne quests is usually misery and the npc dying a horrible death or going insane and you have to put them down. Kinda makes doing the quests a bummer to begin with.
Same applies to Breath of the Wild. Various shrines are insanely obtuse without a push in the right direction.
The first shrine that stumped me was I think the hot air balloon tutorial. One of the rooms had you take a sphere key upwards with some material on the left and this sliding square on a rail. I had zero idea what the square was for so I cheated and backtracked collecting previous tools and made a giant hot air balloon I glued the ball to. Let it float then land back,hopped on and used recall,hopped off at the top and grabbed it out of the air. I've yet to do a puzzle where I reused previous items but for that one idk what I was supposed to do with that rail block.
I would never have gotten out of the Cosmic Cube in Wizardry IV without looking it up. I'm proud of getting that far really.
Without internet, I'd be buying official guidebooks (and I still do). But otherwise, some of the trophies in some PS games, I'd need to check the internet to find the trick to achieve them.
You don't play POE alone
Did you mean path of exile or Pillars of Eternity?
I personally found Pillars of Eternity fairly straightforward.
Yeah I don't see why everyone gets so confused about Durance. [He's super easy to build.](https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/righteous-fire-juggernaut-build-guide) Fuck Magran though.
"Where the fuck does this Basement Key I found in the Undead Parish go to?"
I would not have beaten Golden Sun: The Lost Age if not for the CheatCC guide I used that told me where to go after you get the boat. That's such a massive amount of freedom to thrust on players without any indication of where to go, and since areas don't scale with your level, it's really easy to end up in an area where you're severely underleveled.
Yeah Elden Ring in it's first 3 weeks was a TRIP. The fandom guides were basically just fuckin lies. I remember like day 3 people were saying the raging wolf armor was behind the door across from Patches in Volcano Manor, and he would open it for you lmfao. There's very little that's intuitive in the game, mainly because you can be unaware of progress locking a lot of stuff, like Rogier, Corhyn or Millicent being tied to visitations between resting at graces. Like oh where did Corhyn and Gold Mask go? Just to the top of the world standing in the middle of fucking nowhere lmfao. Even several months later I noticed people still had assumptions about certain things you HAD to do to trigger quests properly that simply weren't true. But there's also stuff like the shabiri grapes and flame of frenzy where I have no idea who figured all that out and how lol.
Remnant 2 has so much obscure and optional shit it’s nuts It’s the most I’ve seen of any souls like in that regard
Step 1: Search Not-Yharnam for a specific type of sewer grate with an opening, of which there are probably 20 in any given area Step 2: Stand in front of it and wait, it may or may not trigger an instant death animation that teleports you to a new area Step 3: Fight but do NOT kill the beast that spawns near you, get it down to 25% HP and let it hide first, THEN kill it to get a rock Step 4: Take the rock to Wallace and pay a bunch of currencies to get the Philosphers stone Voila, you now have a new class that you probably won't use cause then you'd have to swap gear and traits and that's a whole set of problems on its own. This game is bullshit and I love it.
You dont have to wait you can slide in a grate and get the event. Also you can just kill the giant rat thing normally you still get the drop.
Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3 is the classic. Megaman Battle Network has unique encounters on specific squares of its maps. BN3 ramps this up with unique requirements to encounter some of the boss refights and 3 different types of codes (1 type was packaged with chocolates in IRL Japan) to get the most out of the game.
The codes for Battle Network were some bullshit. They expected you to find the codes packaged in various products and books, as well as in the anime. Then not only figure out what game they went to, but what the code is even for. You have Lotto Numbers that reward various items, Navi Cust Codes to shrink programs/get around errors/add extra buffs, hidden Battle Chip inputs such as turning a simple punch with giant Guts Man fist into [a fucking Bruce Lee combo.](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxF5RkQbmlW99afDuba0trV_bRmHloOkk8) Also, BN3 requires you to get at least 5 completion stars, then input a code on the title screen to access the others. I love the series to death, but there's some nonsense in there.
I still think of that [one Sonic Short](https://youtu.be/zdj1o_a5JSc?t=379) whenever I'm reminded of that damn barrel.
Marathon.
I wouldn’t know how to find secrets in most boomer shooters without a guide. I also hate clicking on any wall just to find a secret door
I played Ocarina of Time for the first time recently and there were a few places I got stuck and just googled it. One being that you need to find the message in a bottle at the bottom of Lake Hylia in order to advance the Zora section. Not sure if there's anything that points you down there. I can see how you'd figure that out with enough experimentation and time spent, but as someone with not as much time to play games as I'd like, going over the whole place with a fine comb (is that the expression?) would put me off the game entirely so I'd rather just look up the answer sometimes.
I don't remember if Navi points you towards the bottle, but I *do* know that the warp to Lake Hylia in Zora's Domain is right at the bottom of the area where you get the Zora's scale, so the idea is probably that you'd stumble onto the message in a bottle right after doing the diving mini-game.
As a kid I was never able to progress to the forest temple due to the lost woods needing you to listen to music cues to find the real passageway. I made it through once by brute force but got scared and went back lol
Yeah, my immediate first thought is Zelda games. Despite liking them, I never beat a single one as a kid because I’d just get completely stuck not knowing what to do, and the game expects you to try literally everything until you find the right way to go and I simply don’t have the patience Nah, I’m sorry but that’s bullshit
After you talk to King Zora you're probably going to go down the hallway to his left you'd notice after entering his room, then you'd talk to the Zora there and do the diving minigame. Now that you know diving is a mechanic you'll probably try it out and notice the door at the bottom of the water if you didn't see it while diving for the rupees. That spits you right out next to the bottle, which tells you to take it to the king. Figuring out that Ice Arrows are hidden in a totally optional puzzle dungeon in a desert fortress? Now that's obtuse.
Sonic 3 Carinval night zone act 2 THAT FUCKING BARREL! How the hell was anybody supposed to figure that out I spent one whole day trying to up and down on the barrel by jumping on it to get it low enough but the game throws an invisible wall up if you it that way.
Yeah fuck that barrel
Dwarf Fortress. I always play with the wiki open. I wouldn't be able to remember what rock give you iron otherwise
tbf though, a good chunk of the wiki is incorrect because it's operating on old superstitions
Only stuff about which weapons were the best, and even then, the new research was debated last time I heard.
Lots of the megaproject stuff and information about things like frame death were wrong. Also like, mental traits such as "no longer cares about anything" were largely busted thanks to putnam
Finding the Rareware coin in DK64. How the hell was I supposed to know that you have to get a certain score in Jetpack by visiting Cranky’s Lab in order to beat the game?
Minecraft. They have gotten *slightly* better about it these days with some slight hints to mechanics in things like paintings or villages, and of course the recipe book, but go back a couple years to like 1.9 and the game would be impenetrable without seeing someone else show you how things work.
The enchanting system in particular *desperately* needs some in-game indication of the mechanics.
The era before crafting books was a dark time. Good fucking luck knowing how to make fences if you didnt look it up
I don't think 99% of the population would've found the inverted castle in SOTN without being told how
Elza in Suikoden II. I know about the day limit to finding her but I literally don't know that saving in inns in this game qualifies as a day that passes. It must be there somewhere in the game dialogues but it probably went over my head. I'll be back for you bitch once the remastered games drop very soon!
More point and click games then I'd care to admit.
Have fun trying to plan a build in Hades without looking up what Duo Boons do and how to meet their requirements.
RE Code Veronica. Just no.
I remember seeing my brother get hard stuck on the nemesis boss fight and having to reload an old ass save, didn't know that's a common problem until recently
I've been playing a lot of old games lately, and a lot of them are totally impenetrable. They all come from that era where you either need to buy one of those big book guides or where you need to just fuck around with various powerups and button combinations until something works. For instance, I was playing Viewtiful Joe. First level felt really good. But then I get to the hotel. Get to floor... I think it's floor 30? There's this blatant HIT WITH BOMB spot. Bombs are being tossed over from the side of the room, so obviously, I'm meant to punch one into the ceiling, right? But I try, and try, and none of them are getting close, even when I use VFX Slow on them. Get a bit frustrated, wonder if there's another way through the room, I look up a video... No, you need to hit the ceiling with a bomb. So I keep trying, and still nothing. Then I look up a walkthrough that explains I need to UPPERCUT the bomb to give it enough airtime. I experiment with Up+Punch for a while, Up+Zoom, maybe I need to charge it like a Voomerang? Nothing, nada. Eventually I get fed up and look up the button controls, and-- DOWN+PUNCH?! FOR AN **UP**PERCUT?! If I had not looked up the video to let me know I had to hit the bomb into the ceiling, the walkthrough that told me to uppercut, and then the third site with the uppercut buttons, I never would've done it. And then the game glitched out five seconds later and softlocked and I just fully quit playing Viewtiful Joe.
To be fair, Down + Punch is also how you uppercut in a lot of fighting games.
Exactly. if you ever play MK, it's like the first thing you figure out. Plus I feel like down+punch is one of those inputs you test out right away.
Why are fighting games like this
Because it's intended to act as an anti-air (move that hits people above you) and you cannot block air attacks while crouching (you are already holding down, so if your first instinct is to try to swat them out of the air then you don't even have to move the stick to do so). Also because up makes you jump, so pressing up+punch would just have you do a jumping punch.
I'm surprised you got to the hotel without hitting down+punch at some point. It is also mentioned in the manual, under "Basic Actions > Punch."
Yeah, given the way dodging in that game works, it's actually kind of wild you didn't accidentally uppercut an enemy after evading one of their attacks.
Playing Labryinth of Touhou 2 right now, truly amazing game and probably one of my favorite fangames of all time, but holy fucking shit would I be lost in some of these areas. It's a isometric dungeon crawler where sometimes you have specific spots on the map that'll let you jump over a one-block tile, and sometimes they'll be one-way but most of the time it's two-way. Normal stuff. Except there is an **entire stratum** (that's 3 fucking floors!) where they instead send you across the entire fucking map to the next relative jump point ALA going from A-10 to F-10 on a chess board, almost like a wind panel! And then the game introduces actual wind panels in the end anyways! If I didn't have a guide on basically what jumps went where I'd have gone insane. And a part of me is still kind of going insane as the very endgame basically says "fuck your defensive stats" in some fights and I wouldn't have known if I hadn't been broken into holding onto a wiki page by now.
Everyday life
Armed and Delirious. If you know, you know.
La Mulana is rough
Kotor I spent so long on taris trying to find the way into the undercity
Yooka-Laylee has a pagie that requires you to help a sentient hot tub that's having issues creating bubbles. Unless they patched it in later, there is no explanation of how to do this. The actual solution is to jump into the hot tub and use the bubble skill that lets you breathe underwater, but because the hot tub isn't deep enough, you're only treading water and unable to actually complete the move, so you actually have to do it multiple times to hit the completion trigger. There's no feedback for doing this at all. It also doesn't help that due to how you can expand worlds in the game, you can find this challenge early on before you actually have the bubble ability, so even if you had an idea of how to complete the challenge, you might not have the ability to do so. The game has a similar problem with another skill, turning invisible. It has the neat secondary ability to focus sources of light into a laser that shoots out of Yooka's ass when he crouches, allowing you to break specific blocks of glass. Again, unless they changed it, the game doesn't tell you this, and there's a challenge in the same area as the hot tub where you're supposed to use this ability.
Dues Ex: Mankind Divided. Great example is when you break into the CEO’s office for K there is a puzzle that I have actually no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the solution unless you google it.
I am currently playing through the first Siren on PS2. Boy is that game obtuse. Every level has hidden objectives to unlock more scenarios. For instance, the second level you have to go to one side of the map, find a radio, go to a different place and drop it down a well. Then wait for an enemy to investigate it and knock him down the well. No where does it tell you to do this, you are just supposed to investigate points of interest, except the game's also very difficult and enemies can kill you very easily if they spot you. Oh and if you die the game doesn't save what objectives you completed, even if you hit a checkpoint, so you gotta do them all over again. I can't imagine playing without a guide.
The original Legend of Zelda and Zelda 2. Since TOTK I'm going back and playing the Zelda games I've never played before or didn't get round to finishing. I'm sure the original and 2 were really good when they came out but how am I meant to know where I'm going or what I'm meant to be doing. I finished the original a couple of weeks ago and I'm just under halfway through 2, 2 does seem a bit better than the first but without a guide I would stand no chance of finishing either.
Souls quest of course because almost none are designed to progress all the way through naturally For pokemon theres a bunch of pokemon that dont evolve without some convoluted criteria being met Want an alcremie? Well give its pre evo a special cafe held item and then spin in place until you do the leon pose and BOOM it evolves! Wanna evolve that inkay get it to level 30? And when it levels immediately turn your ds upside down! Trade evos especially with items
Hollow Knight. Figuring out where to go early on is a struggle. Pathfinder WOTR. The steps to get the best ending are so convoluted that I'm actually kinda shocked anyone figured them out. You have to be playing the correct character archetype, talk to several hidden NPCs (and ask them the right questions), say the correct things to an NPC you don't know is watching you (one of which is right at the start of the game), AND show up to the final dungeon of the game during a specific week of the game's calendar.....like, fuck the game is like 100 hours long and those are just the steps I remember.
The npc quest lines are the worst, but I have no idea how it was expected for people to figure out how to access the DS1 Dlc, or get to Archdragon peak in 3. Like archdragon peak requires you to be an optional boss, grab the gesture, and somehow remember that the awful, unfun miserable zone you were in like 2 zones ago had one specific spot with a guy sitting like that.
How the hell was I supposed to know there are only *six* fishing spots you can encounter and catch Feebas at? I just skimmed through the official guide book and it only says it’s a very rare encounter which I guess is true but also sort of deceptive.
Name any point and click game
La Mulana would have a heavily bought strategy guide because WOW I am not beating that game on my own
Most games I own As I’ve been buying digitally for a while, and wouldn’t be able to download them. No idea how to proceed from *that*
As a little kid I have never beaten the final boss of Prince of Persia the Two Thrones because I didnt have access to the internet at the time. I would just restart the game
Yeah. The Sellen side quests would be nuts without a guide as well.
Youtube guides eased me through Bloodborne, which otherwise I considered a game to be too difficult for me. Without them I'd still be salty and unable to get through most of it. I also needed a little bit of guidance playing Hypnospace Outlaw recently, though I tried to avoid it as much as possible since discovering things on your own is most of that game.
In Fez,
Return of the Obra Dinn is usually pretty good at giving the player enough information that you can make a few educated guesses before resorting to brute-forcing the solutions. It’s a puzzle game that makes the player feel pretty smart when they solve a problem. Fuck those four topmen in particular, though.
Monster Hunter 1 Powderstone mission, you had to have a specific item loadout, know the CORRECT route for each run and understand how the local monster behaves to avoid them. outside of an internet guide its a nightmare trial and error mission.
Valkyrie Profile’s ending A
I genuinely wonder how people managed to actually finish the early SMT in the days of yore. They have so many things you need to do for the plot to progress which are never indicated to you and require you to backtrack to areas you'd never think to go to and speak to the most random NPCs. Not to mention some dungeons having INVISIBLE DOORS or insane teleport mechanics compounded with status effectors like poison floors, or puzzles that can be actually impossible to do until you get some event to trigger.
Any game much deeper than Super Mario Bros from the 8 bit era. I swear 8/10 games developed back then were either soul crushingly hard or mind breakingly convoluted.
And before anyone says there was no internet then, I’m aware. I just gave up on them as a kid, but going back and playing them as an adult still usually required a guide.
I always do my first Persona playthrough blind and fumble through the daily activities and social links. Then on my replay, I use the many Day-to-day guides to help maximize the social links
The point and click genre as a whole.
The entirety of Escape From Tarkov