How are you all playing these insanely complex games?

Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate.

I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.

I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it’s an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.

So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?

E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!

ag_roberston_author,
@ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org avatar

First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it’s almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.

A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the “Send to camp” option for items. Grab them whenever, they don’t take up inventory space.

frog,

For me, it’s a combination of “just jump in and wing it” and building on top of working knowledge from previous similar games. But I’m very much a “learning while doing” person, so if I tried to research how to play a game first, it’s not like the knowledge would sink in. I build up a working knowledge by jumping in and trying stuff out, and a lot of knowledge has at least some cross-compatibility between games of the same genre, even if the game mechanics are a bit different. As I play a lot of games with my partner, we’re often both learning a new game at the same time, and you’d be amazed how often we’ll have a conversation that can be summarised as “I’ve discovered how to do X. It’s like Y from game Z, except you do A instead of B.”

When the game allows for it, I always play on the easiest difficulty setting while I’m learning, as that makes the game more forgiving of mistakes. There’s no shame in playing on easy mode, even for serious gamers. :)

Poggervania,
@Poggervania@kbin.social avatar

BG3 is based on arguably the most user-friendly version of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (5e). Larian themselves also do a fantastic job at easing you into the mechanics via gameplay, so you can honestly jump in and just play something that sounds cool to you without worrying about having to min-max or optimize your character. The game lays out what you get on each level-up pretty well and it defaults you to being a single class, so you won’t have to worry about multi-classing unless you want to - and because it’s based on 5e, you can honestly get away with not optimizing your build that much, if even at all, and manage to do fine as long as your main damage (STR for melee, DEX for ranged and Finesse weapons)/casting stat (INT for Wizards, CHA for Bards/Sorcerers, and WIS for Clerics/Druids) is high.

Can’t speak on OW2, but with games like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide, I found it’s best to just play it and figure stuff out slowly from experience. A lot of it can sound complicated, but I found it’s easier to digest the complexity of the mechanics and systems a bit at a time as your experience with the game grows. Like with Vermintide, as an example, I recently started really diving in deep with Cleave, Stagger, and Frontline/Heavy Frontline/Tank property mechanics and numbers for melee weapons; you literally cannot see these things from the game’s UI, and starting out I had no idea these things even existed, and it only really matters once you start playing on the hardest difficulties, Legend and Cataclysm. If I had to figure out all that stuff early on, I would nope out of the game super quick lmao.

Moonguide,

5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.

Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.

Megaman_EXE,

For destiny, I have no idea. I first played D2 when it launched and that was fine, but I attempted to pick it up again a year or two later and I was immediately lost.

For overwatch I agai haven’t played in quite some time. But for multiplayer shooters like that I try to go into a casual mode or training mode first and just get a feel for everything. Eventually you get the hang of things.

For RPG’s it depends. Some games can benefit from reading up online. For example I’m playing bloodborne right now and I had no idea how I wanted to spec out my character. So I looked up what weapons and abilities are in the game and made my decision based around that. If a game features a respec option, I’ll be more likely to just go in and wing it and change things up when I need to.

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

casual mode or training mode first and just get a feel for everything

These usually don’t have any explanation of the game mechanics though. Like you’d have to sit down and analyze all the character traits on some web forum in order to not get immediately slaughtered by other more experienced players, since it’s multiplayer only.

valaramech,
@valaramech@kbin.social avatar

Getting repeatedly beaten in competitive multiplayer games is just kinda par for the course if you haven't learned the meta, strategies, etc. If you lack game knowledge and your opponents have that game knowledge, you will mostly lose.

If winning in the game is the only way you find enjoyment in them, then those kinds of games require significant investments of time and energy to "git good".

I say this as someone who is repeatedly shit on in every game of CoD I've ever played and will play in the future. That said, I don't gain particular enjoyment from winning alone - not that it isn't fun to win, just that I get just as much enjoyment from other aspects of the game.

It sounds to me, mostly, that these games just don't really appeal to your idea of what's fun.

dark_stang,
@dark_stang@beehaw.org avatar

Games like Baldur’s Gate assume you have at least some DnD experience. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time long ago and being really glad I played one session of DnD before it.

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Oh wow, okay, good to know. Well my brother has agreed to play the co-op with me and help me out. Maybe I’ll learn to love it. Just not sure I want to 😂

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

The first two Baldur's Gates sure did, but not so much BG3.

Nepenthe,

I'm not so sure. I've not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn't been so into watching videos of other peoples' dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.

As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don't. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don't have a need to go over when you're not the one at the table.

Those aren't things OP would know enough about to even know they don't know, so I'm glad they have someone helping them. I don't consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they're starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I've played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

I'm no D&D expert myself. I got through those other two BG games with a lot of frustration (and "narrative"/god mode for the last quarter of BG2), and pretty much the only things I didn't understand just from reading tooltips in BG3 were the numbers governing saving throw DCs and the to hit chance with certain spells.

kandoh,

Sounds like you have mind goblins

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Scary

uphillbothways,
@uphillbothways@kbin.social avatar

Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you've gained from prior experimentation.

Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it's an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren't particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.

A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.

Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.

argo_yamato,

Generally I just start playing. If the game keeps my attention and I keep playing at some point all the various character abilities, what is valuable or not and managing items just clicks. And some days I just don’t feel like figuring stuff out so I play games I am familiar with.

ulkesh,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

Experience. I’ve been playing video games for 40 years. Many of them of any given genre tend to follow a familiar formula. While I also wing it, like others have said, it usually doesn’t take long to recognize the patterns of the formula.

gullible,

Never played destiny and never will, but deep rock galactic, overwatch, and baldur’s gate all have mechanics rooted in other games. After playing a few other ability-heavy shooters with slower onboarding, OW and DRG make sense.

MoogleMaestro,
@MoogleMaestro@kbin.social avatar

Insanely deep rpgs are a bit of an issue for me as well. And I generally do love rpg games, but I feel like the good ones should ease you into decisions a bit better than dropping you into a character creator.

So it's a mixed bag for me.

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