How are you all playing these insanely complex games?

Magnus, 7 months ago

Wing it, discovering that I’ve made a massive mistake is part of the fun, I don’t want to spoil any game with let’s plays. I don’t try to get the most optimal build I’m just looking to have fun. I use what ever gun I enjoy the most in borderlands, yeah when it starts to feel weak I swap but I’m not going to use a gun I hate because it does two more damage that one I love.

Titan, 7 months ago

No need to watch tutorials on how to create a character brother. Figuring things out as you play is the fun part

Glide, 7 months ago

BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.

The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.

WeLoveCastingSpellz, 7 months ago

I already was a dnd fan so I understood how character creation worked but still spent a good one and a half hour in the character creator. This is something I enjoy though.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

Wow!

Overzeetop, 7 months ago

Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.

averyminya, 7 months ago

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.

Why do you need to know? Just pick one and go with it!

Deep Rock Galactic

I haven’t played much but, it’s not complicated? There’s a main lobby where you select a quest, then you go on it. It generally involved following a path and gathering/dropping off stuff with some fighting in between.

Overwatch

This one is just anticipating other people’s movement on a map, which can be chaotic but I don’t really think it’s complicated? Honestly if you’re having issues just play Paladins instead I would stick by 1 or 2 teammates and just focus on staying with them no matter what. Over time you’ll learn what works and doesn’t work.

Destiny

Now THIS one is complicated bullshit. lol

cheesymoonshadow, 7 months ago

I’m a casual gamer and I used to play Overwatch. There’s always the practice range or training room, I forget what it’s called. But what really got me learning all the characters was playing Mystery Heroes over and over.

exponential_wizard, 7 months ago

As with any competitive game, in overwatch you are expected by other players to understand complex strategies that have evolved over time, which can be stressful for a newcomer.

It doesn’t help that many players who don’t understand the Meta aren’t afraid to chime in. Standing in front of you holding up my shield isn’t my job, learn how to use cover fool.

frank, 7 months ago

Dan Olson has a good video on this topic. It’s tough to get into some larger player base competitive games

m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU

helenslunch, 7 months ago

Rocket League has a really great ranking system that ensures that I’m always playing with members of a similar skill level, but also always challenging myself to move up the ranks.

I really wanted to like BattleBit but couldn’t be bothered to grind to get the better weapons while constantly being slaughtered by much more experienced players with much better equipment.

comicallycluttered, 7 months ago

Lol, some of these replies…

I think you know what it is you enjoy, so you’ve just got to remember not to fall into that trap of “well, everyone says it’s good, so I must try it”.

The great reviews come from the people who already enjoy that kind of game. Like, reviewers on a site usually favor specific genres. If something gets a good review, you’ve got to put it into the context of whether or not it’s something the reviewer usually plays.

You’re not often going to see an RPG review by someone who mostly plays platformers.

So if an RPG is good to an RPG-enjoyer reviewer, and most of the people picking it up are already RPG fans, then good reviews are always going to be biased in favor of people who enjoy that gaming experience.

My advice?

Take a look at the tags on Steam. I know they’re user-submitted and “RPG” is on like every fucking game now, but things like “turn-based”, “tactical”, “simulation”, “crafting”, and a few others I’m forgetting will most likely be the things you’ll want to avoid (maybe there will be some exceptions here and there).

Also, wait a bit. No need to play games immediately. Play some stuff you enjoy for a year and then see if you still want to play it.

As for how and why people play these games… Just preference really. It comes down to the energy and time someone’s willing to commit. Neither a good thing or bad thing. Some find that thrilling, others find it chore. Both perspectives are perfectly valid.

Sometimes, people just enjoy them as is without getting too deep and never bother with “the meta” or whatever. Usually one of two things happens here: either they really enjoy it because they don’t have people backseat gaming them and telling them how to play and they’re finding creative ways to do things, or they find it a miserable experience because it’s just not fun if they don’t like the core mechanics.

I personally don’t have the energy for “deep complex games”, despite enjoying RPGs and immersive sims. I don’t ever bother with crafting or strategy games (although I did get into Civ V for a while, which was nice).

Over the years, I’ve learned what I like, what I don’t like, and just wait things out. Game Pass and deep sales help a lot here, actually. (Also other options, but not strictly ones people necessarily approve of for various reasons.)

Kolanaki, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic and Overwatch are complex?

I play Dwarf Fortress. And I got into it before the Steam version gave it a functional UI. Maybe I’m just spoiled. I’ve been gaming since I was 3 or 4, so like 90% of what most games require is already ingrained in me. That last 10% is the stuff unique to a particular game; and recently I’m finding these unique things to be the only things not taught in a tutorial. And that is pretty annoying that they will teach the basic controls, which even a non gamer could figure out in mere seconds, but not a mechanic unique to that specific game that no other game has done before.

stardreamer, 7 months ago

Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.

bionicjoey, 7 months ago

The Baldur’s Gate character creator is a lot less daunting if you’ve played D&D before. Honestly I’ve seen far scarier character creation screens

HatchetHaro, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Here’s a fun thing you can do: just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.

Baldur’s Gate 3 may be very daunting at first, even with its genius tooltip system, so I just went straight into it with a Dragonborn barbarian with no real thought put into it other than “he’s hot and totes my new fursona”. You’d be surprised at how far you get and how much you pick up naturally over the next 80 hours of gameplay.

That being said, it’s still not for everyone, as much as it tries to be, and if even Overwatch is too complex for you already, it might just be that the evolving game design in the industry is becoming more misaligned with your tastes, and that gamers are becoming more and more serious about the video games they play.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.

Haha I mentioned this elsewhere but that’s kinda what I did. Just picked random everything. I just feel like I’m going to get my ass kicked in the first altercation with a weak-ass character and be stuck there permanently.

Faydaikin, 7 months ago

Don’t worry too much about it. It’s part of the Role-Playing charm.

After my own first couple of playthroughs with “serious characters” I just started screwing around with fun builds.

The “Double Chaos” sorceror is fun and stupid way to complete the game. Sometimes I’m a doomsday machine in battle, others times I’m a sheep…

bipmi, 7 months ago

Unless you do obviously dumb things, like not doing anything at all and letting the enemies hit you, you literally could not fail at baldurs gate on default difficulty. I actually find it way too easy to succeed and far too forgiving. You could genuinely go through the whole game with your “picked random everything” character. Youll get your ass kicked a few times, but youll never get stuck anywhere. The only part thats complex is the story IMO. There are dozens of alternative endings and secret story bits and hidden interactions between characters. Almost every quest, no matter how small, has multiple endings. You could probably sink 1000 hours into BG3 without going through most of the story content.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

Thank you

Don_alForno, 7 months ago

Then you respec your character.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

And start over completely?

Zozano, 7 months ago

I wonder how long before someone starts getting offended on behalf of cavemen for the phrase Ooga Booga.

Seriously though, perhaps RPG’s just aren’t for OP. Some people get enjoyment from taking things slow, learning all the mechanics, and building the most powerful character possible within the limits of the game.

Many people choose not to cheat in games like this to give yourself max stats because that’s where the fun is, as opposed to a a game like borderlands, where an already maxxed out character can still be challenged with the endgame content which scales to their level.

wildginger, 7 months ago

A lot of these games are working off of an assumed learned collective memory.

Think of movies, and their tropes. How do you understand that when a movie cuts to black for a second, and then suddenly shows a new location, that we did not just teleport? That the black cut indicates the end of a scene, and the start of a new one?

Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump. Now, add another layer of controls. And another.

BG3 is also working with an assumed collective memory from DnD. Assuming you already learned about class vs race, and cantrips vs lvl spells, and turn order, etc.

It sucks when you miss large games that establish these things, but its also how art forms evolve. Games just dont yet have a way to easily re-teach them.

frank, 7 months ago

Yeah, if you’ve played DnD 5E I’d say you’re already well on the way to knowing how BG3 works technically. If not, it’s prolly a bit of a learning curve but the game does start soooorta slow at level 1, though 4 characters is a lot. Look up some common archetypes!

TheCalzoneMan, 7 months ago

Or don’t, and just pick what sounds fun!

helenslunch, 7 months ago

Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump.

Button bindings are almost always listed in the settings menu. And many games WILL explain those controls, usually with an option to toggle them on/off.

wildginger, 7 months ago

Often, yes, but not always, and thats only become a recent trend.

And just as many games dont, or only explain where their controls differ from the cultural expectations.

It applies to mechanics too, but thats harder to talk about without actual examples in front of you, and I dont have any good contrast examples off the top of my head

Astaroth, 7 months ago

Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.

The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they’re playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

What is “let’s plays/player”?

melmi, 7 months ago

A video of someone playing the game, on somewhere like YouTube. You get to watch someone else (the “lets player”) play, and use all the mechanics.

helenslunch, 7 months ago

Okay I’ll give that a shot, thanks

blindsight, 7 months ago

You could also try Twitch. Most smaller streamers are open to answering viewers’ questions (and bigger ones probably would be, too, but they just can’t because of volume.)

Rolder, 7 months ago

When you have a lot of experience with games, you find that most things follow common trends and tropes. Like if I open a new shooter it’s a safe bet that shift is gonna make me sprint and things like that.

In Baldurs Gate specifically, it’s basically Dungeons and Dragons in a video game format, so if you know Dungeons and Dragons already that is a huge head start.

Sharpiemarker, 7 months ago

I used to be into brainy games. When life gets busy, I tend to enjoy simpler games that are easy to put down.

MMOs require a lot of time and effort.

I think some games require you to be a bit ADHD.

sculd, 7 months ago

I got you. Nowadays I would look at the UI of a game first before jumping in. If it looks too complicated I just pass. My job is already complicated enough, I don’t need to make myself more stressed when I just want to have fun.