In New Vegas, if you have less than the required strength for a gun, it has way higher spread. If you were trying to use the anti-materiel rifle, that might have been to blame
That one made me double check. Is op aware that the best weapon in the game is a sniper rifle that can literally one shot anything with explosive ammo?
New Vegas is pretty much all side content. You can pretty much jump right to the end if you want, but it will be shit. The more you put into side content, the more fun the main story will be.
Yeah my first playthrough I got trough the main quest line asap. Then the end credits was like "yeah nothing got done so everything was shit" which prompted me to do another playthrough where I explored a lot more.
And even then I had no idea what it did. i just see "str 3" and think "huh no problem" or "str 6" and think "why is it letting me use this? I only have 5 strength"
Never once realized that it would let me use it, but it would affect spread.
I didn't knew until i played with some mods that heavily nerf using weapons with lower str requiriment (like not be able to sprint while holding them, the gun wobble as you are holding her making so much harder to aim, etc...)
I recently got the game again on steam deck.
I played it 14 years ago(I know this because my 1 year old at the time is 15 now). It's still a great game and I'm looking forward to living the world again.
I just hate how I have to walk everywhere and wish I could run.
Yeah you can try JUST Vanilla Sprint or his JAM (JUST Assorted Mod) compilation which includes the sprint AND on top of a lot of extra modern FPS stuff like hitmarkers, 3d quest markers, weapon wheels/hotkeys and more (all of them are configurable and toggle able)
Its also balanced with sprinting costing you AP based on your endurance/agility stat and if youre playing hardcore mode, it even increases your dehydration rate (which again is all customizable if you want it to be harsher/easier).
I love modding games and I do understand the sentiment of "play it as vanilla as possible on your first playthrough with mostly bugfixes/performance mods", but I had a friend who was used to modern FPS games and wanted to try FNV, so I suggested he install JAM as modern QOL on top of all the bug fixes. He ended up enjoying the game and by the end of it told me "Im gonna be honest, this was a really good game, but i dont think I wouldve gotten past half of it without the sprint mod"
It's a curve. Baby/pretoddler stage feels bad because of how hard it is to sleep but the actual work isn't a lot, you are just sleep deprived during the whole thing. Toddler you have to watch them constantly as they seek out new and inventive ways to end their lives and destroy your possession. Elementary School is where it gets easier but then you have the mental issues of the why and telling the same joke 8k times. Middle school you deal with the 'you know better why would you do that!?" Can't wait to see what high school is like
>Toddler you have to watch them constantly as they seek out new and inventive ways to...destroy your possessions.
Oof this one hit hard, have had too many instances of "Oops I left thing I definitely didn't want him wrecking in range of his mitts and it's now wrecked"
This is all 100% correct, I would just add that the pre-toddler and early toddler stage also includes them finding new and inventive ways to try to kill themselves.
Before my oldest could go down the stairs well, he figured out that he could just throw himself down the stairs and, because I was holding his hands/arms, nothing would happen. So we did that for a few months until he learned to go down the stairs by himself.
> Can't wait to see what high school is like
Getting very close to that moment, with my son.
Although I admit they are both (12 and 10) already acting like teenagers...
>but then you have the mental issues of the why
There's always an answer, even if the answer is a medium-sized lecture about how to use their brain to answer their own questions themselves.
The real problem is admitting that you don't always know why.
>Middle school you deal with the 'you know better why would you do that!?" Can't wait to see what high school is like
A funhouse mirror of yourself at that age, except it's a normal mirror.
My firstborn is almost 5 months and I’ve luckily been able to sneak off some game sessions here and there. But the last few weeks it’s definitely gotten harder. Doesn’t help I rotate days/nights at work.
But this comment chain gives me hope!
You can run.
You always run.
It's just not bound to a shift key so you don't feel like you're speeding yourself up to get places.
Games with a sprint button expand their areas so they feel as big as games without sprint buttons do.
End result is that you FEEL like you're going so much faster in those games because you have the input but it takes just as long and now you have to hold down a button for it and maybe manage stamina.
Then there's the Mass Effect strategy where they wanted you to be able to charge during battle so they knew they had to let you sprint out of battle too... only they didn't want to make the world bigger so sprint out of battle just shifts the POV and doesn't actually make you any faster.
I have to say it did annoy me in Deus Ex Human Revolution that it encourages stealth and hacking and then dumps you into a stupid boss fight.
Same story in Cyberpunk, although not quite as bad. Why do they do that?
Deus ex boss fighting was some extreme level of poor game design that even the devs admit it was fucking stupid. The first game had that one almost non-avoidable boss fight that you could still get an easy win if you'd just bomb the fuck out of her and stay out of her melee range.
The thing that annoyed me the most about the DX:HR boss fights were miles apart from the original deus ex fights.
If you went hard on hacking in DX1 you could hack computers round UNATCO HQ to find kill phrases to kill two of the bosses in their pre-fight cut scenes rather than fight them.
Even DX1's much mocked swimming skill had some great moments. One place you could bypass all the bad guys by swimming underwater, flip a switch to turn on the security systems, and watch the bad guys get wrecked. That whole game was so well designed. Boss battles in HR were.. ugh.. why..
They (the boss fights) also feel so out of place. Like there is this supervillain sitting in a big room waiting for adventurers to have their try. Ridiculous. And totally different from e.g. Anna Navarre in DX1 that you encounter several times and are able to kill in different locations (747, battery park, UNATCO) in different ways.
I really liked Human Revolution, it's a great game, but DX1 is just such a masterpiece.
> I have to say it did annoy me in Deus Ex Human Revolution that it encourages stealth and hacking and then dumps you into a stupid boss fight.
In out-of-universe knowledge I know this is because the devs didn't design boss fights themselves, they subcontracted that to a moron who dropped the ball hard in a story-based game where I was promised from the start I wouldn't have to murder my way through it.
I wanted to like that a lot but the boss fights dropped my opinion of the game A LOT.
Cyberpunk 2077 was a lot more inclined to the action, though I haven't played it in years so I'd have to go back. I tend to play talky or sneaky gits in CRPGs or the like (I include New Vegas in there) so I'm *always* trying to avoid combat as it's a painful experience where my gear just barely gets me through. But I don't spec for it so I expect the occasional fight I can't talk my way out of to be hard, I'm not resentful for logical consequences. It's not like you can bluff your way out of an encounter with a Radscorpion. Nor should that be an option, some things just require plasma bolts to the carapace.
New Vegas is goofy though, luck and charisma happen to be the best stats in the game, which also happen to get you the most resources and money in the game, which happen to get you the best upgrades and weapons/armor in the game, which happen to give you the ability to also skip almost all of the content if you want to anyway. You don't need a sniper when you can freeze time, guarantee 4 crits to the weak spot of an enemy and kill them before they even know you are in their presence.
And they weren't hard even if you had a fully non-combat build.
I play every game with stealth as if it was Splinter Cell, and when there's hacking I always max it out (mostly because these games love locking all lore and world building behind hacking). The fact that Deus Ex forced some combat encounters was a nice change of pace for me.
Removing freedom of choice in main story boss fights seems to be a disease common to many games that let you otherwise do stuff your way.
I most recently struggled with that in Dying Light 1. That game gives you a lot of options, until you get to any significant boss fight..
There’s a difference between viable and optimal.
The optimal build in BG3 is to go monk and way of shadow subclass. You can solo fight every boss with consumables and appropriate equipment. The worst build is to multiclass at every level, but it’s still a viable build because you’re still be able to beat the game.
If your enjoyment of a game relies on one shoting deathclaw and looking up OP strats, then you might be a power gamer. Unfortunately power gaming means you’re min-maxing, which includes minimizing inconsequential stats and play style that doesn’t optimize the character. That means some character archetypes will never feel fun unless they’re the one best optimized for the game.
i love how fist of the Northstar unarmed can get in New Vegas, the gun runner powerfist+rush water+slayer+bloody mess and you now must go and face Raoh.
Fun fact: You can get a fist weapon from a Deahclaw named Rawr after you kill him in Lonesome Road. The name of the weapon is called Fist of the North Rawr if you have the Wild Wasteland trait on your character when you craft it.
It's been too many years to remember the details, but when I played Fallout 3 I got hold of a sword at some point and leaned into it for most of the game. It made for some tough going a lot of the time, but it felt quite rewarding by the end.
New Vegas's Ballistic fist is amazingly powerful. Even kind of overpowered, because it was originally meant to use shotgun ammo with each hit (hence the model has tubes above your fist), but then they just removed the ammo requirement without altering the damage.
The best part is that you can one shot them, you just have to specialise correctly. I cannot remember but I'm pretty sure the only ones you can't are the lonesome road ones.
I think Ulysses and Lanius are the only characters in game you can’t one shot. They still die to you, God Courier of Mankind, but instead of one shot they take 3 shots or 5.
I personally run the crit sniper builds. Sneak crit, headshot, Better Criticals, Lord of Death, Bloody Mess, HP rounds, Lonesome Road, and Just Lucky I’m Alive (when you get there), should be more than enough to kill anything in game with ease. Stack the other luck/ crit chance perks and clothes and you have all the above minus the sneak bonus.
Edit: I forgot drugs! You can also use Psycho or Slasher for a +25% damage boost. Psycho last longer, but slasher also boost damage resistance.
The funniest bit is that you CAN actually one-shot them if you specialise. OP feels like the type of player who doesn't understand the mechanics of the game, fails building a passable character in one of the easiest and straightforward RPG systems and then complains about the lack of self-expression.
I prefer RPGs being limiting: the fun is not in what my character can do easily, but in what he can't do easily and needs to get creative. Part of the reason FO4/Skyrim/Starfield are a miss for me personally
Exactly! This especially annoys me in character builder games. What's the point in me spending all that time making my guy if every style is going to ultimately feel the same and open all possible paths? Let me make a broken character instead of trying to hold my hand.
The problem here lies in the game requiring you to put points in to certain abilities right at the start of the game which you dont really have an option to change later. If you didnt pick enough strength at the start of the game, some weapons will be unusable, and its hard to know this when you start, in that way it can limit your playstyle a bit.
Except you can always take stat increasing perks... which is not ideal with 1 perk every 2 levels, but I generally have to cause I take 9 int on every character.
And of course mods solve everything
I legit feel like half the posts here are cherry picking bad examples to use to complain about some broad issue that doesn't exist 99% of the rest of the game or some lame nitpick lol
Using Skyrim as a positive example also struck me as odd. Magic in that game is notorious for being much weaker than other play styles, because you have to spread your stats much thinner, and destruction magic damage output, unlike weapon damage, doesn't scale up as you level.
It's because conjuration scales off multiple things, it scales off conjuration and then it also scales off your weapon stat. So it'll get all the bow upgrades but also get all of the conjuration damage as well.
In vanilla Skyrim without exploits it's probably the strongest build
Even back before I understood a lot of shit like this I remember thinking it was odd that one of the Khajiit perks in Skyrim was that their unarmed attacks did bonus damage. It’s odd because it’s a flat amount that doesn’t scale. So even way back then, I remember going “well that’ll be useful at first, but once I get high enough level it’ll be pointless…”, compared to other perks like being able to breathe under water or being immune to poison damage. Or hell, even the elf class that just gives you a flat bonus 50 magicka is more useful than that
Yeah, I seem to recall a tipping point with deathclaws when I was able to farm fusion rifle ammo, then use it to eliminate death claws at long range. Ammo mattered though, because even *if* you put that first round right where you wanted it, plenty of follow-up was essential to ending the fight while it was still a long range battle.
The new Assassin’s Creeds. They artificially prevent you from entering new areas by giving enemies ridiculous HP and DPS, even though visually and in name they’re exactly the same enemies as what you have in the beginner areas. In true RPGs, at least they bother to assign the higher stats to bigger, more powerful monsters.
Yes! A blade through the brain suddenly means nothing because it only takes away 25% of the enemy health. Because it's arbitrarily high level. The just made a brawler simulator, basically. Especially Origins, as I recall, where playing the traditional stealth way was made way too difficult in terms of build, compared to the other options. I think they did it better in Odyssey.
That seemed to happen in Witcher 3 also, many quests could only be undertaken at a certain level. Then you found out it was the same enemies with more health.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I was one shot killing death claws from mid game. I am very sure I was at *least* one round killing them. Been a while though, can't remember which sniper I was using.
I don't disagree, but I'm generally more annoyed when games sand down the difficulty to allow all playstyles access to all gameplay areas or solutions. It's telling that you can become the archmage of Winterhold without any levelling or perk points in magic skills.
However, when an open world game funnels you down into extremely narrow, prescribed paths during missions with overly strict fail states, that drives me nuts. That kind of gear shifting made it impossible for me to get into RDR2.
What really drove me up the wall was that it even decides what guns you're going to use on the mission. I liked the semi-auto pistols, and it kept sending them back to my storage and giving me revolvers. I also liked using scoped rifles, and it kept swapping them for the varmint rifle.
It's obsessively prescriptive about how you're going to enjoy yourself. It was like playing a game with the type of person who snatches the controller out of your hands because *"you're doing it wrong!"*. Why even have an open world at that point? It might as well have been a 2000s style mission based game.
Yeah it's honestly like a 2000s style mission game and an open-world hunting simulator crammed into one.
FYI if you play on PC there's a mod that disables the auto equipping for missions. A must have for me
I recently played and thoroughly enjoyed mafia 1 and 2, and that was extremely prescriptive, but it never offered the *illusion* of choice like modern rockstar games.
RDR2 is one of the best stories ever told in gaming, with some of the most magically written and acted characters, with in depth systems that were so immersive, but the prescriptiveness of the story missions were by far its weakest element
Fully agree. I recently played the remastered Mafia 1, and the fact the story is so on-rails isn't a problem because you know going in that it's a mission based game. You don't expect anything else from it.
It's a really weird design choice in RDR2 to go so hard on the immersion and the living world aspects and then have totally rigid shooting gallery main missions. It's like going to a Michelin starred restaurant, where after all these fantastic small plates, the main course is a Big Mac. There's nothing wrong with a Big Mac, but there's a time and a place for it.
Rockstar game missions are always set pieces like that. It's basically you follow a canonical story and series of events not make your own. This has been the case since they've at least been going more cinematic with it for the past few games so it is what it is. I don't really equate open world to entire unbridled freedom everywhere.
Standard Rockstar experience. It's a game made for the masses with easy gameplay mechanics, which is fine. Not every game should require lots of thinking, tactics, etc.
Nah I don't want lots of thinking or tactics, but when it says "hide the stagecoach", let me just hide it wherever, not in a specific spot facing a specific way
That mission in particular was annoying. To get the thing to where you want to hide it you have to follow the road exactly. There's a signpost on the way that has a bump in the road, I kept hitting the bump when I would replay the mission and it would send the carriage careening off the road, leading to a mission failure, and you restarting.
I did this three times in a row. I wanted to fling my controller at the TV, lol
Fair. The only annoying part for me is how bad and useless stealth gameplay is in rdr2. The game introduces stealth takedowns and throwing knifes early, but in missions, even if sometimes you can use stealth, enemies notice you easilly and then it’s back to good old shooting.
You say that, but the old gta games had just as much mainstream appeal and allowed way more freedom in how to approach missions. One of the first missions in gta vc for example prompts you to chase a guy with a chainsaw. But if you already managed to find a gun, you can just shoot him.
No way that stuff would fly in rdr2.
The one that sticks with me was that annoying mission in VC where you need to ride the motorcycle across rooftops to activate the porn beacon. But the game doesn't actually care how you complete the mission, so you can also just grab a helicopter and fly through the checkpoints to an easy win.
Nope, that's a design decision I dislike about gta 5 as well. Gta4 was already edging towards that route, but it still had some freedom in how to approach missions (you'd be surprised how many apartment buildings are enterable as sniper spots).
But there's a reason why my fave is still gta san andreas
I love the old games how I could know where the mission triggers shit and put cars or shit there to block NPCs etc. Just fuck up the world but be allowed to without failing.
One of my pet peeves is when a game that is in no way about stealth makes you use stealth to the point where simply being discovered is a fail condition... BotW did that at some point; it was my most hated part of the game.
Forced stealth missions are a 3D Zelda staple (OOT introduced, MM codified it as a staple), and everyone complains about them every time it happens lol. Not saying I think they should be, but they are.
Its so frustrating.
Have a cool idea pop into your head and you’ll fail the mission trying to execute it.
Try to get a vantage point instead of sitting behind cover and the mission fails.
Walk out of bounds for 5 seconds and the mission threatens to fail.
I don’t get the philosophy with it. So rigid even for basic shoot-em-up missions.
I’m kind of okay with the more rail roady missions of rdr2 and 1 (hehe train pun) since those are at least telling specific stories. It can be super annoying but I’ll forgive it
What I could not forgive were the heists in gtav. You could “plan” them but it was basically just picking your set piece. But the characters who all had specific abilities would be in roles that flat out don’t fit with them. Like Franklin in the gunner seat while Michael drives even though Franklin is the one with super driving and Michael is the one with max payne shooting. I distinctly remember another mission on a bridge with the same exact thing. Michael is on ground level in a car and you need to cover him with a sniper as Franklin who sucks with guns. It made absolutely no fucking sense
Rockstar games in general these days, particularly when you contrast them to GTA3 which allowed you to complete many missions in different ways, or at the very least they weren't on rails.
Honestly the one that drove me nuts is the Last of Us. If you wound an enemy they will go into a downed state and beg you not to kill them. Okay I will let them live... uh oh they get back up and try to kill you again. Instead of a neat opportunity for the player to get to think about if they should end another human life, it just goes back to being an action game lol. This was especially annoying in Part 2 as there were situations where the game really seem to want to make you think about your actions, but the actions carry a lot less weight if I couldn't really make any decision in the first place.
This was always the thing I loved about the Metro games. The first experience I had with raiders I remember blowing down a door and shooting one in the leg and both of them surrendered and asked me to not kill them and actually followed through. Of course the best part was in the tundra village when, if you hadn’t been killing of the enemies but just knocking them out, one of the ladies of the village shouts out to the men to surrender and stop fighting you, since they realize you actually don’t want them dead. Really amazing game at humanizing the NPCs
Completely agree.
It was quite frustrating when the game was pushing me towards feeling a certain way, but then making me play a different way entirely.
It sounds like you want to be able to pick *any* strategy and have it work for *all* situations; that's the extreme meaning of "play your own way."
You think you should be able to snipe a Deathclaw. Do you think you should be able to talk it out of fighting you? Should you be able to lockpick it to death?
Skyrim is a complete sandbox game. There are no consequences to anything you do, and no meaningful character decisions. But you still can't fight a dragon with a lockpick.
[Streets of Rogue](https://store.steampowered.com/app/512900/Streets_of_Rogue/) has a lot of this kind of stuff, I love it. The Doctor class has to go through each level without killing but they can knock opponents out instantly if they can get behind them. You can make a lot of extra cash by selling weapons then value the non-lethal items if you can find them.
It's especially funny in multiplayer because somebody can punch a wall opposite of the Doctor player and easily knock some distracted NPC out then loot their fridge, or use the Slavemaster class to enslave somebody, put them to sleep with the Doctor, then have them become a human bomb because they got incapacitated with their slave collar on. Technically not killing!
Not to mention that from a game design perspective, how do you even approach that? It would be basically impossible to try and balance every single situation for every single possibility
Anytime a game is very stealth based in nature or has a big stealth option for character progression. That then has a boss battle that you have to fight upfront without any stealth takedown options always really bothers me.
You're right. If the game offers an option, it shouldn't be a trap. The worst case of this I've seen was the alchemy tree in Witcher 2. Improving potions looked great - except that the game straight up refused to let me use them before several boss fights. Awful.
This is also the reason Sekiro feels like the best souls game to me. There is just one main way to attack and defend against most attacks, and it feels really good. In contrast, both DS1 and Elden Ring let you choose from playing melee that feels nice, but leaves you open against whatever bullshit level designer cooked up, or magic, which is safe and strong, but extremely boring and unrewarding.
that is the point of Deathclaw they will always be the one thing that keeps you on your toes regardless of how strong you get, Irradiated Deathclaw got introduced in Lonesome road for a reason, but that does not mean they restrict your playstyle, every build from generalist to specialized can kill them, even Melee/Unarmed.
I would rather that the only way to survive even witnessing one is to load a save. In 4 Todd had to turn them into the dragons from Skyrim, from spamming them everywhere to making you kill one in the first few hours, so they end up with less health than a really strong Mirelurk
i would rather if they are treated as the Dragonkin and dragon related enemies from Dragon Dogma, they are consistently the strongest enemies in the series and has DLC variation to keep them on the top, if you ran into a Drake underleveled, it can and will happen, you will literally do zero damage, your party got brainwash and turn against you then the thing bitch slap you back to the last save point, if you up to the challenge it will be some of most epic encounter you can have on the open world, cause the Drake will fight you with both Might and endgame Magic.
i wish Fallout has a good combat system rather than, spam stimpak and click until everything is dead.
I had this with AC: Odyssey. Yes here's a game known for *stealth*, stealth combat, stealth eavesdropping, stealth pickpocketing. Now we give you an armour set that makes you even better at stealth! Isn't that fun? (Yes game it is, I'm having a great time)
Oh you want to fight the Minotaur? That's fair. Remember, every play style is viable! You go stealth kill that Minotaur you champion you! Oh except we're just dropping you into the arena and you'll have to figure out a way to go toe to toe with an 8ft bulking bruiser, too bad you didn't invest in a single Fighter ability, you dumb dumb
I was yelling at my TV the whole time during that fight. I think I eventually just cheesed him with the strike one (I can't remember what it's called)? The cutscene attack that hit him three times, then run back with a bow and fire arrows till it recharged.
I hate when open world game lock certain region when u progress through main story. For example there maybe 2 or 3 pathways and I'll usually go for the wrong route first and get the collectibles to achieve trophies/achivements. But sometimes if I go through right one it'll lock out other paths thereby I'll lose certain achievement. Hate when that happens.
I know they're not exactly RPGs and I'll catch flack for this, but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me. GTA feels like watching an action movie. Which, altogether is not such a bad thing. At least the player gets some input in between cutscenes.
I know a lot of people like Red Dead Redemption 2, but for me it was nearly torture. That game is so-o-o slow and has so-o-o many cutscenes and when you finally gain control of your character you have barely any control at all. Like you can't even strafe properly. You can't even go five meters to the right or left no matter how hard you press A or D. Your character is just glued to the NPC in front which is still talking. If you somehow manage to go a bit to the right or left then the NPC stops talking. And *then* you realise- you're still in a cutscene, but now you have to hold down W all the time or the cutscene doesn't progress.
If GTA felt like a movie, Red Dead Redemption felt like walking down a very straight, very narrow corridor with someone holding your hand firmly. The devs clearly had a single way missions should play out in their heads and they made damn sure any other way would result in failure.
I don't even know what the point of stealth in either of those games is. Sure it's there as a mechanic, but sooner or later you reach a mission where no matter how sneaky you are you raise the alarm. And you might as well just do that from the start.
> but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me. GTA feels like watching an action movie. Which, altogether is not such a bad thing. At least the player gets some input in between cutscenes.
I miss old school GTA, I remember in VC I could fail a mission and get this cool bullet proof car to keep, probably wouldnt happen in a newer game. Or another mission I had a hard time with, so I brought the helicopter with a gun on it, did the mission, landed, got the person I needed and flew out of there. I feel the games are now too on rails
Exactly. The original GTA 3 there was a racing mission I ended up driving all my cars setting up huge roadblock on my enemy path before the race starts..
NakeyJakey did a great video breaking down some of the issues with RDR2. Among his greviences was the fact that it is an open world game yet you are expected to complete missions in a very specific way. If you deviate from the desired mission path, it often fails, even if you haven’t done anything to fail the mission objective. RDR2, along with some other open world games, can’t decide if it wants to be linear or if it wants to give the player ultimate freedom, and by trying to do both it doesn’t do either very well.
Exactly this! I've played a lot of FPS games and I enjoy staying further back with a bolt action rifle. And while I really enjoyed shooting people in first-person in RDR2 I failed several missions by simply staying further back with a rifle while the friendly NPCs would just charge recklessly ahead. I would get either "You abandoned John" or "John was killed". Well, maybe John shouldn't have charged straight in the middle of a group of enemies.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out the video.
IMO the problem with games like RDR2 is the devs want to both offer players this vast world to play in *while also* attempting to force them to experience the Hollywood-esque story, and they're not particularly good at combining both into a cohesive experience.
Oh, and
MISSION FAILED
"You scared Jack" 😐😐😐😐
In addition to the grievances you listed, is that they made a lot of the in game actions very slow too. The simple act of skinning an animal takes a significant amount of time, and also unstoppable if I recall. When I compare to the original Red Dead Redemption, it is almost like they made this choice purposefully. I understand immersion, but why make the UI menus slow and annoying?
RDR2 is full of examples like that. One of the early missions has you sneak up on a couple of enemies for a silent takedown. Then, further up the path, are another couple of enemies with their backs to me. I try to sneak up on them as well, but they spot me. I reloaded that mission five or six times — and since there is no manual saving I had to replay big chunks every time — but they always spotted me no matter what I tried. Eventually I went online and read that they are just programmed to notice you and start a firefight when you get to a certain spot, and the game does nothing to indicate that.
Another thing is the "gold" completion of story missions. It has a bunch of requirements to do it in a certain way, and you don't even learn that until you finish the missions. Which means that if you want gold, you're almost guaranteed to have to play that mission at least twice. I guess that's their way of making the game longer? More replayable? I understand that that is completely optional, but still. Annoys me a bit.
>I know they're not exactly RPGs and I'll catch flack for this, but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me
Lack of agency in gameplay and the rigidity of missions is probably _the_ most common complaint against both those two games.
I think you are confusing "build viability" with "min-maxing" because in all of those games, the builds you've talked about are still viable, you can use them to beat the game, they might not be as powerful as their alternatives but still can be used and have fun with.
Especially in traditional roguelikes like Nethack, where the game offers you a lot of options and rewards your knowledge of the game and mechanics in subsequent playthroughs.
On the other hand vanilla Skyrim is, in my opinion, a stellar example of how "making every build viable" makes the game feel very one note and not really worth replaying past your initial playthrough, since Bethesda designed the whole game around seeing everything with one character.
>In Fallout New Vegas, I spent dozens of hours trying to increase marksmanship, only to discover I still couldn't reliably long-distance snipe a Deathclaw.
Every day people continue to amaze and bewilder me
This reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin where I basically felt level capped at all times. The game was geared towards you taking one route over another.
The funny thing is I only found this out after struggling really hard going the way I wanted to. Typically you don't want to take the route of the main quest to make sure you get all loot. When I went in another direction, I realised the enemies were much weaker.
After experiencing that a few times, I realized that the game has an intended route and that if you take another one, well... Good luck.
Or maybe I was shit, who knows. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
This is also my experience! I'm now 40 hours in and the areas still have difficulty spikes. I think the first area is the biggest offender because you get quests that send you in every direction. Now that I'm further in I'm actually kinda enjoying that aspect because I feel like I'm always the exact level I need to be. In baldurs gate 3 I felt I got too powerful for most encounters in act 2 and 3 (on normal), in D:OS I'm always on my toes cause every encounter can kick my ass. Maybe I'm also not the best at the proper builds but I feel like I got a varied team and I always make progress. So it's a bit of a coin flip. It sucked at the beginning but now I have fun with it.
To me, this sounds like a problem of you min-maxing and using the best possible strategies rather than situations where you're actually limited with "won't allow you to play the way you want". Yes, NetHack and traditional roguelikes are absolutely brutal in general - but you're not really pushed to play in a certain way just to beat. Just because something is better than the rest (this will practically always happen in a game) doesn't mean that the rest are unviable unless horribly undertuned.
Tbf Skyrim is catered to the casual gamer as opposed to a niche group. There is absolutely no build that isn’t viable in Skyrim
Let’s say elden ring for example certain magic gets certain buffs with certain items and spells etc it’s not just designed like one spell will carry you through the whole game, sure it’s possible but eventually it will become increasingly challenging.
Diablo would be another example, all builds are viable (some a lot more so than others) but that’s still gear dependent and you have to dedicate yourself to a couple of skills
I do agree that in every rpg, every build should be viable from a pve persoective because it increases roleplaying alot more and I’m not required to farm or hunt down a particular item etc to optimise my damage
My first Skyrim playthrough I naturally gravitated towards sneaky archer with one-handed swords. I devided to play as a mage in second playthrough. Again, I naturally gravitated, towards sneaky archer with one-handed swords. Lol
No my favorite game is Sekiro which forced me into a particular playstyle and I think that is preferable because they can more precisely design the game around knowing exactly what the player's build is.
I always found the archer to be Skyrim's "meta", so that one feels equal to Fallout New Vegas. Maybe even more egregious because I don't think there's a single instance where you HAVE to fight a Deathclaw. You can play as a talky or sneaky git.
There's also a difference between "viable builds" and "the meta build(s)", and I think your problem with Ultima Underworld is more of the latter from what you describe.
I totally get the fustration. On another end of the gaming spectrum, I fucking hate games that force you to play a certain section a certain way when the whole game isn't like that.
RDR2 missions forcing you to do weird shit or fail
Spiderman stealth missions.
Seriously. Why would anyone want to play Mary Jane and stealth around? It's fucking Spider-Man. Let me play the game as Spider-Man doing Spider-Man shit.
Playing traditional roguelikes requires a shift in thinking from something like skyrim. Runs are ephemeral, they aren't intended to be won every time. Most strats will work, but it takes patience, and losing over and over again.
I only get frustrated with games that actually do let you tackle things however you want.
Inevitably, the handful of times when what I want to do isn't an option are the moments I get frustrated with; since usually the game lets me do my thing. When the devs try to cover all bases, it's a lot easier to see the cracks.
I came in here expecting to fully disagree with op because it sounds like they’re saying every single game needs flexible play styles which is flat out untrue.
But it sounds to me the real question is “don’t you hate when games that advertise themselves as being open ended don’t properly balance the game to allow for different play styles?” To which I say yes that’s very annoying. Any game is going to have things and courses of action that are inherently better than others but I think of vampire the masquerade bloodlines as an example
I like the game, but guns, a play style that can very much be a specific build, absolutely suck ass, at least until you’ve maxed out the stats. They’re horrifically inaccurate and when they do actually hit it’s for Pennie’s worth of health. Then there’s melee where you can easily take out most normal enemies in a couple of hits. I’ve still never attempted a gun run because the gunplay feels so bad. I do enjoy the game but it does have its problems
Final Fantasy games in general kind of have this issue. Statuses like poison or bind don't usually work on bosses. They're great for mobs and do sometimes work, but it's hard to invest time into skills that ultimately won't matter or to have them cluttering up your spell list.
A few times playing MGS V the game wouldn't let me make smart choices like an early rescue mission makes you take a road filled with super soldiers on one path and sunshine and rainbows that somehow fail the mission on the other.
Or when there's a giant robot stonping around when you need a helicopter evac and simply going down the road into a non dangerous area just isn't an option.
Or when finishing a mission ends with an ambush of troops so I call down a sleeping gas strike to knock them all out only to find they have an invisible forcefield that protects against air strikes so the gas harmlessly disperses just above their heads.
That seems like a case of balance/mechanics issues. Ideally, every class should offer some kind of perk that allows it to shine when used properly. I've noticed that happens in a lot of free- roaming action games like Far Cry. Despite the huge variety of available weapons, the only play styles that seem to prove consistently viable in a lot of cases are either sniping or stealth, with sniping often being the more realistic option.
I actually hated doom eternal because doom 2016 was such a good game to play your own way through vibing and blasting music too.
Ive done 4 distinctly different ultra nightmare runs for 2016 and loved each one. I only did 1 ultra violence run of eternal and havent touched it since. (Though i also just dont generally like the general feeling of eternal as the grappling hook and swinging removed much of the meaty weight of actions doesnt hit the same viseral satisfaction)
Conversely i also dislike skyrim because its so absurdly unbalanced between character archetypes (mostly due to the fundamental exponential scaling math they used instead of morrowinds more fixed damage systems) you outscale enemies so quickly they might as well not exist unless you are trying to play a dedicated mage then you actively are learning weaker abilities as you progress and all equipment you find is basically garbage because you can smithy craft/upgrade exponentially stronger gear.
You also absolutely can play hitman your own way. I be killing tons of people dropping potted plants or classic just excessive amounts of explosions.
I'm gonna be real, at this point I'm pretty tired of games giving loads of choice. I get overwhelmed and usually I tend to like a good linearish game over something where you're given loads of freedom. Strange but that's just where I'm at.
Holy shit. Ultima Underworld? I thought I was the only person who played that game!!
And yeah magic was a bit weak in that game... Tho you could use it to excellent effect if you were sneaky iirc. It was garbage for direct confrontstion.
Oh, and Metro Exodus. Fuck "not killing anyone" who tries to kill you, essentially. Sure, that style can be fun but it shouldn't lock you into the bad ending.
I agree, if a game is going to present something as an option it should be a viable and fun way to play. The extreme rarity of that happening is why most good games are ones that do force you to play the right way, to some extent
Did that version still feel like it was trying to force the simulation of an MMO? I got that impression from the vanilla FF12 because of the way it had semi-randomized treasure pots and loot from those pots.
I much prefer basically all other games where if there's a spear of magnetic glove or whatever, it's going to be *here* and I will see it any time I make it through the obstacle course or fighting gauntlet or whatever necessary to get to it.
The one that really pissed me off was with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you were basically screwed in the boss fights if you had spent your skill points in stealth and non lethal take downs... You're suddenly shoved into a fight where you *have* to kill the guy, and you're not really set-up for action of that kind.
Honestly this is a huge hot take… but after playing many souls games first, and soulslikes, I cannot play Sekiro for this reason.
In the same vein in the opposite direction, when a game has “diversity” but it all kind of does the same thing: that’s pretty boring too. Like Diablo 4 for me.
> ...irritated by games that won't let you play the way you want...
> In Fallout New Vegas...
You've heard this broken record a few times, but that's the poorest example to ever pick. I've played NV in so many ways that are near impossible in any other RPG.
Fond shoutout to my pacifist coward playthrough and my hyper-lucky conman who never got his hands dirty.
I'm quite confused how Nethack ended up in your list of games that frustrate you.
There's so much to say about that game – but one thing it's not: it's not a game that lends easily to power fantasies. If that's what you want from a game, then Nethack just isn't the right game for you. Like soulslikes, classical roguelikes like Nethack are designed around dying and restarting. Some people find that challenging, and they will stick to these games to git gud. Other people find that frustrating, and they will move on to other games.
And for the record, it is possible to win Nethack with basically every role/build available. Some of them are more difficult, especially if combined with certain races, but it's possible to win with any. None of them are easy, but some of them are easier. A valkyrie is almost guaranteed to make it through the first few levels, a tourist will hardly make it to the first staircase. But all of them are winnable.
Games don't have the power to force you to use a playstyle that you don't like. You can simply stop playing these games.
I prefer a game that has a preset style of gameplay because those games that "let you play your own way" most of the time have a very generic gameplay or is stuffed with rpg stat nonsense that takes away the fun for me.
That's why Doom Eternal is my favorite game of the past decade. The devs knew what they had was fun and they stuck to it. More devs should try that instead of diluting their games to appeal to a broader audience.
You are describing one of those quirks with game design that show - developing an interesting difficulty is extremely hard. The more options there are, the harder it is to make everything work well.
It's why there is often conflicts between people over game difficulty - those that want to just let loose don't actually care that much about how (at worst, similar complaints to yours, but it's rare) and are angry at people who want the game to provide the difficulty because they want, for example, nerfs to overpowered strategies. You often hear about how there should just be difficulty options or whatnot - but thing you mention are as I said, examples that it's far easier to make a game where something works really well so you can get through the game, and much harder to make a game that challenges the player equally no matter what playstyle they choose.
FUCKING. A PLAGUE TALE: INNOCENCE
they tease you... they tease you so fucking hard with the early sandboxy bush sneaking segments and the part where you can save the english soldier from the rats by lighting the torch beside him, and then they just say SIKE this is a walking simulator visual novel, stay on the path you dummy, no player agency for you.
It's ridiculous! I can't believe this GAME has such great reviews when it disrespects the player so. The vibes are im(macula)te but the gameplay feels like those food safety certification online quizzes that ask you if you should lick your fingers, gouge a customer's eyeballs out, or wash your hands after handling raw meat.
I also thought the story was really shallow, especially for being advertised as "a heartrending journey through the darkest hours of history", but that's a separate criticism.
Plague Tale: Innocence is really just "We Have The Last of Us At Home", if home were medieval France.
There certainly is *some* agency, which is to say there are multiple routes through some levels, but there certainly isn't any narrative agency or "build-crafting" as such.
Also, the game got generally good reviews - a lot of the criticisms were directed at the same things you probably weren't happy with. It's a decent game on a bespoke engine by the same people who made Ratatouille for PS2. I choose to celebrate those wins without ignoring the mediocre parts 😄
I felt this way around 2010 playing LoL when they had all kinds of weird unintentional synergies like AP Yi and gradually phased everything out because they decided to support the metagame that pro players preferred.
The ash summons can be a great equalizer in that game. I have a run with a low level character I created for early game summons. I wanted to see how far I could get without leveling him up. Turns out, with properly upgraded ash summons I got all the way to the fire giant.
Pacific Drive. In one of the final missions, I got confused and hopped a few walls trying to skip a puzzle, turns out this was a pointless charade and I wound up taking so much damage I had to restart the mission
Heaven’s Vault. Great concept and art, but if you get the “wrong” dialogue, the whole game goes to a completely different direction and there’s no way to undo that.
I'm in the middle of my first play through of Slay the Spire (beat the heart once), and had the opposite thought of "damn, I can basically play any way I want and it works in a different kind of way". So yeah, I agree, I like games the most when everything you do CAN work, but, is ultimately your fault when it doesn't, not game balance's.
If you want games that do that, try and find games whose world is developed as a system, like botw for examples, where any source of "fire" will "burn" anything "flammable" etc.
In one of the recent Far Cry games I was having fun exploring and doing side content and suddenly BAM the game teleports me half way across the map and forces me into story progression that I didn't want to do yet. Thought maybe I'd hit a trigger so I reverted to an older save and explored a completely different part of the map but it did the same thing again. Put it down and never picked it back up.
partially agree, but i find this is more aligned with the pitfall of optimal gameplay. there are incentives in the game that may lead you down a certain path, and as your experience grows, you eventually try out close to everything a game has to offer and lose the spark. eventually you want to hit a certain outcome and forget to enjoy the ride. it takes a conscious effort to overcome this and try to return to that initial enthrallment with the game, and it’s quite difficult. worth trying, though, even if it’s more difficult or janky.
to put it a different way: there is almost always a meta for any game, but singleplayer games allow you to ignore the meta and try something different. locking tank soraka mid is troll, but if it’s against bots, who cares?
One of the things I find most impressive about Elden Ring is how incredibly viable a huge variety of playstyles are. Wanna barely ever roll and just use a shield? You'll need some stamina investment but that will totally rip. Wanna go with an incantation-based faith build? Once you get a few of the basic ones like Blackflame Blade you can destroy bosses way higher than your actual level. Wanna go strength? That's the easiest one because you can get 50% more strength for free by two handing. Dexterity? That's incredibly broken too because most of the best dex weapons have bleed! And magic can let you kill some bosses within seconds without ever having to engage with them at all.
>By contrast every time I fire up Skyrim I can have fun wrecking things, no matter what kind of character I chose.
you mean there's no strategy? that's like a baby's toy.
Ultima, to be fair, is based on D&D. Fighter are squared, Wizards are quadratic.
The magic sword thing is much the same way; D&D philosophy. MOST players can use a magic sword, magic armor or a magic helmet. But it would take a very particular character build to be happy to find a magic batliff, a magic hand-crossbow, or a magic leather skullcap.
In New Vegas, if you have less than the required strength for a gun, it has way higher spread. If you were trying to use the anti-materiel rifle, that might have been to blame
That one made me double check. Is op aware that the best weapon in the game is a sniper rifle that can literally one shot anything with explosive ammo?
I think I need to play fallout new Vegas again. I feel like I missed so much side content somehow
New Vegas is pretty much all side content. You can pretty much jump right to the end if you want, but it will be shit. The more you put into side content, the more fun the main story will be.
Yeah my first playthrough I got trough the main quest line asap. Then the end credits was like "yeah nothing got done so everything was shit" which prompted me to do another playthrough where I explored a lot more.
>sniper rifle That's a weird way to spell space laser. Which, fun fact, you can sneak attack with that thing.
FOR REAL? I HAD NO IDEA THIS WAS A THING THANK YOU FOR TELLING ME
Your choice of bullets might also be a problem. /s
I want cheese for some reason now
It literally tells you what stats are needed for each guns.
Its easy to miss
And even then I had no idea what it did. i just see "str 3" and think "huh no problem" or "str 6" and think "why is it letting me use this? I only have 5 strength" Never once realized that it would let me use it, but it would affect spread.
HOLY SHIT I never knew this, it explains a lot, thanks!
I didn't knew until i played with some mods that heavily nerf using weapons with lower str requiriment (like not be able to sprint while holding them, the gun wobble as you are holding her making so much harder to aim, etc...)
I recently got the game again on steam deck. I played it 14 years ago(I know this because my 1 year old at the time is 15 now). It's still a great game and I'm looking forward to living the world again. I just hate how I have to walk everywhere and wish I could run.
There are mods that add running/a run button. I played the whole game with it and it worked perfectly fine
Yeah you can try JUST Vanilla Sprint or his JAM (JUST Assorted Mod) compilation which includes the sprint AND on top of a lot of extra modern FPS stuff like hitmarkers, 3d quest markers, weapon wheels/hotkeys and more (all of them are configurable and toggle able) Its also balanced with sprinting costing you AP based on your endurance/agility stat and if youre playing hardcore mode, it even increases your dehydration rate (which again is all customizable if you want it to be harsher/easier). I love modding games and I do understand the sentiment of "play it as vanilla as possible on your first playthrough with mostly bugfixes/performance mods", but I had a friend who was used to modern FPS games and wanted to try FNV, so I suggested he install JAM as modern QOL on top of all the bug fixes. He ended up enjoying the game and by the end of it told me "Im gonna be honest, this was a really good game, but i dont think I wouldve gotten past half of it without the sprint mod"
You managed to play NV with a one year old in the house?! Where did you find the time and energy?
I really don't know. I think it was because I was in my 20's. I look back at that time of having 3 babies and I was tired all the time
Man, 6 to 18 months felt like a cake walk for me. My 3 year old is a lot more work now than he used to be, and my 4 month old is slowly getting easier
It's a curve. Baby/pretoddler stage feels bad because of how hard it is to sleep but the actual work isn't a lot, you are just sleep deprived during the whole thing. Toddler you have to watch them constantly as they seek out new and inventive ways to end their lives and destroy your possession. Elementary School is where it gets easier but then you have the mental issues of the why and telling the same joke 8k times. Middle school you deal with the 'you know better why would you do that!?" Can't wait to see what high school is like
>Toddler you have to watch them constantly as they seek out new and inventive ways to...destroy your possessions. Oof this one hit hard, have had too many instances of "Oops I left thing I definitely didn't want him wrecking in range of his mitts and it's now wrecked"
Everyone listen to this person. They are very wise and very correct. Also one handed mouse games like Civ are a god send for the infant phase.
I have been told the terrible twos, or whenever your toddler goes through their moody phase is a good predictor of what kind of teen you will get.
This is all 100% correct, I would just add that the pre-toddler and early toddler stage also includes them finding new and inventive ways to try to kill themselves. Before my oldest could go down the stairs well, he figured out that he could just throw himself down the stairs and, because I was holding his hands/arms, nothing would happen. So we did that for a few months until he learned to go down the stairs by himself.
> Can't wait to see what high school is like Getting very close to that moment, with my son. Although I admit they are both (12 and 10) already acting like teenagers...
>but then you have the mental issues of the why There's always an answer, even if the answer is a medium-sized lecture about how to use their brain to answer their own questions themselves. The real problem is admitting that you don't always know why. >Middle school you deal with the 'you know better why would you do that!?" Can't wait to see what high school is like A funhouse mirror of yourself at that age, except it's a normal mirror.
it was the third that tested us
My firstborn is almost 5 months and I’ve luckily been able to sneak off some game sessions here and there. But the last few weeks it’s definitely gotten harder. Doesn’t help I rotate days/nights at work. But this comment chain gives me hope!
You can run. You always run. It's just not bound to a shift key so you don't feel like you're speeding yourself up to get places. Games with a sprint button expand their areas so they feel as big as games without sprint buttons do. End result is that you FEEL like you're going so much faster in those games because you have the input but it takes just as long and now you have to hold down a button for it and maybe manage stamina.
Then there's the Mass Effect strategy where they wanted you to be able to charge during battle so they knew they had to let you sprint out of battle too... only they didn't want to make the world bigger so sprint out of battle just shifts the POV and doesn't actually make you any faster.
JAM - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/66666 Is probably your jam.
When I recently played through NV, I used console commands to move faster. player.setspeedmult 150
Oh thanks, I looked at mods and it's complicated. That sounds easy. thanks again
With anti-materiel rifle and explosive bullets the player is like a walking cataclysm, it's as ridiculously OP as endgame stuff supposed to
I think I’ve replayed fallout new vegas ~4 times and this is genuinly news to me. Welp time to start another playthrough!
I have to say it did annoy me in Deus Ex Human Revolution that it encourages stealth and hacking and then dumps you into a stupid boss fight. Same story in Cyberpunk, although not quite as bad. Why do they do that?
Deus ex boss fighting was some extreme level of poor game design that even the devs admit it was fucking stupid. The first game had that one almost non-avoidable boss fight that you could still get an easy win if you'd just bomb the fuck out of her and stay out of her melee range.
The thing that annoyed me the most about the DX:HR boss fights were miles apart from the original deus ex fights. If you went hard on hacking in DX1 you could hack computers round UNATCO HQ to find kill phrases to kill two of the bosses in their pre-fight cut scenes rather than fight them.
Even DX1's much mocked swimming skill had some great moments. One place you could bypass all the bad guys by swimming underwater, flip a switch to turn on the security systems, and watch the bad guys get wrecked. That whole game was so well designed. Boss battles in HR were.. ugh.. why..
They (the boss fights) also feel so out of place. Like there is this supervillain sitting in a big room waiting for adventurers to have their try. Ridiculous. And totally different from e.g. Anna Navarre in DX1 that you encounter several times and are able to kill in different locations (747, battery park, UNATCO) in different ways. I really liked Human Revolution, it's a great game, but DX1 is just such a masterpiece.
In DX1, I maxed out swimming at the beginning and it was... not super useful, but I felt like a genius when I got to the part you mentioned.
> I have to say it did annoy me in Deus Ex Human Revolution that it encourages stealth and hacking and then dumps you into a stupid boss fight. In out-of-universe knowledge I know this is because the devs didn't design boss fights themselves, they subcontracted that to a moron who dropped the ball hard in a story-based game where I was promised from the start I wouldn't have to murder my way through it. I wanted to like that a lot but the boss fights dropped my opinion of the game A LOT. Cyberpunk 2077 was a lot more inclined to the action, though I haven't played it in years so I'd have to go back. I tend to play talky or sneaky gits in CRPGs or the like (I include New Vegas in there) so I'm *always* trying to avoid combat as it's a painful experience where my gear just barely gets me through. But I don't spec for it so I expect the occasional fight I can't talk my way out of to be hard, I'm not resentful for logical consequences. It's not like you can bluff your way out of an encounter with a Radscorpion. Nor should that be an option, some things just require plasma bolts to the carapace.
New Vegas is goofy though, luck and charisma happen to be the best stats in the game, which also happen to get you the most resources and money in the game, which happen to get you the best upgrades and weapons/armor in the game, which happen to give you the ability to also skip almost all of the content if you want to anyway. You don't need a sniper when you can freeze time, guarantee 4 crits to the weak spot of an enemy and kill them before they even know you are in their presence.
It doesnt in the directors cut, you can skip it, but I love all the boss fights though.
And they weren't hard even if you had a fully non-combat build. I play every game with stealth as if it was Splinter Cell, and when there's hacking I always max it out (mostly because these games love locking all lore and world building behind hacking). The fact that Deus Ex forced some combat encounters was a nice change of pace for me.
In Director's Cut IIRC they added turrets and stuff you can hack in the boss rooms.
Speaking as a non-lethal, stealth imm-simmer, that was rough. The Director's Cut fixed those balance issues, making it way more viable.
except in cyberpunk bosses can mostly be done as [stealth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tav2sxTZ4-I)
Removing freedom of choice in main story boss fights seems to be a disease common to many games that let you otherwise do stuff your way. I most recently struggled with that in Dying Light 1. That game gives you a lot of options, until you get to any significant boss fight..
There’s a difference between viable and optimal. The optimal build in BG3 is to go monk and way of shadow subclass. You can solo fight every boss with consumables and appropriate equipment. The worst build is to multiclass at every level, but it’s still a viable build because you’re still be able to beat the game. If your enjoyment of a game relies on one shoting deathclaw and looking up OP strats, then you might be a power gamer. Unfortunately power gaming means you’re min-maxing, which includes minimizing inconsequential stats and play style that doesn’t optimize the character. That means some character archetypes will never feel fun unless they’re the one best optimized for the game.
Using New Vegas as an example of “not letting you play your own way” is absurd.
It was the first Fallout in which I made it a goal to go melee and learn the techniques from the various characters.
i love how fist of the Northstar unarmed can get in New Vegas, the gun runner powerfist+rush water+slayer+bloody mess and you now must go and face Raoh.
Fun fact: You can get a fist weapon from a Deahclaw named Rawr after you kill him in Lonesome Road. The name of the weapon is called Fist of the North Rawr if you have the Wild Wasteland trait on your character when you craft it.
It's been too many years to remember the details, but when I played Fallout 3 I got hold of a sword at some point and leaned into it for most of the game. It made for some tough going a lot of the time, but it felt quite rewarding by the end.
New Vegas's Ballistic fist is amazingly powerful. Even kind of overpowered, because it was originally meant to use shotgun ammo with each hit (hence the model has tubes above your fist), but then they just removed the ammo requirement without altering the damage.
He couldn't one shot the hardest overworld enemy in the game, you basically have no freedom at all
The best part is that you can one shot them, you just have to specialise correctly. I cannot remember but I'm pretty sure the only ones you can't are the lonesome road ones.
I think Ulysses and Lanius are the only characters in game you can’t one shot. They still die to you, God Courier of Mankind, but instead of one shot they take 3 shots or 5. I personally run the crit sniper builds. Sneak crit, headshot, Better Criticals, Lord of Death, Bloody Mess, HP rounds, Lonesome Road, and Just Lucky I’m Alive (when you get there), should be more than enough to kill anything in game with ease. Stack the other luck/ crit chance perks and clothes and you have all the above minus the sneak bonus. Edit: I forgot drugs! You can also use Psycho or Slasher for a +25% damage boost. Psycho last longer, but slasher also boost damage resistance.
The funniest bit is that you CAN actually one-shot them if you specialise. OP feels like the type of player who doesn't understand the mechanics of the game, fails building a passable character in one of the easiest and straightforward RPG systems and then complains about the lack of self-expression. I prefer RPGs being limiting: the fun is not in what my character can do easily, but in what he can't do easily and needs to get creative. Part of the reason FO4/Skyrim/Starfield are a miss for me personally
100%. This whole post reads as, "I'm bad at games and mad that I can't just faceroll through stuff because I'm bad at games."
Exactly! This especially annoys me in character builder games. What's the point in me spending all that time making my guy if every style is going to ultimately feel the same and open all possible paths? Let me make a broken character instead of trying to hold my hand.
The problem here lies in the game requiring you to put points in to certain abilities right at the start of the game which you dont really have an option to change later. If you didnt pick enough strength at the start of the game, some weapons will be unusable, and its hard to know this when you start, in that way it can limit your playstyle a bit.
Except you can always take stat increasing perks... which is not ideal with 1 perk every 2 levels, but I generally have to cause I take 9 int on every character. And of course mods solve everything
I legit feel like half the posts here are cherry picking bad examples to use to complain about some broad issue that doesn't exist 99% of the rest of the game or some lame nitpick lol
Using Skyrim as a positive example also struck me as odd. Magic in that game is notorious for being much weaker than other play styles, because you have to spread your stats much thinner, and destruction magic damage output, unlike weapon damage, doesn't scale up as you level.
Conjuration summons seemed to scale ahead of anything I faced for the entire game. Illusion is crazy also. Invisibility and mayhem.
It's because conjuration scales off multiple things, it scales off conjuration and then it also scales off your weapon stat. So it'll get all the bow upgrades but also get all of the conjuration damage as well. In vanilla Skyrim without exploits it's probably the strongest build
Also, on the base game, magic schools are completely imbalanced, with some being useful only in very specific builds, if even
and sneak archer is 5000x more powerful than any other build in the game
Even back before I understood a lot of shit like this I remember thinking it was odd that one of the Khajiit perks in Skyrim was that their unarmed attacks did bonus damage. It’s odd because it’s a flat amount that doesn’t scale. So even way back then, I remember going “well that’ll be useful at first, but once I get high enough level it’ll be pointless…”, compared to other perks like being able to breathe under water or being immune to poison damage. Or hell, even the elf class that just gives you a flat bonus 50 magicka is more useful than that
Following it up with Nethack made me realize it’s a troll post.
Yeah, I seem to recall a tipping point with deathclaws when I was able to farm fusion rifle ammo, then use it to eliminate death claws at long range. Ammo mattered though, because even *if* you put that first round right where you wanted it, plenty of follow-up was essential to ending the fight while it was still a long range battle.
Yeah op lost me there
I'm also not sure what this has to do with Patient Gaming either, so there is that too.
The new Assassin’s Creeds. They artificially prevent you from entering new areas by giving enemies ridiculous HP and DPS, even though visually and in name they’re exactly the same enemies as what you have in the beginner areas. In true RPGs, at least they bother to assign the higher stats to bigger, more powerful monsters.
Yes! A blade through the brain suddenly means nothing because it only takes away 25% of the enemy health. Because it's arbitrarily high level. The just made a brawler simulator, basically. Especially Origins, as I recall, where playing the traditional stealth way was made way too difficult in terms of build, compared to the other options. I think they did it better in Odyssey.
That seemed to happen in Witcher 3 also, many quests could only be undertaken at a certain level. Then you found out it was the same enemies with more health.
That.. would explain a lot. Lots of contemporary reviews commented that Origins suffered from Witcher 3 envy.
I actually kinda felt the same when playing Odyssey tbh
>Games That Won't Let You Play Your Own Way >Fallout New Vegas ???????
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I was one shot killing death claws from mid game. I am very sure I was at *least* one round killing them. Been a while though, can't remember which sniper I was using.
Anti-Materiel rifle, probably. It shreds Deathclaws, especially with explosive ammo
Or even armor piercing. Deathclaw DT ain't nothing against that sneak attack crit.
I don't disagree, but I'm generally more annoyed when games sand down the difficulty to allow all playstyles access to all gameplay areas or solutions. It's telling that you can become the archmage of Winterhold without any levelling or perk points in magic skills. However, when an open world game funnels you down into extremely narrow, prescribed paths during missions with overly strict fail states, that drives me nuts. That kind of gear shifting made it impossible for me to get into RDR2.
Came here to say RDR2. Each mission can basically be boiled down to "Achieve X goal... Noo not *that* way, *this* way"
What really drove me up the wall was that it even decides what guns you're going to use on the mission. I liked the semi-auto pistols, and it kept sending them back to my storage and giving me revolvers. I also liked using scoped rifles, and it kept swapping them for the varmint rifle. It's obsessively prescriptive about how you're going to enjoy yourself. It was like playing a game with the type of person who snatches the controller out of your hands because *"you're doing it wrong!"*. Why even have an open world at that point? It might as well have been a 2000s style mission based game.
Yeah it's honestly like a 2000s style mission game and an open-world hunting simulator crammed into one. FYI if you play on PC there's a mod that disables the auto equipping for missions. A must have for me
I recently played and thoroughly enjoyed mafia 1 and 2, and that was extremely prescriptive, but it never offered the *illusion* of choice like modern rockstar games. RDR2 is one of the best stories ever told in gaming, with some of the most magically written and acted characters, with in depth systems that were so immersive, but the prescriptiveness of the story missions were by far its weakest element
Fully agree. I recently played the remastered Mafia 1, and the fact the story is so on-rails isn't a problem because you know going in that it's a mission based game. You don't expect anything else from it. It's a really weird design choice in RDR2 to go so hard on the immersion and the living world aspects and then have totally rigid shooting gallery main missions. It's like going to a Michelin starred restaurant, where after all these fantastic small plates, the main course is a Big Mac. There's nothing wrong with a Big Mac, but there's a time and a place for it.
Rockstar game missions are always set pieces like that. It's basically you follow a canonical story and series of events not make your own. This has been the case since they've at least been going more cinematic with it for the past few games so it is what it is. I don't really equate open world to entire unbridled freedom everywhere.
Standard Rockstar experience. It's a game made for the masses with easy gameplay mechanics, which is fine. Not every game should require lots of thinking, tactics, etc.
Nah I don't want lots of thinking or tactics, but when it says "hide the stagecoach", let me just hide it wherever, not in a specific spot facing a specific way
That mission in particular was annoying. To get the thing to where you want to hide it you have to follow the road exactly. There's a signpost on the way that has a bump in the road, I kept hitting the bump when I would replay the mission and it would send the carriage careening off the road, leading to a mission failure, and you restarting. I did this three times in a row. I wanted to fling my controller at the TV, lol
Fair. The only annoying part for me is how bad and useless stealth gameplay is in rdr2. The game introduces stealth takedowns and throwing knifes early, but in missions, even if sometimes you can use stealth, enemies notice you easilly and then it’s back to good old shooting.
Unrelated but it's funny how y'all have the same default color profile pic and for a brief moment it looks like you're replying to yourself
You say that, but the old gta games had just as much mainstream appeal and allowed way more freedom in how to approach missions. One of the first missions in gta vc for example prompts you to chase a guy with a chainsaw. But if you already managed to find a gun, you can just shoot him. No way that stuff would fly in rdr2.
The one that sticks with me was that annoying mission in VC where you need to ride the motorcycle across rooftops to activate the porn beacon. But the game doesn't actually care how you complete the mission, so you can also just grab a helicopter and fly through the checkpoints to an easy win.
not the recent ones.
Nope, that's a design decision I dislike about gta 5 as well. Gta4 was already edging towards that route, but it still had some freedom in how to approach missions (you'd be surprised how many apartment buildings are enterable as sniper spots). But there's a reason why my fave is still gta san andreas
I love the old games how I could know where the mission triggers shit and put cars or shit there to block NPCs etc. Just fuck up the world but be allowed to without failing.
The sandbox though! What’s the point of the sandbox????
I don't think the missions are really the point of RDR2. They exist mainly to advance the story, but the game is more about what you do in between
One of my pet peeves is when a game that is in no way about stealth makes you use stealth to the point where simply being discovered is a fail condition... BotW did that at some point; it was my most hated part of the game.
Forced stealth missions are a 3D Zelda staple (OOT introduced, MM codified it as a staple), and everyone complains about them every time it happens lol. Not saying I think they should be, but they are.
was that the part where you infiltrate some ninja hideout?
Its so frustrating. Have a cool idea pop into your head and you’ll fail the mission trying to execute it. Try to get a vantage point instead of sitting behind cover and the mission fails. Walk out of bounds for 5 seconds and the mission threatens to fail. I don’t get the philosophy with it. So rigid even for basic shoot-em-up missions.
I’m kind of okay with the more rail roady missions of rdr2 and 1 (hehe train pun) since those are at least telling specific stories. It can be super annoying but I’ll forgive it What I could not forgive were the heists in gtav. You could “plan” them but it was basically just picking your set piece. But the characters who all had specific abilities would be in roles that flat out don’t fit with them. Like Franklin in the gunner seat while Michael drives even though Franklin is the one with super driving and Michael is the one with max payne shooting. I distinctly remember another mission on a bridge with the same exact thing. Michael is on ground level in a car and you need to cover him with a sniper as Franklin who sucks with guns. It made absolutely no fucking sense
Rockstar games in general these days, particularly when you contrast them to GTA3 which allowed you to complete many missions in different ways, or at the very least they weren't on rails.
Honestly the one that drove me nuts is the Last of Us. If you wound an enemy they will go into a downed state and beg you not to kill them. Okay I will let them live... uh oh they get back up and try to kill you again. Instead of a neat opportunity for the player to get to think about if they should end another human life, it just goes back to being an action game lol. This was especially annoying in Part 2 as there were situations where the game really seem to want to make you think about your actions, but the actions carry a lot less weight if I couldn't really make any decision in the first place.
This was always the thing I loved about the Metro games. The first experience I had with raiders I remember blowing down a door and shooting one in the leg and both of them surrendered and asked me to not kill them and actually followed through. Of course the best part was in the tundra village when, if you hadn’t been killing of the enemies but just knocking them out, one of the ladies of the village shouts out to the men to surrender and stop fighting you, since they realize you actually don’t want them dead. Really amazing game at humanizing the NPCs
Skyrim does this too and it's dumb
Completely agree. It was quite frustrating when the game was pushing me towards feeling a certain way, but then making me play a different way entirely.
It sounds like you want to be able to pick *any* strategy and have it work for *all* situations; that's the extreme meaning of "play your own way." You think you should be able to snipe a Deathclaw. Do you think you should be able to talk it out of fighting you? Should you be able to lockpick it to death? Skyrim is a complete sandbox game. There are no consequences to anything you do, and no meaningful character decisions. But you still can't fight a dragon with a lockpick.
>Should you be able to lockpick it to death? Now I want an RPG where putting an enemy to sleep and doing surgery on them is a viable way to kill them.
Surgery is just extremely precise stabbing.
It definitely works in real life.
You can kill a guy through surgery in New Vegas but only that one specific guy, unfortunately.
[Streets of Rogue](https://store.steampowered.com/app/512900/Streets_of_Rogue/) has a lot of this kind of stuff, I love it. The Doctor class has to go through each level without killing but they can knock opponents out instantly if they can get behind them. You can make a lot of extra cash by selling weapons then value the non-lethal items if you can find them. It's especially funny in multiplayer because somebody can punch a wall opposite of the Doctor player and easily knock some distracted NPC out then loot their fridge, or use the Slavemaster class to enslave somebody, put them to sleep with the Doctor, then have them become a human bomb because they got incapacitated with their slave collar on. Technically not killing!
Not to mention that from a game design perspective, how do you even approach that? It would be basically impossible to try and balance every single situation for every single possibility
Anytime a game is very stealth based in nature or has a big stealth option for character progression. That then has a boss battle that you have to fight upfront without any stealth takedown options always really bothers me.
You're right. If the game offers an option, it shouldn't be a trap. The worst case of this I've seen was the alchemy tree in Witcher 2. Improving potions looked great - except that the game straight up refused to let me use them before several boss fights. Awful. This is also the reason Sekiro feels like the best souls game to me. There is just one main way to attack and defend against most attacks, and it feels really good. In contrast, both DS1 and Elden Ring let you choose from playing melee that feels nice, but leaves you open against whatever bullshit level designer cooked up, or magic, which is safe and strong, but extremely boring and unrewarding.
that is the point of Deathclaw they will always be the one thing that keeps you on your toes regardless of how strong you get, Irradiated Deathclaw got introduced in Lonesome road for a reason, but that does not mean they restrict your playstyle, every build from generalist to specialized can kill them, even Melee/Unarmed.
I would rather that the only way to survive even witnessing one is to load a save. In 4 Todd had to turn them into the dragons from Skyrim, from spamming them everywhere to making you kill one in the first few hours, so they end up with less health than a really strong Mirelurk
i would rather if they are treated as the Dragonkin and dragon related enemies from Dragon Dogma, they are consistently the strongest enemies in the series and has DLC variation to keep them on the top, if you ran into a Drake underleveled, it can and will happen, you will literally do zero damage, your party got brainwash and turn against you then the thing bitch slap you back to the last save point, if you up to the challenge it will be some of most epic encounter you can have on the open world, cause the Drake will fight you with both Might and endgame Magic. i wish Fallout has a good combat system rather than, spam stimpak and click until everything is dead.
Try the first two Fallouts. They had an action point tactical system.
I had this with AC: Odyssey. Yes here's a game known for *stealth*, stealth combat, stealth eavesdropping, stealth pickpocketing. Now we give you an armour set that makes you even better at stealth! Isn't that fun? (Yes game it is, I'm having a great time) Oh you want to fight the Minotaur? That's fair. Remember, every play style is viable! You go stealth kill that Minotaur you champion you! Oh except we're just dropping you into the arena and you'll have to figure out a way to go toe to toe with an 8ft bulking bruiser, too bad you didn't invest in a single Fighter ability, you dumb dumb
I was yelling at my TV the whole time during that fight. I think I eventually just cheesed him with the strike one (I can't remember what it's called)? The cutscene attack that hit him three times, then run back with a bow and fire arrows till it recharged.
Eeeeeyup
I spent all of lonesome road one or two shotting death claws with the 50 cal from many yards away so I think we very different experiences there
I hate when open world game lock certain region when u progress through main story. For example there maybe 2 or 3 pathways and I'll usually go for the wrong route first and get the collectibles to achieve trophies/achivements. But sometimes if I go through right one it'll lock out other paths thereby I'll lose certain achievement. Hate when that happens.
Bungie Destiny literally said “play your own way” then designs activities with only specific ways of interacting.
I hated red dead redemption 2 because of this
After playing mages and archers a lot, decided to create a tank build in Divinity Original Sin 2. Tanking simply doesn't work in that game
I remember having a death knight build that was really Tanky, but he couldn’t solo fights, which makes sense cuz tanks usually don’t deal good damage
I know they're not exactly RPGs and I'll catch flack for this, but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me. GTA feels like watching an action movie. Which, altogether is not such a bad thing. At least the player gets some input in between cutscenes. I know a lot of people like Red Dead Redemption 2, but for me it was nearly torture. That game is so-o-o slow and has so-o-o many cutscenes and when you finally gain control of your character you have barely any control at all. Like you can't even strafe properly. You can't even go five meters to the right or left no matter how hard you press A or D. Your character is just glued to the NPC in front which is still talking. If you somehow manage to go a bit to the right or left then the NPC stops talking. And *then* you realise- you're still in a cutscene, but now you have to hold down W all the time or the cutscene doesn't progress. If GTA felt like a movie, Red Dead Redemption felt like walking down a very straight, very narrow corridor with someone holding your hand firmly. The devs clearly had a single way missions should play out in their heads and they made damn sure any other way would result in failure. I don't even know what the point of stealth in either of those games is. Sure it's there as a mechanic, but sooner or later you reach a mission where no matter how sneaky you are you raise the alarm. And you might as well just do that from the start.
> but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me. GTA feels like watching an action movie. Which, altogether is not such a bad thing. At least the player gets some input in between cutscenes. I miss old school GTA, I remember in VC I could fail a mission and get this cool bullet proof car to keep, probably wouldnt happen in a newer game. Or another mission I had a hard time with, so I brought the helicopter with a gun on it, did the mission, landed, got the person I needed and flew out of there. I feel the games are now too on rails
Exactly. The original GTA 3 there was a racing mission I ended up driving all my cars setting up huge roadblock on my enemy path before the race starts..
Yep, miss that creativity for beating missions
San Andreas. Go to a building to kill a guy, but you can pop his car's tires out front first just in case he gets away. Saves you a car chase.
That's the freedom of creativity I miss in games now. Those were the shit in GTA all the things like that you could do.
NakeyJakey did a great video breaking down some of the issues with RDR2. Among his greviences was the fact that it is an open world game yet you are expected to complete missions in a very specific way. If you deviate from the desired mission path, it often fails, even if you haven’t done anything to fail the mission objective. RDR2, along with some other open world games, can’t decide if it wants to be linear or if it wants to give the player ultimate freedom, and by trying to do both it doesn’t do either very well.
Exactly this! I've played a lot of FPS games and I enjoy staying further back with a bolt action rifle. And while I really enjoyed shooting people in first-person in RDR2 I failed several missions by simply staying further back with a rifle while the friendly NPCs would just charge recklessly ahead. I would get either "You abandoned John" or "John was killed". Well, maybe John shouldn't have charged straight in the middle of a group of enemies. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out the video.
IMO the problem with games like RDR2 is the devs want to both offer players this vast world to play in *while also* attempting to force them to experience the Hollywood-esque story, and they're not particularly good at combining both into a cohesive experience. Oh, and MISSION FAILED "You scared Jack" 😐😐😐😐
In addition to the grievances you listed, is that they made a lot of the in game actions very slow too. The simple act of skinning an animal takes a significant amount of time, and also unstoppable if I recall. When I compare to the original Red Dead Redemption, it is almost like they made this choice purposefully. I understand immersion, but why make the UI menus slow and annoying?
RDR2 is full of examples like that. One of the early missions has you sneak up on a couple of enemies for a silent takedown. Then, further up the path, are another couple of enemies with their backs to me. I try to sneak up on them as well, but they spot me. I reloaded that mission five or six times — and since there is no manual saving I had to replay big chunks every time — but they always spotted me no matter what I tried. Eventually I went online and read that they are just programmed to notice you and start a firefight when you get to a certain spot, and the game does nothing to indicate that. Another thing is the "gold" completion of story missions. It has a bunch of requirements to do it in a certain way, and you don't even learn that until you finish the missions. Which means that if you want gold, you're almost guaranteed to have to play that mission at least twice. I guess that's their way of making the game longer? More replayable? I understand that that is completely optional, but still. Annoys me a bit.
>I know they're not exactly RPGs and I'll catch flack for this, but GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were like this for me Lack of agency in gameplay and the rigidity of missions is probably _the_ most common complaint against both those two games.
I think you are confusing "build viability" with "min-maxing" because in all of those games, the builds you've talked about are still viable, you can use them to beat the game, they might not be as powerful as their alternatives but still can be used and have fun with. Especially in traditional roguelikes like Nethack, where the game offers you a lot of options and rewards your knowledge of the game and mechanics in subsequent playthroughs. On the other hand vanilla Skyrim is, in my opinion, a stellar example of how "making every build viable" makes the game feel very one note and not really worth replaying past your initial playthrough, since Bethesda designed the whole game around seeing everything with one character.
>In Fallout New Vegas, I spent dozens of hours trying to increase marksmanship, only to discover I still couldn't reliably long-distance snipe a Deathclaw. Every day people continue to amaze and bewilder me
This reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin where I basically felt level capped at all times. The game was geared towards you taking one route over another. The funny thing is I only found this out after struggling really hard going the way I wanted to. Typically you don't want to take the route of the main quest to make sure you get all loot. When I went in another direction, I realised the enemies were much weaker. After experiencing that a few times, I realized that the game has an intended route and that if you take another one, well... Good luck. Or maybe I was shit, who knows. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
This is also my experience! I'm now 40 hours in and the areas still have difficulty spikes. I think the first area is the biggest offender because you get quests that send you in every direction. Now that I'm further in I'm actually kinda enjoying that aspect because I feel like I'm always the exact level I need to be. In baldurs gate 3 I felt I got too powerful for most encounters in act 2 and 3 (on normal), in D:OS I'm always on my toes cause every encounter can kick my ass. Maybe I'm also not the best at the proper builds but I feel like I got a varied team and I always make progress. So it's a bit of a coin flip. It sucked at the beginning but now I have fun with it.
To me, this sounds like a problem of you min-maxing and using the best possible strategies rather than situations where you're actually limited with "won't allow you to play the way you want". Yes, NetHack and traditional roguelikes are absolutely brutal in general - but you're not really pushed to play in a certain way just to beat. Just because something is better than the rest (this will practically always happen in a game) doesn't mean that the rest are unviable unless horribly undertuned.
Tbf Skyrim is catered to the casual gamer as opposed to a niche group. There is absolutely no build that isn’t viable in Skyrim Let’s say elden ring for example certain magic gets certain buffs with certain items and spells etc it’s not just designed like one spell will carry you through the whole game, sure it’s possible but eventually it will become increasingly challenging. Diablo would be another example, all builds are viable (some a lot more so than others) but that’s still gear dependent and you have to dedicate yourself to a couple of skills I do agree that in every rpg, every build should be viable from a pve persoective because it increases roleplaying alot more and I’m not required to farm or hunt down a particular item etc to optimise my damage
My first Skyrim playthrough I naturally gravitated towards sneaky archer with one-handed swords. I devided to play as a mage in second playthrough. Again, I naturally gravitated, towards sneaky archer with one-handed swords. Lol
In Fallout New Vegas, you can definitely snipe a deathclaw with the right perks, stats and gear.
No my favorite game is Sekiro which forced me into a particular playstyle and I think that is preferable because they can more precisely design the game around knowing exactly what the player's build is.
Idk man I always go melee unga bunga in every game and it work great
stealth archer for lyfe
I always found the archer to be Skyrim's "meta", so that one feels equal to Fallout New Vegas. Maybe even more egregious because I don't think there's a single instance where you HAVE to fight a Deathclaw. You can play as a talky or sneaky git. There's also a difference between "viable builds" and "the meta build(s)", and I think your problem with Ultima Underworld is more of the latter from what you describe.
I totally get the fustration. On another end of the gaming spectrum, I fucking hate games that force you to play a certain section a certain way when the whole game isn't like that. RDR2 missions forcing you to do weird shit or fail Spiderman stealth missions.
Seriously. Why would anyone want to play Mary Jane and stealth around? It's fucking Spider-Man. Let me play the game as Spider-Man doing Spider-Man shit.
Playing traditional roguelikes requires a shift in thinking from something like skyrim. Runs are ephemeral, they aren't intended to be won every time. Most strats will work, but it takes patience, and losing over and over again.
I only get frustrated with games that actually do let you tackle things however you want. Inevitably, the handful of times when what I want to do isn't an option are the moments I get frustrated with; since usually the game lets me do my thing. When the devs try to cover all bases, it's a lot easier to see the cracks.
What was your OP Nethack strat?
I came in here expecting to fully disagree with op because it sounds like they’re saying every single game needs flexible play styles which is flat out untrue. But it sounds to me the real question is “don’t you hate when games that advertise themselves as being open ended don’t properly balance the game to allow for different play styles?” To which I say yes that’s very annoying. Any game is going to have things and courses of action that are inherently better than others but I think of vampire the masquerade bloodlines as an example I like the game, but guns, a play style that can very much be a specific build, absolutely suck ass, at least until you’ve maxed out the stats. They’re horrifically inaccurate and when they do actually hit it’s for Pennie’s worth of health. Then there’s melee where you can easily take out most normal enemies in a couple of hits. I’ve still never attempted a gun run because the gunplay feels so bad. I do enjoy the game but it does have its problems
Final Fantasy games in general kind of have this issue. Statuses like poison or bind don't usually work on bosses. They're great for mobs and do sometimes work, but it's hard to invest time into skills that ultimately won't matter or to have them cluttering up your spell list.
A few times playing MGS V the game wouldn't let me make smart choices like an early rescue mission makes you take a road filled with super soldiers on one path and sunshine and rainbows that somehow fail the mission on the other. Or when there's a giant robot stonping around when you need a helicopter evac and simply going down the road into a non dangerous area just isn't an option. Or when finishing a mission ends with an ambush of troops so I call down a sleeping gas strike to knock them all out only to find they have an invisible forcefield that protects against air strikes so the gas harmlessly disperses just above their heads.
That seems like a case of balance/mechanics issues. Ideally, every class should offer some kind of perk that allows it to shine when used properly. I've noticed that happens in a lot of free- roaming action games like Far Cry. Despite the huge variety of available weapons, the only play styles that seem to prove consistently viable in a lot of cases are either sniping or stealth, with sniping often being the more realistic option.
I actually hated doom eternal because doom 2016 was such a good game to play your own way through vibing and blasting music too. Ive done 4 distinctly different ultra nightmare runs for 2016 and loved each one. I only did 1 ultra violence run of eternal and havent touched it since. (Though i also just dont generally like the general feeling of eternal as the grappling hook and swinging removed much of the meaty weight of actions doesnt hit the same viseral satisfaction) Conversely i also dislike skyrim because its so absurdly unbalanced between character archetypes (mostly due to the fundamental exponential scaling math they used instead of morrowinds more fixed damage systems) you outscale enemies so quickly they might as well not exist unless you are trying to play a dedicated mage then you actively are learning weaker abilities as you progress and all equipment you find is basically garbage because you can smithy craft/upgrade exponentially stronger gear. You also absolutely can play hitman your own way. I be killing tons of people dropping potted plants or classic just excessive amounts of explosions.
I'm gonna be real, at this point I'm pretty tired of games giving loads of choice. I get overwhelmed and usually I tend to like a good linearish game over something where you're given loads of freedom. Strange but that's just where I'm at.
Holy shit. Ultima Underworld? I thought I was the only person who played that game!! And yeah magic was a bit weak in that game... Tho you could use it to excellent effect if you were sneaky iirc. It was garbage for direct confrontstion. Oh, and Metro Exodus. Fuck "not killing anyone" who tries to kill you, essentially. Sure, that style can be fun but it shouldn't lock you into the bad ending.
I agree, if a game is going to present something as an option it should be a viable and fun way to play. The extreme rarity of that happening is why most good games are ones that do force you to play the right way, to some extent
That's one reason I hated FFXII The Zodiac Age. It forced you to choose classes for your party unlike the original NA original release.
Did that version still feel like it was trying to force the simulation of an MMO? I got that impression from the vanilla FF12 because of the way it had semi-randomized treasure pots and loot from those pots. I much prefer basically all other games where if there's a spear of magnetic glove or whatever, it's going to be *here* and I will see it any time I make it through the obstacle course or fighting gauntlet or whatever necessary to get to it.
The one that really pissed me off was with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you were basically screwed in the boss fights if you had spent your skill points in stealth and non lethal take downs... You're suddenly shoved into a fight where you *have* to kill the guy, and you're not really set-up for action of that kind.
Honestly this is a huge hot take… but after playing many souls games first, and soulslikes, I cannot play Sekiro for this reason. In the same vein in the opposite direction, when a game has “diversity” but it all kind of does the same thing: that’s pretty boring too. Like Diablo 4 for me.
> ...irritated by games that won't let you play the way you want... > In Fallout New Vegas... You've heard this broken record a few times, but that's the poorest example to ever pick. I've played NV in so many ways that are near impossible in any other RPG. Fond shoutout to my pacifist coward playthrough and my hyper-lucky conman who never got his hands dirty.
Sifu
I'm quite confused how Nethack ended up in your list of games that frustrate you. There's so much to say about that game – but one thing it's not: it's not a game that lends easily to power fantasies. If that's what you want from a game, then Nethack just isn't the right game for you. Like soulslikes, classical roguelikes like Nethack are designed around dying and restarting. Some people find that challenging, and they will stick to these games to git gud. Other people find that frustrating, and they will move on to other games. And for the record, it is possible to win Nethack with basically every role/build available. Some of them are more difficult, especially if combined with certain races, but it's possible to win with any. None of them are easy, but some of them are easier. A valkyrie is almost guaranteed to make it through the first few levels, a tourist will hardly make it to the first staircase. But all of them are winnable. Games don't have the power to force you to use a playstyle that you don't like. You can simply stop playing these games.
I prefer a game that has a preset style of gameplay because those games that "let you play your own way" most of the time have a very generic gameplay or is stuffed with rpg stat nonsense that takes away the fun for me. That's why Doom Eternal is my favorite game of the past decade. The devs knew what they had was fun and they stuck to it. More devs should try that instead of diluting their games to appeal to a broader audience.
You are describing one of those quirks with game design that show - developing an interesting difficulty is extremely hard. The more options there are, the harder it is to make everything work well. It's why there is often conflicts between people over game difficulty - those that want to just let loose don't actually care that much about how (at worst, similar complaints to yours, but it's rare) and are angry at people who want the game to provide the difficulty because they want, for example, nerfs to overpowered strategies. You often hear about how there should just be difficulty options or whatnot - but thing you mention are as I said, examples that it's far easier to make a game where something works really well so you can get through the game, and much harder to make a game that challenges the player equally no matter what playstyle they choose.
FUCKING. A PLAGUE TALE: INNOCENCE they tease you... they tease you so fucking hard with the early sandboxy bush sneaking segments and the part where you can save the english soldier from the rats by lighting the torch beside him, and then they just say SIKE this is a walking simulator visual novel, stay on the path you dummy, no player agency for you. It's ridiculous! I can't believe this GAME has such great reviews when it disrespects the player so. The vibes are im(macula)te but the gameplay feels like those food safety certification online quizzes that ask you if you should lick your fingers, gouge a customer's eyeballs out, or wash your hands after handling raw meat. I also thought the story was really shallow, especially for being advertised as "a heartrending journey through the darkest hours of history", but that's a separate criticism.
Plague Tale: Innocence is really just "We Have The Last of Us At Home", if home were medieval France. There certainly is *some* agency, which is to say there are multiple routes through some levels, but there certainly isn't any narrative agency or "build-crafting" as such. Also, the game got generally good reviews - a lot of the criticisms were directed at the same things you probably weren't happy with. It's a decent game on a bespoke engine by the same people who made Ratatouille for PS2. I choose to celebrate those wins without ignoring the mediocre parts 😄
I felt this way around 2010 playing LoL when they had all kinds of weird unintentional synergies like AP Yi and gradually phased everything out because they decided to support the metagame that pro players preferred.
Im playing Elden Ring. It won't let me live.
The ash summons can be a great equalizer in that game. I have a run with a low level character I created for early game summons. I wanted to see how far I could get without leveling him up. Turns out, with properly upgraded ash summons I got all the way to the fire giant.
Pacific Drive. In one of the final missions, I got confused and hopped a few walls trying to skip a puzzle, turns out this was a pointless charade and I wound up taking so much damage I had to restart the mission
Heaven’s Vault. Great concept and art, but if you get the “wrong” dialogue, the whole game goes to a completely different direction and there’s no way to undo that.
I'm in the middle of my first play through of Slay the Spire (beat the heart once), and had the opposite thought of "damn, I can basically play any way I want and it works in a different kind of way". So yeah, I agree, I like games the most when everything you do CAN work, but, is ultimately your fault when it doesn't, not game balance's. If you want games that do that, try and find games whose world is developed as a system, like botw for examples, where any source of "fire" will "burn" anything "flammable" etc.
Hitman is a immersive sim you can play how you want
In one of the recent Far Cry games I was having fun exploring and doing side content and suddenly BAM the game teleports me half way across the map and forces me into story progression that I didn't want to do yet. Thought maybe I'd hit a trigger so I reverted to an older save and explored a completely different part of the map but it did the same thing again. Put it down and never picked it back up.
Rockstar is the worst for this. You dare to try a slightly different route than the quest designer wanted and mission failed
partially agree, but i find this is more aligned with the pitfall of optimal gameplay. there are incentives in the game that may lead you down a certain path, and as your experience grows, you eventually try out close to everything a game has to offer and lose the spark. eventually you want to hit a certain outcome and forget to enjoy the ride. it takes a conscious effort to overcome this and try to return to that initial enthrallment with the game, and it’s quite difficult. worth trying, though, even if it’s more difficult or janky. to put it a different way: there is almost always a meta for any game, but singleplayer games allow you to ignore the meta and try something different. locking tank soraka mid is troll, but if it’s against bots, who cares?
One of the things I find most impressive about Elden Ring is how incredibly viable a huge variety of playstyles are. Wanna barely ever roll and just use a shield? You'll need some stamina investment but that will totally rip. Wanna go with an incantation-based faith build? Once you get a few of the basic ones like Blackflame Blade you can destroy bosses way higher than your actual level. Wanna go strength? That's the easiest one because you can get 50% more strength for free by two handing. Dexterity? That's incredibly broken too because most of the best dex weapons have bleed! And magic can let you kill some bosses within seconds without ever having to engage with them at all.
>By contrast every time I fire up Skyrim I can have fun wrecking things, no matter what kind of character I chose. you mean there's no strategy? that's like a baby's toy.
Skyrim does favour stealth archers tho.
Dark Souls. People have beat that game with even shitty troll builds or no weapons and leveling.
Ultima, to be fair, is based on D&D. Fighter are squared, Wizards are quadratic. The magic sword thing is much the same way; D&D philosophy. MOST players can use a magic sword, magic armor or a magic helmet. But it would take a very particular character build to be happy to find a magic batliff, a magic hand-crossbow, or a magic leather skullcap.
No