Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate.
I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.
I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it’s an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.
So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?
E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!
Personally I just hop in an wing it. In the case of baldurs gate I already understood most classes and races because of DND but in general when it comes to games like that yeah I just wing it and hope for the best
This is it basically. Especially for the first time you don’t really need to minmax anything and still have a good time.
For BG3, don’t search something about it, just start and play. You don’t need to know anything prior, however it’s a role-playing game so play accordingly what kind of character you created. You can save-scumming if you want if some desicion you made leads to something bad, though they all the part of the game. Just play and experience.
For games like Overwatch, it isn’t complicated at all. It just requires you to play it constantly and learn counter measures just by playing. Learning them is the fun part, overthinking about them not so much.
To be fair when I see “complex game” part, I was kinda expexting some advanced building games, something like Factorio, maybe RimWorld.
Anyway, also you don’t have to like any games even if they are overwhelmingly positive titles. Just find what you like and dig in.
I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).
Counterpoint. Rimworld is complicated. EU4 is super complicated.
Hey now factorio isn’t complex, just play it a lot and you’ll pick it up… I’m 2000 hours in and managed to finish a game in only 70 hours! I’m thiiiiis close to making train lines without constant crashes. Pretty soon I’ll feel ready to add in Bob’s mods to the mix. It’s… Simple…
You should jump right into PyAE, very great easy mod idea just trust me
/s
A lot of these games are working off of an assumed learned collective memory.
Think of movies, and their tropes. How do you understand that when a movie cuts to black for a second, and then suddenly shows a new location, that we did not just teleport? That the black cut indicates the end of a scene, and the start of a new one?
Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump. Now, add another layer of controls. And another.
BG3 is also working with an assumed collective memory from DnD. Assuming you already learned about class vs race, and cantrips vs lvl spells, and turn order, etc.
It sucks when you miss large games that establish these things, but its also how art forms evolve. Games just dont yet have a way to easily re-teach them.
Yeah, if you’ve played DnD 5E I’d say you’re already well on the way to knowing how BG3 works technically. If not, it’s prolly a bit of a learning curve but the game does start soooorta slow at level 1, though 4 characters is a lot. Look up some common archetypes!
Or don’t, and just pick what sounds fun!
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Often, yes, but not always, and thats only become a recent trend.
And just as many games dont, or only explain where their controls differ from the cultural expectations.
It applies to mechanics too, but thats harder to talk about without actual examples in front of you, and I dont have any good contrast examples off the top of my head
I recently started playing Divinity Original Sin 2, and I went through this problem as well until I changed the way I approached the game.
I just let go of trying to make the most optimized decisions and instead just make the decision I, or my character would make (if I’m role playing).
I just realized that no matter what decision I make, it will still lead me to finish the game. If I really want to, later I can go back and play it again to see more of the game. Only if I like my first play-through though.
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I just wing it at first, and figure stuff out as I go, even in online stuff. BG3 in particular, by the end of chapter 2 you’ll be pretty familiarized with mechanics. Inventory management is here, but worth doing sometimes. I just unload stuff from main character into someone else in the party.
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BG3 handles failure better than almost any game I’ve ever played. Fuck around, find out. Be free of your need to always win and just play the game however you want.
Worst case you start over with a totally different character.
Playing out all the possibilities is half the fun!
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Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you’ll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.
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Tell that to my TES: Oblivion character I picked only non combat skills as primary. Everything was fine when exploring landscape and forests, leveling peacefuly my alchemy, alteration or stealth and lockpicking. It was nice. Until I got to first oblivion gate and found out level scaling is a thing. Then I was f’d up pretty hard. Needless to say I never finished the game because of this.
Oblivion’s levelling system was beyond fucked. The optimal way to play in terms of power is to pick primary skills that you know you won’t use and then go out of your way to only level those once you’ve levelled other things enough to get maximum value out of the level up. Or, alternatively, just never sleep so that you never level up and play the entire game at level one.
Sad part is I did really like Oblivion world, but that level/power scaling was absolute shitshow that completely ruined it for me.
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It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it’s a common complaint.
Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn’t have the stats to do what you’re wanting/what they’re built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it’s even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.
But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.
Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term “barrelmancy” is a thing.
I’m not gonna say there won’t be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.
If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.
You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.
I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.
Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I’m saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don’t work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.
If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.
That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn’t require fighting.
Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You’ll be fine.
It’s a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I’m certain most people would be overjoyed to help.
it’s going to make things very difficult as my character will be super weak.
Who cares? That’s a challenge.
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That’s why after dying 3-4x I will do a quick research on how to die less. There’s a limit to my trial and error in games.
That right there is the mindset of min/maxing. You’re halfway there already!
I’m curious why you think Deep Rock Galactic is complex. It’s one of the most “pick up and play” friendly games, I think, that I own.
Exactly. I’d be reluctant to try any of the other games that OP names because I “don’t have the time” and yet I have 200+ hours in DRG.
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Obviously if you don’t enjoy it then that’s 100% valid, but at least in terms of understanding what to do it’s totally okay to play DRG without understanding anything beyond “shoot bugs and do whatever thing mission control most recently asked you to do”. There’s no need to play at a higher hazard if you don’t yet know or just don’t care to know about how to set up your weapons for maximum effectiveness or how to counter each type of bug and so on. Just play at whatever hazard you find fun and try things out until you find what you enjoy. There’s no class or weapon that is non-functional without some other component. No wrong choices, so to speak. They’re all just degrees of better and worse at any given job, and if you try something out on a mission and it doesn’t work then the absolute worst possible penalty is just that you fail that mission and only get a little bit of xp and cash instead of a bigger amount.
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If you want a calm group of people to play with, DM me and we can trade Steam information (assuming you use that platform) - we typically need a 4th player anyway
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Just sent you a request. KNova
Here’s a fun thing you can do: just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 may be very daunting at first, even with its genius tooltip system, so I just went straight into it with a Dragonborn barbarian with no real thought put into it other than “he’s hot and totes my new fursona”. You’d be surprised at how far you get and how much you pick up naturally over the next 80 hours of gameplay.
That being said, it’s still not for everyone, as much as it tries to be, and if even Overwatch is too complex for you already, it might just be that the evolving game design in the industry is becoming more misaligned with your tastes, and that gamers are becoming more and more serious about the video games they play.
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Don’t worry too much about it. It’s part of the Role-Playing charm.
After my own first couple of playthroughs with “serious characters” I just started screwing around with fun builds.
The “Double Chaos” sorceror is fun and stupid way to complete the game. Sometimes I’m a doomsday machine in battle, others times I’m a sheep…
Then you respec your character.
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Unless you do obviously dumb things, like not doing anything at all and letting the enemies hit you, you literally could not fail at baldurs gate on default difficulty. I actually find it way too easy to succeed and far too forgiving. You could genuinely go through the whole game with your “picked random everything” character. Youll get your ass kicked a few times, but youll never get stuck anywhere. The only part thats complex is the story IMO. There are dozens of alternative endings and secret story bits and hidden interactions between characters. Almost every quest, no matter how small, has multiple endings. You could probably sink 1000 hours into BG3 without going through most of the story content.
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I wonder how long before someone starts getting offended on behalf of cavemen for the phrase Ooga Booga.
Seriously though, perhaps RPG’s just aren’t for OP. Some people get enjoyment from taking things slow, learning all the mechanics, and building the most powerful character possible within the limits of the game.
Many people choose not to cheat in games like this to give yourself max stats because that’s where the fun is, as opposed to a a game like borderlands, where an already maxxed out character can still be challenged with the endgame content which scales to their level.
The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.
Why do you need to know? Just pick one and go with it!
Deep Rock Galactic
I haven’t played much but, it’s not complicated? There’s a main lobby where you select a quest, then you go on it. It generally involved following a path and gathering/dropping off stuff with some fighting in between.
Overwatch
This one is just anticipating other people’s movement on a map, which can be chaotic but I don’t really think it’s complicated? Honestly if you’re having issues
just play Paladins insteadI would stick by 1 or 2 teammates and just focus on staying with them no matter what. Over time you’ll learn what works and doesn’t work.Destiny
Now THIS one is complicated bullshit. lol
As with any competitive game, in overwatch you are expected by other players to understand complex strategies that have evolved over time, which can be stressful for a newcomer.
It doesn’t help that many players who don’t understand the Meta aren’t afraid to chime in. Standing in front of you holding up my shield isn’t my job, learn how to use cover fool.
Dan Olson has a good video on this topic. It’s tough to get into some larger player base competitive games
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I’m a casual gamer and I used to play Overwatch. There’s always the practice range or training room, I forget what it’s called. But what really got me learning all the characters was playing Mystery Heroes over and over.
Use your thinkbox
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BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.
The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.
I just pick a character class that looks interesting, make them look like me, and get going.
Figure it out as I play, and just have fun. I pretty much never watch videos or read anything about games unless I get really stuck, or have already finished the game and am curious about other playstyles.
Is destiny complex? When I played, it felt basically like all you do is follow the arrow and shoot everything
Its less that it’s complex, moreso that there’s basically zero onboarding.
Also all the actual good content (raids) are not explained and you need to herd some cats to do them. Which is even harder if you’re learning them.
The best time I had with destiny was when I had a clan and a couple of the more experienced players would take a bunch of newbies through. Then we could fuck around and not be completely lost.
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Yup. D2 has the worst new player experience of any game I’ve played. But at the end of the day, it’s just about knowing where the daily solo dungeon is, so you can grind Light level. Raids are complicated though, because a lot of them are like puzzles.
Stopped playing it because of how money hungry the game is.
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This!
The fun of this games are learning what are good or bad combination of traits.
Its true that if you already have playe Dungeon and dragóns or are used to play this short of games need less tries until you found something that works
Wing it, discovering that I’ve made a massive mistake is part of the fun, I don’t want to spoil any game with let’s plays. I don’t try to get the most optimal build I’m just looking to have fun. I use what ever gun I enjoy the most in borderlands, yeah when it starts to feel weak I swap but I’m not going to use a gun I hate because it does two more damage that one I love.
Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar Games?
This. There is a sort of gaming DNA that you just internalize over time. I’ve been gaming for 30 years, I just know how that one breakable wall looks, that you need to come back to once you get bombs or whatever it is. I know the difference between a caster, a fighter and a rogue when I see them without knowing the exact details of their ability mechanics in this particular game. My intuition as to how a given ability is most likely going to work is also usually pretty close. Because they are often very similar across different games.
Also if you don’t know and don’t have to have the absolute optimal combination from square one, just pick what looks cool and try it. If it doesn’t work out, try something else. Most games allow respecs nowadays. We learn through failure and repitition.
Baldurs Gate allows “respeccing” too, which I presume is respecialistion?
It puts you back to level one, let’s you change class entirely even, but you keep your experience so you can level all the way up again straight away, making different choices.
