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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Most players use guides to play that game?
Is that common these days?
It doesn't seem very fun.
FromSoft sort of brought it upon themselves with their design philosophy to be fair, going back at least as far as Dark Souls. Selling a DLC and having it locked behind a convoluted puzzle you wouldn't figure out without a guide was certainly a choice, for example.
Case in point: I played dark souls for 30 minutes and then gave up.
Did not seem worth it.
30 minutes is not nearly long enough to get to anything convoluted.
I like the idea of Soulslikes. I want to like playing them (some of them, I do: Hellpoint, The Surge, the Jedi games). But I can't bring myself to slog through it just to say I did. It's not fun or worth it to me.
But that’s literally the point of these games compared to everything else that’s out there.
Where else do I get cryptic puzzles and unforgiving exploration without a map full of markers?
I don't think that's entirely true. There are lots of people who play them mostly for the challenge of learning and beating the (mostly) well designed bosses.
Outer Wilds? Subnautica?
Lunacid
Tangentially related, I played over 30 hours of Elden Ring before learning there were Map Fragments. The first one I found was way up north. I just assumed the world map was supposed to be dogshit.
I wasn't happy for having gotten through without them, I was honestly just kinda pissed that they didn't do some minimal nudging towards the first one.
The first one is a big glowing item by a big stone marker that the graces point you to. It's also marked on the unrevealed map.
It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren't missing anything the game has to offer. You never know when a game may put something very obscure in a very limited timeframe.
In the case of elden ring or from software games in general NPC's are usually so cryptic that solving the puzzles/quests would take you a lot of trial and error which isnt very fun for me.
You've hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you've hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you're likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.
That's gonna be excruciating if you insist on "100% completing" the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.
Not to say there's anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you'd like to experience the whole game.
I'd love a Morrowind type journal to log some of that, totally get I can write things down outside the game, I'd just like to have that option in game especially as I can tend to jump around games and put them down for some time. They're almost there with the player map markers and NPC markers, even just having the ability to make notes in game would be big for me.
There are some things you just can't do without a guide/wiki. For example the achievements of "collect every weapon/ring".
Also, the NPC quests are just undoable. There are basically no hints as to how to do them, and there are many ways to permanently lose the quest. Doing correctly a NPC quest going blind as an average player consists of plain luck.
I think most people have used guides, but I wonder how much guide people use. Take me for instance, I play blind as much as possible, but I look up a guide to see if there are any weapons that I can miss in a playthrough.
It isn't. Having to look up everything about a game to know how to play doesn't make a fun game. I quit games with convoluted solutions. I'm not a Dark Souls player for that reason.
It's really not that difficult to go through these games with minimal guide use. If you're looking to 100% them, then yes, a guide is essential to use. And you always have summoning in boss battles, and ER added npc summons too. Once you just embrace the games with an open mind , they become more enjoyable.
I typically play the FromSoft games without a guide the first time through, then look up what I missed for subsequent playthroughs.
You don't really need to follow a "build" guide because it's not really that kind of game. There are a lot of weapons to choose from, and some choices in rings, but it's not like Path of Exile where you have a ton of interconnected, semi permanent changes.
I feel like dark souls games are the only time I ever hear about build guides, what kind of games require build guides if not the dark souls ones?
Man, I guess I should just try playing elden ring already haha.
I mean, a lot of the "build guides" online are just trash from youtubers and whatnot trying to get clicks. You don't need to follow a complicated youtube video to get "Raise HP and Stamina, get a big spear, get a big shield, stab baddies."
Do you know Path of Exile? Go look at how that game works. You really want to follow a guide there or you're likely going to find halfway through that your character is too weak, and you're too poor to reset it. Other games that are close relatives to Diablo2 often feel like they need build guides. They often have mutually exclusive build choices and a lower player-skill factor.
Eh, if you want specific endings you need a guide or you can spend hundreds of hours finding and talking to each npc after each boss fight. I don’t have that kind of time and I don’t like getting locked out of things because I only talked to the creepy dead looking guy five times instead of six.
I can get it for one or two really hard puzzles in a game, but elden ring at least had no need for a guide at all
Eh, maybe after they added the NPC icons to the map. At launch, there was basically zero chance you'd complete any NPC quests on your own.
Usually just to figure out a build that lets them explore without getting completely merked
Yeah yeah git gud and whatever but some folks just want to see the cool story without having to become a dodge rolling master.