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What are your gaming idiosyncracies?
Something unusual you like to do in games -- your uniquely weird habit or preference or behavior.
Tell us all about it.
Something unusual you like to do in games -- your uniquely weird habit or preference or behavior.
Tell us all about it.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but I think I like games way more than I like playing games :|
Similarly I like to read patch notes for MMOs I haven't touched in over a decade, but I couldn't go back even if I get the itch for it on a regular basis.
So real... Few things are more entertaining to me than online microdrama about balance patches in live service games I'll never play. Even if there's no drama involved it's still fun to read through good update notes where the devs go the extra mile to explain all the changes
Ouch. Me too.
Thirded. And then I don't play, or don't finish the games I get.
I'm a potion hoarder. I never use potions or 1-use items, even when they pile up in my inventory in whatever game I'm playing.
I blame game designers for this. Most of the time the items mechanic is unexplained, you never know if there are item limits until you hit them, you don't know if an item is consumable until you use It, you never know if/when you will be able to acquire more, and you never know if you will need this potion against a future boss that is inmune to anything else, or to give It away in a quest or puzzle that hides an undisclosed amount of gameplay.
For me items are mostly a second playthrough mechanic.
100%. There's a lot of good examples to look at these days to help encourage item use rather than hoarding, but there's also a community that's now just upset if they CAN'T hoard.
That's called "too awesome to use" trope and has a whole webpages dedicated to the topic.
Tales of Maj'Eyal roguelike has solved the issue (oh my, the game is old already) by replacing consumables with items with cooldowns.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also had a nice solution too. The ones you find in the wild just upgrade the maximum you can carry. And resting at a flag automatically replenishes all of them.
Same for me when I played OSRS. Potions are annoying to keep track and they cost money. Especially the Sara brew+restore combo, I just use sharks and prayer potions.
I don't even use single use teleports or charges (like tablets or spells) unless it's really far (like Trollheim or Ourania). I'd pay 1m for infinite teleport and use them though
Im the same way, I play ironman and since law runes are hard to come by early on I just developed a habit of not relying on them.
Its nice though, it makes you appreciate and get familiar with the other transport methods. Unlocking stuff like the gnome gliders or hot air balloons is so satisfying as a result.
I just spent like a month working through the fremenik achievements and collecting manta rays so I could unlock infinite teleports on the enchanted lyre. Total game changer.
I cured myself of that in World of Warcraft years ago when there was a particular subclass of Paladin that required basically pissing potions or you’d go down trying to solo anything. It was the one time I played a “take on challenges that are too high level for me” play style over my usual “get beefy and stomp everything in my path” play style. When I went back to WoW years later they had changed everything and it wasn’t fun to play anymore.
I just beat Resident Evil 3 with soooo many unused herbs/herb combos. Also hanging onto them because you never know what's around the corner. Until the thing around the corner is the credits and you've got a garden's worth of greenies.
Same. I rarely use such items.
Go through the options menu before I start the game for the first time.
Give up playing if it feels anything like a chore, or if it fails to throw enough new ideas around. Ain't got time for the same old things.
Do people not do the options thing? That's the very first thing I do on every new piece of software I use. It's a good way to get a sense of how to use the program since they don't tend to come with user manuals anymore.
I pretty much only stay in the options/settings menu. Once I've got things set how i want them, I'm mostly finished with the game (meaning, there isn't much value in actually playing). That's why I don't buy games any more.
Hobbyist web development is more akin to "playing with settings", so I pretty much just do that. I get the dopamine of getting some sort of success after long periods of struggle, which is basically equivalent to playing games.
Dwarf Fortress scratches the same itch.
TotalBiscuit is giving you a thumbs up from heaven!
It's hilarious how in some modern games as part of this you set up all the difficulty and assist related stuff, and then you start the game and they hand hold you through doing the same thing all over again, but with fancier graphics.
Not only do I do this, but I also go to https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home before I start playing.
I would do this less if i could adjust my audio BEFORE the game wakes up the whole house. I feel that audio should be controlled on a per app level, as your desires will change. Devs seem to agree given you've got the ability to and to do things like change sound or music.
SO PLEASE LET ME DO THAT BEFORE YOU DROP ME IN A CUT-SCENE AND SHAKE THE ROOM ARRGHGHGH
Same.
I need to explore side paths. NEED to. I will often find myself crippled trying to decide which way is the dead end and will often turn around if it doesn't seem like I picked the right way. I waste a lot of time needlessly back tracking but I have also restarted or quit games if I end up locked out of going back to a section. It's silly and it's a problem.
I explore any area by going Left every time it is possible, without repeating an area. Dungeons, trails in the woods, etc.
quick edit: It's always surprising when i've play co-op games with a friend and they are either lost, or ask me "which way do you think we go?". Um...left?
But what if going left is the intended path and now you have missed the side path with a meaningless item?
I go left in western RPG games and right in Japanese RPG games. There’s supposedly a built in bias that most game designers exploit to put some sort of loot or encounter in a fork in the opposite direction you’ll naturally pick. I forget where I read it, but supposedly level designers from the west versus Japan will have inverse notions of what is the correct and natural path to guide you down, supposedly relating to reading and writing direction. It’s probably poppycock but it’s still how I make that choice to go the way I’m “not supposed” to go.
Heretic. Right is right.
Left. Always left.
And I greatly appreciate games where the designers take care to ensure that nothing is missable. Or at the very least, provide very clear indications about points of no return.
Beating WW2 FPSs using only the weapons that would be actually available to that soldier.
Currently playing Factorio which i am not great at, but i am putting a LOT of energy into paving a whole continent.
Also, i have to loot everything. Games take me a very long time to finish because of this. Overall I'm pretty sure I am highly diagnosable.
There's a commonly repeated phrase in the Factorio community:
The corollary to this is that you can call anything that doesn't have concrete your "starter base" and make it as messy as you like.
Meanwhile my base is an absolute brick with its own internal train tracks instead of conveyor belts because of how big it is. Paving that monster was uh, an experience.
Nothing that 100,000 bots and 0.2UPS can’t fix! Just slap down the world’s biggest blueprint and leave it running for a week, I’m sure they’ll finish the job eventually!
Yeah, that's suprisingly close to reality except that I was already on 2 UPS and decided to do it in segements with cache crates so the bots wouldn't have to fly so far. I got 0.2 UPS down to only three days, big success.
Oh wow, I was just making up numbers based on vibes and my general understanding of how the factory scales! I don’t think I’ve ever been able to push my own factory to less than 50 UPS or so, I get burned out well before achieving that kind of megafactory.
Well, to tell you the truth I thought I was going along with a gag. But I did suffer extreme slowdowns from my base's sheer size (12-6 UPS). This conversation made me reinstall it on my modern rig, I'll get you some pictures.
Oh gosh I completely missed that, and I’m a bit embarrassed 😅
Condolences to your free time, your loved ones, and your obligations in life. I know how this usually goes
This is why I can't play Diablo or any other ARPG. It took me way too long to realize that other people didn't pick up the junk items to sell.
I was trying out the demo for the Avernum: Escape from the Pit and had been doing the usual picking up all the junk items to be a pack rat and sell them for the miniscule items to sell. It turns out that the junk items in that game were actually just junk, and you are not able to sell them to vendors.
In Oblivion I appropriated an old house originally serving as a bandit's hideout to store junk in. Every few times I entered, a single bandit would have spawned there. I just threw out all of my calipers, brooms, hourglasses, shears, brushes etc. on the floor there. Eventually that turned into a single-digit FPS affair with items flying around the room due to physics glitches.
To be completely honest, I blame early point and click adventure games, which were among the first things I ever played. The number of times I died because I didn’t pick up some random piece of scrap…
The way I play Minecraft is so far like nobody else I've ever met. Usually starts normal, make a house, get stone tools. Then I start mining. I mine an entire chunk, straight to bedrock. (underground so it isn't visible from the surface). I mine with stone tools because I can craft an infinite amount of them. Once I'm done a chunk, I simply start again on another. I rarely go into the nether if I can help it, and I never, ever go to the end or beat the dragon. Just mining. What do I do with all the stone I get, you may wonder? Nothing. I just put it randomly into chests in my house.
On multiplayer servers I usually give the stone away to people who need it for their builds. I'm no builder, I never use it myself. On one server someone took notice and couldn't abide me using a stone pickaxe, so they built me a beacon and gave me an enchanted pick. I hated it. I was mining so fast I didn't even realize I was mining. I went back to stone tools.
You might love Powerwash Simulator then. There's no point other than meticulously turning object from dirty to clean. Or House Flipper 2, where there is an entire community built around not doing the interior decoration part, only doing the lawn trimming and satisfyingly deep cleaning the house parts.
I love mining for the sake of mining in Minecraft too lol.
How do I find these parts? Because I seriously love everything in the game except putting furniture out, it's so relaxing without having to try and put things in nice places.
https://mod.io/g/hf2!
A lot, LOT of these maps are setup with a cleaning focus, or even are cleaning only. Hell, if you wanted, you could download a map, hop in the editor, mass-delete the furnishing part, and then play the job to a 100% as normal :D
A man (miner) after my own heart. I love gathering boring resources for others. I also did the chunk thing. I preferred doing that in the older versions though. Less types of blocks and structures. Less complicated.
Yeah, but the increased world depth in the new versions gives me even more time to mine. And the deepslate takes longer to mine too.
in some survival games gathering (aka hoarding) can be as satisfying if not more so than actually using the things to build stuff. check out valheim and raft. when I played with friends my main contribution was gathering resources haha
this is almost exactly how i play too! i dont aim for bedrock specifically, but i do set myself random weird goals, like "collect x diamonds" or "get x stacks of [some stone]"
incidentally, when i played with lego as a kid, i would make.... square houses and nothing else lol. im not creative in the building things with blocks arena unfortunately.
Not sure if any of this counts, but I did previously share my weird habit of playing single-player C&C Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge skirmishes on maps that position the enemy base behind a bridge, then rushing to blow up said bridge and cut them off from everything. Because of a flaw in the game's AI, it never thinks to repair the bridge. So I scoop up all the resources at a leisurely pace while the enemy withers, and fart around for an hour or whatever just amassing a huge army until I get bored and steamroll everything.
I think I also play tactical RPG combat wrong. What you're supposed to do is look for enemy weaknesses, like you're fighting a fire beast so target it with your water magic, make sure you've got your enchanted helm on that gives you +2 attack against hell-type creatures, target its right shoulder which is unprotected but only against piercing ranged weapons. Delegate roles to everybody in the party — healer, sniper, tank, and so on. Study your spellbook, manage your magicka supply, consult your spreadsheet to make sure you're min-maxing the right skills for your build. But I just don't have the patience for (or honestly, interest in) any of that. I just put all my points into strength and wail on the baddies with the biggest axe I can find. If I can bypass all the complex mechanics and just spam "strong melee attack" instead, that's what I will do. My favorite BG3 run I teamed up with Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and Minthara — respecced ALL of them as berserker barbarians and just blunt-forced our way through every mob the game threw at us.
I know that probably wouldn't have been possible on a "real" difficulty level but this is how I like my games. I don't think hard == fun, and constantly losing and retrying encounters is just frustrating and tedious for me. I want to advance the story, not do math. I game at the end of the day to rest my brain after adulting for umpteen hours.
I'm also the guy who likes to explore every nook and cranny, and do every inane fetch quest. Don't ask me why. I've never finished The Witcher 3 because I got so bogged down in its wonderful plentiful side quests that I burned out and switched to something else.
I love video games but I don't know anybody else who plays them like I do. I'm a gamer but I'm not a gamer.
Holy crap I loved RA2 and Yuri's Revenge; spent an unbelievable amount of hours playing those games....25 years ago...fuck. I'll have to look into that CnCNet thing you mentioned. Something I loved doing as a kid in Yuri's Revenge was amassing as many infantry units as I could on a map and then seeing how many would die to a single Virus sniper shot, green clouds everywhere.
Oh man, I did something almost exactly the same in C&C Red Alert 2 (not Yuri's revenge). I would choose maps that had had 2 islands with no bridges, the enemy as the soviets on easy with super weapons off. They would build a navy, but wouldn't build air units, so they would be trapped on their side of the map. I would just have fun building up, and then eventually fly over with a crazy number of the bomber blimps to overwhelm their air defenses. Good times.
Ahem..
Kirov reporting.
I usually play a woman if that's a choice. No gender dysphoria irl. Probably not that unique.
After 40 years of gaming experience I've started to hate difficulty. It just feels like a more complicated and more stressful version of grind. So I usually turn down difficulty in most games these days, and totally avoid games where difficulty is the main selling point.
I am exactly the same. On both counts.
Anything too difficult or grindy isn't fun. I don't see the appeal of Soulslikes where you bash your head against a wall 50 times over 3 hours to defeat one boss that should take 3 minutes of it weren't stupidly difficult. I will never understand how people enjoy that.
It's entirely the FUCK YES I DID IT feeling. Usually these bosses are fair. Deaths often come from your own mistakes so overcoming those and knowing you got better is why. On the contrary though, I do understand how someone could bounce off of it. Not all games have to be a monumental challenge to overcome, but some are and that's also cool.
It's just so antithetical to what games mean to me. I game to relax and have fun and escape the harsh reality and society we are forced to live in. Every day in this world is a struggle and like fighting just to make an inch. I don't want that in my games.
It's the catharsis of actually being able to overcome that struggle, unlike the larger strife in the real world.
I'm not trying to convince you by the way :) I think it's fine to not have to struggle in your free time.
Not only that; I honestly think the persistence they taught me has made me a better person.
Souls bosses are puzzles more than they are HP sponges. They have mechanics you can learn and get better at. That skill translates to other soulslikes as well. Learning how to read the enemy body language/signposting and dodge/punish correctly is a fun skill to build.
My only issue is that while I did just mention above that the RPG mechanics can help smooth the curve, it can also punish beginners because they wind up with poor builds and are stuck doing 1/10th the damage they should, and thus make bosses a miserable slog.
To be clear though knowing you actually got better is a great feeling, ESPECIALLY when someone who dumpstered you when you were learning is now just cake walk later, and you really feel the earned progression, not just your stats going up.
I'm much the opposite BUT i also avoid games that think difficulty = bigger numbers.
Upping the enemies HP by 10x is not difficulty, it's boring.
Giving them new moves is interesting (but developmentally difficult).
Limiting my options CAN be interesting but often also sucks.
Not many games do it well, but I feel that part of why Souls blew up was because it showed that difficulty can be interesting, and even then it's got a decent use of RPG mechanics to help smooth out the curve, as you can just grind your way past a blocker.
Feel it's a huge part of why Sekiro performed poorly (no RPG grind to escape being bad at the bosses) and Elden Ring did amazing (open world means you can just wander somewhere else and come back more powerful, not just grind somewhere you've already been).
In RPGs (or really any game with a customizable character if the urge strikes me) I'll write an in-character journal for them. In the case of say, Mass Effect it's done in the form of post-mission reports, or a fantasy MMO it's just a physical written journal they keep on hand for downtime. It gives me a chance to do some easy writing (just responding to events of the recent play session) in a structured framework, and to explore character concepts and personalities for how they might react in certain situations. It's mostly fun, but the results are (with some rounds of editing) fun to read as a record of that playthrough. The only downside is that they can get long. I think my record is like 50k words/100+ document editor pages, just bit-by-bit written as I did a full playthrough of some RPG or another. Now, is it good? Almost certainly not, but it's made me much more observant and mindful of seeing background events in games, or even just observing the scenery.
I've been thinking about doing something similar for RPGs as I often only play games infrequently in short bursts and I lose track of the stories in new games which has kept me from playing any RPG that I don't already know the story to.
Does it take you much time to write these entries out?
I'd say total thinking/writing time on the journal itself isn't too long; my longest that I mentioned in the previous post maybe was an additional 6ish hours to the total playtime. However, the playtime was around 110 hours which is far longer than usual for that game (I usually only take 70) since I was intentionally exploring and wandering more than usual. It's far easier and quicker than writing a short story from scratch though, since the bulk of the creative foundations are lain out by the game itself. It definitely helps to have both a character trait clear in mind that guides your writing style for their inner voice/entries as well as some justification for them writing the journal.
I liked that in Trails in the Sky: First Chapter and Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter, part of the information UI is presented as a combination of a scrap book (basic background and world mechanics, list of spells, attributes, etc.) and a log book written from one of the MC's point of view (quest log).
Sometimes Ill make additional restrictions on a game for roleplaying purposes.
Like in Breath of the Wild I only use potions, because healing by eating food doesnt feel realistic. Or in Tears of the Kingdom I never used the paraglider because normal adventurers cant fly.
Or in Pokemon I never use the starters, I only use pokemon you could catch as a normal trainer.
Basically as much as possible I try to have my game character play as though they are a normal person in that world, not a uniquely powerful hero.
I feel like this is the wrong way around. We've been eating healing herbs since the dawn of man. People to this day chew coca leaves for energy but also to combat altitude sickness.
I could see the argument that potions are just medicinal teas I suppose.
Unless you mean the Skyrim variant of eating 50 wheels of cheese in less than a second then yeah I get you.
I mean drinking a magic potion makes more sense to instantly heal than eating a steak and letting it digest and using those protiens to rebuild your body over the course of half a second. I will eat meals if Im at a camp or something, but not mid combat.
Yeah so the latter then. Totally fair. Instantly chowing down on a four course meal and recuperate any wounds makes no sense. Then again, killing deer and having them drop fully ready to eat tenderloins isn't either.
What is wrong on eating 50 wheels of cheese ina few seconds? I love cheese. But I love cheesy mechanics even more!
(I don't like Skyrim, just for the record)
I never did like that game either. I suppose we could make a main thread here about not liking Skyrim since in the overall gaming world, not liking Skyrim is the idiosyncracy.
This is the one game I don't understand how it got so much praise. Bethesda in general if I'm being honest.
It seems I finally found someone with kinda the same view.
I played the hell out of Morrowind. I played the hell out of Oblivion, it was only logical to buy Skyrim for me.
I got it on the midnight of the first day. I paid for it with coins in leather pouch while having chainmail on me with a bastard sword at my hip. I bought PS3 version ( a bit of foreshadowing - Skyrim on PS3 is like Cyberpunk was on Xbox at launch) and I played it until.morning that day. And I played for several days/weeks and finished everything the game had with my first character - a feat I haven't done in Morrowind or Oblivion (I haven't "100%" any of the two games at the time). When I finished the last quest in Skyrim a question popped in my head - What now? The game gave me everything in those 70-80 hours, I have nothing more to do there, no reason to replay it... I actually replayed it once - I have finished it using only warhammer as a damage dealer, no damaging spells, no damaging shouts, just pure warhammer. I finished the game where your main enemies are flying dragons using freakin' warhammer! The game is flawed, big time. Add performance issues of PS3 version that never got remedied and there you go. It is shit game. And Bethesda,l milking it for all those years while not capable of actually fixing the PS3 version that I paid for, is shit company. Even more so with their "You wanna buy and play old Doom on new hardware? Register an account or fuck off" philosophy. This is why they are on my blacklist.
Not so much fun fact: Fallout 3 and New Vegas has alsonissues on PS3. Both by Bethesda.
When I got Steam Deck, I returned to Oblivion and 100%-ed it. It took me 200 hours and it was fun. And I still have cravings of returning to it doing things differently. That is the good old Bethesda game.
I still have to do this with Morrowind, which jzst seems like endless world compared to Oblivion.
I won't do that with Fallout 3 or New Vegas. Fallout 3 lacks achievements on Steam, which is strange when it had them on PS3 and I blame Bethesda being lazy. New Vegas has achievements but for whatever reason I got PCR version - PCR stands Polish, Czech, Russian. I get why I, Czech, got Czech version. What I don't understand is why there are Russians bundled in (I'm with Ukraine; I like Poles) AND the most of all I don't freakin' understand why there even is such a version and why it is not clearly stated you are getting this one. Those are questions I don't have answers for and once again I blame Bethesda for this decision. Sadly I bought both F3 and New Vegas before I got Steam Deck and cozldn't return them due to overshooting the return window by months... I would if I could.
Rant over.
It's genuinely rare to find someone with a dislike for Skyrim. I'm probably even more resolute about it than you are. I couldn't even finish the game.
I noticed the Bethesda signature "something's off"-feeling back in Fallout 3, instantly noticed the same in Skyrim and just... knew it wouldn't work for me. I gave it a halfhearted attempt but there's no chance I'll ever finish that game. Starfield has the same outdated, janky, misaligned, shallow systems that all the other Bethesda games have too. I didn't even attempt that one.
I hate the game and Bethesda with passion! But I'm not gonna fight over who hates it more.
I view Skyrim as a sandbox - they give you engine with some content in it and it's up to you (and modders), to make a game from it. Sadly, on PS3, you are left with sandbox. And no epicness can save it from the fact that the game is shallow.
I even managed to recommend it to a friend... And he was so dissatisfied with it. No wonder, he was Witcher fan and those are some great games! I played just Witcher 3, but I was bloen away! I finished it twice, got around 300-350 hours playtime combined and those were great hours ov video gaming!
Starfield was shit from the get go. It ran like shit and when I saw some gameplay, I saw basically space-dressed Oblivion.
But don't get me wrong, I don't think it's just Bethesda, who is the bad guy nowadays. Activison, Ubisoft, Rockstar - they all have dirt on their hands for one reason or another.
Honestly, this is part of what makes most MMORPGs unplayable for me. I am not some unique hero like they portray me in the cut scenes. I am literally one of hundreds or thousands or maybe even millions of people who is just some schmuck in the world. Stop treating me like I’m important in any way. I’m a grunt who happens to be there to witness the big events, not a mover and shaker within those events myself. Let me be the hermit weirdo who lives outside of town fighting monsters mostly for sport and bringing their remains to the petrified vendors in town who buy their grizzly remains more out of fear for me than any sort of need for five hundred mystery meat steaks.
I've always thought it would be interesting to kinda mash EVE (mostly player driven events and economy) with Realm of the Mad God (level up in about an hour, however equipment farming still takes a long time, but PERMADEATH).
It's fun to just turn your brain off and be a grunt in RotMG (or was, been a loooong time and i've heard mixed things), and I wouldn't mind that in an mmo. It would however be neat to see the emergent created "heroes/villains" who are the players who spent the time/effort/skill to get more stuff together.
You just have to make being a grunt more fun/less painful, and still allow tiers for players to climb to as they get better. It's not easy, but there's probably something really clever there. I know games like Planetside/foxhole are also in that area.
I do something similar, but try to play as if I was projecting the most altruistic version of myself.
I played Subnautica as if I was trying to upset the ecosystem as little as possible. Which meant trying to have compassion for the reaper leviathans. I even left a capsule message pleading for others to do the same.
I also play as a Gek in No Man's Sky, but took on an all Korvax crew for my freighter. I built a giant city on it and ensured that my Korvax friends have everything they could need to live happy and fulfilling lives (if you know NMS lore, you'll understand).
I get that. For RPG-like games that give me the option to be a jerk to an NPC or to be the good guy, I find it almost painful to choose the former. Yes, I will help you out, good NPC, and undertake your side quest. No, I will not go retrieve your fancy equipment from the dungeon, only to keep it for myself.
I also like to play 4X games as the biggest side in town and with the largest, most advanced military. But I've also got a no-first-strike rule and will usually accept a surrender. Domination games are kind of boring to me - I find it much more fun to try to do runs where I win without ever actually going to war with anyone. "Si vis pacem, para bellum."
I have a rule like this regarding fast travel. If there's an in-universe explanation for it - like it's a spell or a Shieka gizmo thing, or teleporter stations - I'll use it. But in Skyrim where there's no spell involved and you just suddenly turn up at your destination and the clock has jumped, I stuck to manually running everywhere.
I get this one. It’s super weird for me to get health back from food. That’s not how food works. It helps you to heal in the long term maybe, but healing like... ten hearts worth of damage to my body requires magic for my brain.
On the other hand, if it's good enough for the Dragonborn, it's good enough for Link: I love taking a break mid-combat to eat 15 apples!
When I play Minecraft (every few years) and I start a new world, I make a wooden pickaxe, mine 3 cobblestone, then immediately make a stone pickaxe and retire the wooden one. It will always end up in a frame somewhere as memento of my first day of that world.
Ah, my wooden pick axe either collects cobblestone until it’s broken, or it helps smelt my first iron bars. It never survives for very long.
Mine is used to make the first piece of charcoal. I like to be efficient. :)
The order of progression is: workbench > wooden pickaxe > cobblestone pickaxe > harvest more cobblestone to make a furnace and three cobblestone axes > harvest trees until nearly sundown because I’m going into the mines, make a set of doors, set a door; door is now my guardian, make charcoal if I haven’t found a seam of coal, make 64 torches if I can, make two chests and set them near my workbench and cobblestone furnace; this is home base, the rest of my lumber is sticks and now they’re ladders: I am ready to play Minecraft. The wooden pickaxe is the first fuel source I use in my furnace.
Wow. I thought I was the only one who did that, although sometimes I later use it for burning material.
In single player games I name my characters like I'm still an edgy 13 year old - Cockenstein, JizzyJones, etc. If nothing else I usually get a laugh when I go back to something I haven't played for a while.
Haha, I always try to name my characters IdiotBoy in honor of my Dragon Warrior character when I was 8. It always made me laugh when the king would say "Thou hast done well, IdiotBoy"
I usually go with one of a handful of names I've been using for a while. Male characters are usually Zeit, Zeitghast, or Terr, and female characters are most frequently Vex or Vexalis. The choice for me generally comes down to the vibe of the game and the general personality that I associate with a particular name.
Also, if given the opportunity, I always name a dog Merlin. It's what I named the dog in Dragon Age: Origin on a whim, and I've stuck with it since 2009.
If I get a horse its always named Glue.
I struggle with optimizing the fun out of games. Like @Wafik, I feel compelled to explore side paths. When I come to a fork, I spend time trying to figure out which is the story-progressing path, and go the other way first. If it isn't looking like it'll be a dead-end, I'll go back and try the other for a bit to see if that was the side path instead. In a room, I rub myself against everything possible to make sure I don't miss anything interactive or lootable. If world travel is fairly linear, I'll approximate a "traveling salesman" solution and exhaust everything possible at each location before leaving so I don't have to backtrack or go anywhere twice unnecessarily and so I have all quests started before I potentially reach what would be their next steps. If there's an open map and fog-of-war over a map, or a city with many crossing streets, I will first traverse the edge to establish boundaries and then systematically go back and forth like mowing a lawn, making sure that nothing is overlooked. If there's some sort of resource collection/production/whatever, I need to figure out the most optimal and efficient way to get it done, even it it means grinding for the upgrades "quickly" that they expect you to passively get after a while playing. I must complete all side content possible before the endgame because I almost never replay a game, and once the "end" is complete, knocking out the remaining side quests just feels hollow.
In short, I can't get out of the mindset of "what do I expect the game developers to have done/hidden here" and optimization rather than just playing how my character would reasonably act and enjoying the organic exploration.
I very much relate to this. But also, if I pace myself poorly it feels weird to just be grinding out all the side quests before doing the final battle. There is an optimal side quest to main mission ratio, and I have no idea what it is, but I have experienced what it isn't
Oh my god, we are the same person.
I used to refer to World of Warcraft as “Spreadsheet: the MMORPG” because I was obsessed with farming materials and selling them on the auction house. I’d meticulously farm a full zone over and over just gathering materials. All of my add-ons were geared towards better loot discovery. I had literal spreadsheets, maintaining prices and things like that before I found better add-ons to help with that. I never made much money at it either; a few thousand gold over the entire course of it. I always made far more money when I actually did the quests; but there was just something about that feeling of coming in and undercutting absolutely everybody else and getting the best price in selling all my stuff that kept me in that loop for weeks at a time. I have probably paid Blizzard over $1000 over the years to act like an auction house merchant.
This doesn't seem as idiosyncratic as others here, but: I really, really dislike playing games with other people. Even MMOs, I like that others are there, but I want to be left alone and do things at my own pace.
This extends down to even playing with my kids and makes me feel like a bad father. I'll often buy three copies of a game so we can play together (Minecraft, Grounded, to name a few), because I like it as an idea, but I can only ever do maybe 45 minutes before I'm so dreadfully bored and wanting to do something, anything else. Then I only very rarely actually play with them again.
Playing games to me feels like my time and I just don't want to feel obligated to others while I'm doing it. I love facilitating gaming for my kids, I've built them PCs to game on, as well as an arcade cabinet and if we're going anywhere for an extended period, I'll make sure I bring handhelds so they can play something, I just don't want to play with anyone.
I'm mostly the same. I recently went very deep into Warframe. I loved it, but I went out of my way to do as many missions as I could solo. The game doesn't really want you to play it that way, but it works most of the time.
When you go into a mission with other players, it becomes a mad rush to the objective, which is miserable if you ask me. I want to take my time, look for secrets, enjoy the levels… I'm not there for a speedrun.
I always audibly groaned when I entered a mission I could have soloed, realizing I had forgotten to flip back to solo after running a mission with other players.
In multi-player games, I always gravitate towards the less popular characters, gear, strategies, etc. I think it appeals to my enjoyment of theory crafting, since the less popular things haven't been min-maxed yet.
Or maybe I just like being special :P
Personally some of that just comes from them often having the more interesting or unique designs.
"Do a fuck load of damage" is often easy to make good but isn't that deep. "Here's 14 different debuffs, figure it out" tends to be a lot more engaging for me, but often under-tuned.
I intentionally walk with my characters, rather than run. If I feel that something is about to happen, or I’m taking a good look at an interesting environment, then also I make the character walk slowly, as if I am the one. I love that kind of immersion. I hate it when characters only run.
Somewhat similar, but I almost never use mounts in games. If something pops up while I'm travelling, I want to be able to respond right away rather than wasting precious seconds dismounting. Especially if there's stuff to climb over, you stumble into all sorts of interesting stuff by travelling in straight lines towards your goal rather than succumbing to those vile "roads".
Valve messed things up for me lately... Proton is just too good. I am that weird guy who likes to mess with Wine to make games playable and then not play the game at all.
Apparently, I’m every single person in this thread.
There is a game I have been playing for years called Endless Sky that is a loving recreation with many quality of life upgrades of an older Macintosh game called Escape Velocity.
There are many ways to play this game, but your three main paths tend to be essentially space trucker (usually referred to as a merchant), pirate, or you can go to work for one of the various governments. I usually run as a space trucker for a while, just until I can afford to buy a slightly upgraded shuttlecraft and get directly into the lucrative trade of ferrying passengers. The way that the game is built, passengers cost you no extra cargo space, they are pure profit. They are patient and they never have a deadline. I can usually keep my bunks full from planet to planet when I stop off to refuel, and I can carry some mission cargo and commodities to help offset the fuel costs. I don’t feel terribly bad about kicking them out of the ship on a planet if I find a more lucrative passenger line to run.
Very often I end up with a ship that has one required crew (meaning just me, the pilot/captain) and a bunch of passenger bunk rooms that allows me to literally run full profit runs. As soon as I can afford to get into those higher capacity, lower crew compliment ships, I run a small fleet. Imagine six ships with 17 passenger compartments each, twenty to fifty tons of cargo space, and only six crew in total across the entire fleet. I pay 100 credits a day per pilot and nothing else. I can haul 102 passengers for only 500 credits a day; it’s basically free money.
Most of my games end with me running just an endless loop around the entire known universe, dropping off passengers and never engaging in any potential storylines, always running away from Pirates as quickly as possible, and building up a huge bank account.
Every once in a while, I will finally feel like I’ve gotten enough money to justify buying a big beefy battleship and going out and wrecking someone’s shit. Usually pirates. I have thousands of hours invested into this game and the original and its two sequels.
I'll steer clear of games trying to be movies.
It's all the rage to make a cinematic game, but given the nature of the medium, voice acting, pacing and everything else that appeals to cinematic experience feels forced and full of uncanny valley hiccups.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was the most recent offender for me, but they're everywhere. Shallow game mechanics, weird drama, overacted everything. BARF
Finally. Someone who gets me.
Please, elaborate on why pregnant pauses, weird eye-lines and giant fetch quests between critical dramatic moments are the worst idea ever :D
When movies with sound arrived, critics of narrative heavy films said the same thing as we're saying now. Film as a medium doesn't need to be more like books -- it's a poor substitute for a book, and neglects the things that make film special in its own right.
Damn, there goes mine.
Sports games are the worst for it, the stories they create are always the same. You and your best friend are playing on a high-school/college team, your friend goes on to be the best draft pick, you have to slum it a bit and work your way back up, you'll meet up with your friend again in the big leagues, and thats the climax of the story.
Not a terrible story, just boring and repetitive, but the worst part is, story doesn't follow the gameplay at all. You play the game on easy, crush the other team 100-0, cut to a cutscene where your coach is chewing you out for playing badly. Reeks of failed movie directory wannabe who gets a job directing a game instead.
Oh yeah, sports games are the absolute worst. It all began with naming your nemesis in Pokemon, then ever fighter and sports game with a create a character and career mode slapped this easy narrative onto it.
I didn't play the game, but I watched clips from a WWE career mode where the poor effort dramatic sequences were combined with equally poor effort reality tv handheld camera and reality tv stereotypes.
Yawn
Okay I don't totally disagree but I do think if you somehow haven't, MGS is at least worth a look as a series. They:
Kojima, intentionally or not, has managed to make his polysci fanfiction with video game limitations tolerable by wrapping it up in "just the right level of stupid but takes itself seriously" fantasy sci fi spy thriller.
I haven't played a MGS title since the original, but I'm with you from what I've seen from recent entries. Kojima has cinematics locked in and I'm amazed at how well it worked out.
It's long in the tooth now, but Witcher 3 was also fantastic on this front. That said, it had great gameplay to support it.
I have a very difficult time playing games out of order. Baldur's Gate 3 might be amazing but I have to finish 1 and 2 before I can even look at it.
Not sure if it counts, but it really bugs me when games don't let my player character jump, even if that ability has no practical function. It just feels… stifling somehow and takes me out of it a bit. Why? Who knows. It's not as if people jump often in real life.
Other than that I don't mind challenge-style play in games as long as it's solo. It doesn't bother me to dust myself off and try again when it's just my own time that's been spent, but as soon as other people are involved pressure ramps and the bottom falls out of my enjoyment. So for example, in WoW modes like Mage Tower (Legion), Horrific Visions (BfA), and Delves (last couple of xpacs) are all cool, but M+ dungeons past like +5 or something are just not my cup of tea. It's no fun when failure and self-improvement means dragging your teammates down.
On jumping, I have a similar feeling, and something of a theory.
Jumping (and crouching) is, when implemented, usually one of the more immediate responsive things you can do in a game. It's an avenue for player self-expression and communication between otherwise mute players, and it doesn't necessarily need to serve any immediate gameplay function to do those things.
Even if you can't jump high enough to get over that fence, it feels good to hit the button and immediately have your character on screen react, especially if your friends can see you jumping and do it too.
Bunny hopping everywhere, even in games where it doesn't do anything, and jumping/climbing over everything instead of taking expected paths. Stairs? Hop over the edge.
This is one of the things I like about Genshin Impact: the game is designed to let you make your own paths instead of walking in some planned route.
The main thing I do is collect everything. I don't know why, if it isn't nailed down I pick it up.. actually, if it's nailed down and the game still lets me I'll pull the nails and pick it up too. In Baldur's Gate 3, I even take the bodies and chests. Often using the chests/crates/barrels/etc... to send the bodies to camp. Depending on the game, I might limit this to once per area where loot re-spawns so fast that at some point you'd become paralyzed in an infinite cycle of looting. Some like TESO I have huge issues not looting everything. If the game allows me to drop loot, I will stack it outside a dungeon until I've cleared it, only to pick it all up and use some potions to haul it home or some other method (poor horse). I built an entire castle just to house my totally-not-stolen items in Morrowind.
Makes playing an upstanding character rather difficult. Picture a Paladin that goes back to throw some gold in a drawer to pay for all the junk that was stolen because she doesn't remember what among everything taken was stolen from that house (quite a lot can go missing before a Klepto realized their magic bag is nearly full). Is RPing in singe player weird?
Aside from "collecting", the other thing is I almost never finish main quests in open worlds due to going on side quests, sometimes exploring/experiencing the world or some other distraction. I once tried to finish Fallout 4, really psyched myself up for it too! A week later, after needlessly fortifying half the settlements, I realized I got sidetracked somewhere and tried to get back on track only to go down a series of side quests and then I ended up at a new settlement and one that I hadn't fortified was attacked....
The world is Ending!
Me: "Sure old lady, I'll take time to find that rare flower for your dear husband's grave! Is that ash falling from the sky? Weird weather you folks have out here."
I was going to agree with you on the looting, but you take it to a whole other level. I just generally hoard, I don't usually steal or hide bodies. Impressive.
I also don't finish open world games. I hate haging to make that Final Choice(tm), so instead I stop playing. I was trying to psych myself up to finish Baldur's Gate, but it's become yet another casualty on my unfinished game pile.
I hate using WASD, largely because it's not symmetric. I prefer to shift the keyboard over and use the numpad for my D-pad.
I got used to a TKL keyboard at work over the last few years, so I’ve enjoyed being able to have the mouse closer to the centre rather than so far over to the side. So when I accidentally lost an entire glass of wine on my keyboard last month, I ended up replacing it with a keyboard where the numpad can be detached and reconnected on the other side. (And then found out about standalone numpads you can buy so they’re not physically required to be next to the keyboard 100% of the time)
This is a fun one. When keyboard + mouse for shooters was a novel thing, I ran with ASDF for a while instead of WASD. WASD didn't really feel solidified as the standard at this time, so it was a good time for experimentation. I sometimes shift one key to the right (ESDF) in games that need a lot of shortcuts to give me a few more keys I can bind around my movement keys.
Ultimately, I wouldn't really recommend ASDF, but ESDF has been a pretty good alternative. It's cool you've found an alternative that works for you.
I like grinding for an advantage. I'm shit so I usually need to way over level in my favourite genre of games, Souls games.
I'll $deity be damned shoot that burd off that ledge in Mogwyn Palace for hour upon hour to get the runes I need and I'll enjoy every minute.
Then I'll start playing the game haha. Yep, every Elden Ring playthrough involves me grinding the troll caravan outside Selen's cave, then the windmill village dancers, until I'm strong enough to make it to bird ledge. Then bird. Endless bird.
Me with that silver ball you can just jump out of the way before it careens off the path up by Gurrang’s house.
Yes! Another great place. Don't forget making the Knights Cav jump over the bridge, and paying a visit to Greyoll, which you can do both right off the rip :)
I usually have explored most all of the map save for mountaintops before fighting Margit, lol. Elden Ring can be as "hard" or as "easy" as you care to make it, with early game Rune availability and map freedom :)
I'm obsessed with exploration. I can't advance to the next map until I saw everything in the current one - think Diablo series, Borderlands series.
When presented with a fork in the road I always choose left first.
(Since I always explore the whole map of doesn't matter and defaulting to left faces me seconds!)
I don't have a ton that are too unique. If I had to name one... it's that I have less qualms nowadays about modding games even before finishing a vanilla playthrough of them or seeing most of their content.
I really, really enjoy using mods, and considering how I very rarely replay campaign games, sometimes I don't feel like going through hours of something before enjoying all the fan-made content or at least getting the experience how I want it to be. To hell with purism, it's my video game!
A day old thread, this will most likely get lost in the Tildenisian fray, but I map the right thumb stick to “jump” in almost every game…
Do you mean when you click it, or as one of the directions? I'm curious why you would do this. Genuine curiosity, no judgement. 🙂
Ah when I click . Particularly satisfying in first person Skyrim. You can be in more control looking while you jump, and the click is more tactile for me.
In every game with a character creator, I make the same person. Woman, red short slightly wavy hair, green eyes.
Forgot the origins of where I started it. It's not a person I know in real life nor an attempt to make the hottest character possible. Likely it came from a dream and it just stuck.
I do the same but usually blue eyes and a ponytail. It's just aesthetically pleasing I think. I absolutely love red hair and always pick it as my go to hair option. And the ponytail just seems practical. We're about to go through a bunch of shit, whatever it may be. No reason for hair to be flopping everywhere while running and jumping and fighting and whatever.
I also usually make the same character. Tall guy, kind of beefy, short red hair, beard if I can get it. Often wearing glasses. If I’m able to design what clothing they’re wearing they’re usually wearing something casual even if they’re supposed to be wearing armor to make themselves more powerful because I’m likely going to be playing some sort of stealth build that doesn’t need that anyway (if the enemy sees me and we have to fight I have failed.)
It’s me. I am basically playing me. Sometimes I give myself blue hair. I usually change it back to red. Sometimes I give myself different facial hair, but usually I go back to a full well-trimmed or scraggly beard. The only place where something other than the full beard has stuck is in Grand Theft Auto Online, where the character is essentially identical, but has mutton chops with a tiny little soul patch. Because I’m playing a villain and that somehow feels like a more villainous facial hairstyle.
I have a nasty habit of having an extremely low tolerance for making mistakes or otherwise not feeling I'm playing the "right" way especially if it happens early on and restarting rather than recovering, even if the latter would be trivial. This can go all the way to stopping the game, erasing my save file and restarting from the very beginning. This also tends to happen if I come back to a game after starting a playthrough but not far enough for me to consider having invested a lot into it.
I'll save every 30 seconds in a retro title if it means not having to do a dungeon or battle again. Ain't got time for that grindy shit at 40!
I don't really like playing games where "your choices matter™". Like, I wanted to like Baldurs Gate but I quit after a few hours because I was agonizing over every dialogue option or skill check and found myself looking stuff up to make sure I wasn't locking myself out of content or missing items.
I've played enough games by now that if a game doesn't seem to respect my time, or has some ridiculously tedious task then I will cheat. A trainer, hack, mod, etc. I'm pretty much over grinding for things.
Also, instead of finishing certain games sometimes I'll just stop playing and watch a game movie or a playthrough.
This was me replaying HeartGold after a decade upon finding out what Pokemon Home was.
0% chance I wanted to re-catch everything again, 100% chance of spawning in infinite masterballs.
I'll choose the "hard" difficulty for my first playthrough (this varies a lot between games, some Japanese games literally won't let you choose hard difficulty until you've cleared normal because it's actually A LOT harder), but then I'll be aggressively chasing down upgrades to make things easier. I'll also try to 100% on my first playthrough within reason and I might not even do a second playthrough, depending on how long and/or tedious playing through the game again would be. My personal justification is that I'm trying to get the most out of my initial experience while also having a bit of challenge, but part of me says that I'm just trying to prove I'm not a casual playing on easy or normal.
Also, I never, EVER use numbers or special characters in my name for a multiplayer game unless it fits the character. Trying to come up with an actual unique name in an MMO is a core part of the experience.
Breaking the mold a bit to talk about tabletop games.
I love love love TTRPGs… just not playing them. 😅 Mostly, I think it's just that I have too much social anxiety to enjoy the experience. I love reading the sourcebooks though — learning about the lore and systems and imagining what the game would be like.
I have been able to play and enjoy some solo RPGs or duet RPGs with my partner, but that's about it.
When playing Guild Wars 2, I have to use the /sit command whenever stepping away. No clue why I feel compelled to do it but it’s become second nature for me
Perhaps it's less in line with the rest of the replies in the thread (a handful of which are things I sometimes do) but my 1 big "always/never" idiosyncracy is that I've always hated vibration and have always turned it off / elected to not use it, ever since it was introduced. I never had an N64 rumble pak of my own and recall removing them from my friend's controller at his house, and always turning it off on dualshocks and the like. I have always hated the whole idea from day 1.
I don't really mind the adaptive triggers on the dualsense too much though, but it is probably an uncommon setup to have vibration off with adaptive triggers on since they're both features in the same general immersive haptic category. Admittedly, I also sometimes turn the adaptive triggers off too, depends on the game and where/how its using the feature.
I turn it off for wireless controllers but not for wired, so you’re not alone (sort of).
That sounds like a battery drain optimization which would be a pretty different reason but sounds valid.