What games have you played the "wrong" way?
"Wrong" here can be intentional or unintentional. Maybe you completely missed that a character had a certain ability and got through the entire game without knowing there was so much more you could be doing! Instead, maybe you specifically challenged yourself to get through the game without using that ability, seeing if you were up to the challenge! Maybe you activated cheats to cruise through on easy mode, or maybe you accidentally activated a cheat and had no idea that the game wasn't supposed to be that easy (ask me about my FF7 playthrough).
"Wrong" can also be however you decide to interpret it: counter to the developer's intentions, exploiting the game engine, uncovering a loophole in the game's systems, pursuing your own goals instead of the game's goals, etc. It's not meant to be a moralistic judgment by any means (play any game however you want!) but more just an identifier that you went against the game's standard norms and expectations.
Tell us what you did "wrong", why you did it that way, and what the outcomes were. Did it make the game more fun or exciting? Did it ruin the game for you?
My friends and I played Arkham Horror incorrectly for months. It's a co-op board game where you're trying to stop an Ancient One from awakening. A core mechanic is that a portal opens up on the board at the end of each turn. You can work to keep closing them them, but if enough portals are open at one time on the board, then you have to directly battle the Ancient One. We thought "turn" meant of our individual turns, but what the game meant by "turn" was collective turn. As a result, instead of one portal opening after everyone went once, we'd end up with the same number of portals as players. Fighting the Awakened One became an inevitability instead of a last ditch effort to salvage failure at the rest of the game, and we thought maybe we just hadn't figured out the right strategy yet. To be fair, we did hold out surprisingly long after a while. We didn't figure it out until someone from outside the regular group came and questioned what the heck we were doing. The game almost felt too easy after that fix.
As an avid Arkham Horror player this made me burst out laughing. Thank you.
I hope your group got to enjoy the game more afterwards. It definitely must have felt easy after you had been awakening the ancient one all the time, but there's several fun ways to tweak the game's difficulty and adjust it to your preferences if you're finding it easy, which is why I love it. Though some ancient ones are absolutely brutal even on a standard ruleset.
I'm curious though, did you play Azathoth with your incorrect rules? If so that must have been hell.
I think it came up once or twice before deciding to pull it out until we could git gud (we never got gud, obviously).
Wow this post brought back some memories. I haven't played DF in over a decade but I used to participate in a fun little succession kingdom on a forum where someone would run the fortress for a (game) month (or year(?), it's a bit foggy...) and then post a report on what happened. Then the next person in the group would take over for the next month/year and so on. It was pretty fun because by the time you got to run the fortress again things would be wildly different and not always better :).
I'm not sure if this counts, but you know that part of the full version of SUPERHOT that's really beating into you "YOU ARE A PUPPET AND WILL DO WHAT WE SAY TO PROGRESS"? Despite really enjoying the game, I uninstalled it then and decided to never play it beyond then.
I've played Undertale, damn it, I won't do things I wouldn't do just to see more content! It's something of a loose ethic I keep. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, many games are too abstract for that kind of thinking to make sense and plenty do interesting things with bad actions, but generally I try to represent my own morality in a way that's really ridiculous and makes my experiences of games pretty different from others. I play games "wrong" in that I resist their expectation that I'll play on their terms and accept the norms that they give me.
Yes! I’m actually glad you brought that part of SUPERHOT up. I didn’t have a problem with it in the pancake version of the game (though I can definitely understand why you would). I did have a huge problem with it in the VR version though.
tw: suicide
I’m not sure exactly when it happens in the game — I think after the first level — but at some point the game cuts to emptiness with only a gun in front of you and instructions to shoot yourself in the head. To advance the game you have to aim the gun at your own head and pull the trigger. As a suicide attempt survivor myself I was genuinely shaken by that moment, especially because VR games in particular have a “lived” quality to them. I stopped playing the game then and there.
For what it’s worth, I’ve actually since played the game outside of that moment, and it’s genuinely excellent — tons of fun, and particularly well-suited for VR. That one moment is a particularly bad low point on an otherwise fantastic game.
Also, to counterbalance that low point, here’s a story of a high from the game: one of the funniest moments in my life as a gamer has been watching my friend try to get an achievement in the game where you have to complete a level while lying on your back. Seeing him cover every square foot of an entire living room, skittering around on his back like an overturned cockroach frantically trying to right itself, was pure comedy gold, and my friend is skilled enough that he legitimately pulled it off too! He beat the level without getting up once. It was funny and impressive!
Yeah, I had a really jarring moment in Red Dead Redemption 2 where I was given the challenge of dragging a person behind my horse for a mile. I was just stunned that the game outright wanted that from me, even as I'd gone through dozens of gunfights by then. That was the point where doing all the challenges became a no-go for me.
There was this game long ago called Colobot (short for "Colonize with Bots"), a first-person, kid-friendly RTS where you built robots and fought oversized insects. The key aspect was that robots were programmable - the game run an internal VM for a Java-like language, and you had an editor in-game to script what your robots did. You could e.g. build a robot that flew around the world hunting for insects and coming back to refuel as it run out of power - and then another robot who would automatically swap batteries of anyone coming back for a recharge. Insect AI was scripted the same way too; with a cheat code, you could take control, and view (and edit) the contents of the enemy's "brains".
The one time that I played this game improperly was during my university years. I wanted to score some extra points on a class assignment, so I built a "state machine visualizer". I programmed a simple finite state machine (FSM) onto a flyer in Colobot, and used the file IO API in Colobot to continuously dump the FSM's state into a text file; I wrote another piece of code in Processing that displayed a diagram of that same FSM, highlighting the currently executing state (which it got by continuously reading the file saved by Colobot). I then run them side by side and achieved my goal of impressing the TA :).
I played Undertale in the "pacifist" route on my first and only playthrough.
The Steam page blurb says "UNDERTALE! The RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone" and in the "features" section it says "Killing is unnecessary: negotiate out of danger using the unique battle system." I thought that was pretty funny, so I decided to play the whole game that way.
Because of that I ended up missing a lot of the meta-plot, how the player is an omnipotent entity and how the main character is an avatar of destruction. Or peace. I also missed all of the moral challenges I've seen in other people's playthroughs, because the characters were trying to kill me and I was just being nice to them.
I got into trouble at Asgore. I spent probably an hour trying to figure out how to spare him before giving up and looking it up online. Apparently you have to defeat him to progress the game, even if you've spared everyone up to that point. So I had to figure out the battle system just for that one fight.
It kind of cheapened the ending for me too, because after I dug through forums figuring out what I was doing wrong (nothing, as it turned out), the rest of the plot was basically spoiled for me.
Honestly, the fact that you can do this is perhaps the greatest achievement of the design of Undertale.
And you know what? The fact that you didn't play through the other route is a shining endorsement to you as a person.
Hidden just in case you think you might want to play through that other route
The whole point of the game letting you play through again on the genocide route is to point out that you, as a player in a narrative-rich, practically living world, are basically a psychopath. If you play through the pacifist ending and then go through the genocide route, what does that say about you? You just played a route where you protected and respected everyone, and then you continued to go back and murder everyone - so was your sympathy before completely false?
So as far as I'm concerned, the fact that you learned there was an ending where you had to go through and kill everyone and chose not to shows that you're a legitimately good person.
I killed everyone and was unable to finish the game as a result 😭
What was that game, in QBasic, with gorillas tossing exploding bananas? I think the purpose of the game was to invite messing with code. Well, mess I did, using it to under-gird an elaborate quiz show game with primitive music and special effects that launched whenever a banana hit the sun. That experience encouraged me to modify the game Thief, changing it from a "sneaker" to an explosions jamboree with all sorts of idiotic physics. Formative fun, that.
The vast majority of my Factorio play is in what I think of (and call my savefiles) "zen garden" mode. Sandbox mode, always day, cheater mode (infinite items, and instantly crafted). Since these options are all built-in to the game this is definitely on the lighter side of doing it "wrong". I originally played in sandbox to get a feel for the game and follow along with YouTube tutorials, and after that going back to normal / walking around mode just felt so slow.
There's an option to fully research all technologies, which I'm sure is very helpful in designing blueprints etc, but I usually decline that and then use the science pack item requirements as a roadmap to building out the factory.
Another option that I like is increasing the "starting area size" up to its max (600%). This pushes the biters out much farther, so they don't bother you at all in the early game while you're still setting everything up. Once the factory is built up, they'll attack as normal and you can play "Factorio as the most complicated tower defense game ever" which is much more enjoyable than "peaceful mode" (in which the biters never attack).
I don't think there's really an incorrect way to play Factorio, especially if you're just enjoying one of its game modes. As long as you're having fun expanding your factory, you're doing it right in my eyes!
Even today I still feel so much joy watching people's first bases which tend to be a complete mess. I don't think I'll ever be able to hate this game or how people play it.
Love Factorio so much. When they released 1.0 I forced myself to start from scratch until I could research my first Spidertron. So worth it, love that thing.
Kingdom Hearts 2 (and the first one, I believe I did the same) there are these moments at the beginning of the game where you learn how to fight, selecting your base stats (do you prefer magic, defense, or attack) and you have to fight your first boss battle against a massive shadow version of yourself (or it's "nobody" in the second game) , all the while being on these small discs with disney princesses on them in the vastness of space.
Well, while you are learning to fight you have to come against a lot of enemies that spawn as you walk around, there's quite a few of these heartless fellows and they only give you two or three xp every time you defeat them. Getting to the first or second level is incredibly easy - only 30 or so XP is needed, maybe even less.
I realized that there was a save spot before an open door, and if you defeated all the heartless by running up and down the stairs as they appeared, leave the room, hit the Save spot, and then waltz back in all the heartless would show back up!
For the next four days I spent hours just going back and forth.
As you level, it's get harder as you need more XP to move up (tens of thousands of XP per level). By the time I decided I had enough I was around a level 40, something you don't get to until about halfway through the game (if you even get there!) and I hadn't even completed the damn tutorials yet.
I breezed through the game and it allowed me to fight some enemies that you usually miss as you hop through different worlds and never return, allowed me to unlock a tonne of hidden resources and get access to some insane weapons.
It did cause a glitch or two when you had defeated those early bosses so quickly as they had cinematics that would happen during the battle and it would confuse the games timing mechanisms.
Maybe not "wrong," but I rarely ever build anything besides a simple house in Minecraft. I much prefer to find massive underground caves and explore, filling them up with torches for safety and signs for directions.
If you think that's the wrong way to play Minecraft, oh boy!
What I do is I install every single even slightly interesting quality-of-life mod I can find, spend hours tweaking them all, and finally I don't touch the game ever again.
I very infrequently catch Pokémon I don't plan to use on my team.
There's just something about catching a Pokémon and leaving it in a box for the whole game that makes me feel bad.
Similar topic from July 2019.
For my answer, not that I think I play it wrong, but I like to play WWI/WWII shooters with a realistic mindset. I (the fictional soldier) trained with the weapons issued to me, and the ammunition I'll get from the supply lines will come for my standard weapons. It makes no sense for an American combatant to swap his M1903 Springfield for some German gun he has zero ability with. That might happen if their gun had some terrible malfunction, and many soldiers like to collect weapons from the enemy. But, for the most part, they don't use them in combat!
I also like to advance slowly and carefully, because that's what real soldiers do (the ones that survive, at least). Not all games allow me to do that, but that's what I aim for.
edit: are there any historical shooters on the XBOX that focus on realism?
From time to time I'll use console commands on paradox games if I just want to see my army steamroll everything in its path. But I'm more interested in your FF7 playthrough, what happened there @kfwyre?
Ah, right!
So, Final Fantasy VII was my first ever JRPG. I grew up on the NES and 90s PC games but pretty much played platformers, racing games, and shooters almost exclusively. I also had no experience with D&D or anything like that, so I didn’t have any foundation for the idea of stuff like “levels” and “experience”.
Back when FFVII came out it had a huge marketing campaign and was genuinely one of the most “futuristic” games concievable. Its gorgeous FMV and stunning setting made it feel like this giant leap forward in gaming. It made the cartoony pixels of previous games feel childish and tiny and insignificant. FFVII felt like it had a weight to it that no other game had ever had up to that point.
So, when my older brother’s friend showed up to our house with a copy of it shortly after release, I was mesmerized. He put it in our PlayStation and started playing, and I watched him with rapt attention. I had never seen another game like it.
The friend, in what I now realize was an absolutely incredible act of kindness to offer to a pesky and bothersome little brother who wouldn’t leave him alone, saw my clear interest in the game and let me borrow it. He just gave me his copy of Final Fantasy VII, to play on my own, indefinitely. I picked up right where he left off — the very same save file.
Because we never established the return terms and I was worried he’d realize he just gave up his copy of the hottest new video game in town and he’d want it back, like, now, I binged that game more than I ever had any other. I played it non-stop, day after day, powering through it and exploring everything it had to offer — each day worried I might have to give it back the next. I was also lucky that my older brother wasn’t much of a gamer himself, so I didn’t have to worry about him wanting a turn. He’d seen all of the marketing and thought the game looked neat, but his curiosity was pretty much satiated when his friend played the opening sequence.
Anyway, I mentioned earlier that I didn’t really have a concept of levels of experience, or even really stat-based stuff or turn-based combat in general. As such, I had no idea that something was massively off about the game.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the friend had booted up the game with a GameShark. I’m realizing in writing this now that I actually probably have to clarify what that is for some younger readers: a GameShark was a device you could plug in to your console that would enable unintended cheats for games. Using the GameShark, he cranked the XP and gil returns after fights so that the characters gained way more experience and money than they were supposed to. It was only for the beginning of the game while he played that first time, so those returns didn’t come back on subsequent play sessions (because I didn’t use a GameShark) but the head start he gave my characters was substantial — probably somewhere in the realm of 20-30 levels.
I basically waltzed through most of the game one-shotting nearly everything. I had no idea that there was supposed to be challenge in most of the combats. In fact, I thought it was really only bosses and the occasional status effect that I had to worry about.
Now, there’s an even more interesting wrinkle to all of this. I actually did learn about levels across the course of my playthrough, but not in the intended way. The character levels were and remained meaningless to me. They were just sort of noisy stat stuff that I ignored, like my characters’ ability scores. Instead, my focus became entirely on materia. When he set up the GameShark cheats, my brother’s friend didn’t spike the AP that materia earn, so while my characters were massively overleveled, my materia wasn’t. Over the course of the game, those became the things I tended to and cared for. They were my party and characters, so carefully configured and lovingly leveled up by all of my efforts.
I played the game entirely “wrong” and I still loved it. In fact, I think it ruined other JRPGs for me. Part of that is actually because the game has an incredibly strong opening and compelling setting that many other JRPGs lack (oh boy, a village, and townspeople, and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s an inciting incident after some laborious exposition, how exciti... zzzzzz). Part of it though, is that I just always want a materia system. Give me materia in literally any game, and I’ll probably be happy it’s there. It’s the kind of “wrong” that I don’t want to be right, and I have no idea if that’s because I actually like how materia work or if it’s because a cheat I didn’t even know was activated taught me that I should care more about little colorful orbs gaining power than my characters themselves.
I had almost the same experience, but instead of it being due to Gameshark it was trying to fight the big snake outside of Midgar.
I didn't know that I had to find a chocobo, or rather I couldn't take one from the farm. So I grinded for a week in the area and was able to lvl up enough to beat and take the Beta for the Enemy Skill materia. This made the first half of the game a breeze..
I've got to say that's the reason why I don't like most modern RPGs in general. And it's probably why Final Fantasy XV in particular ended up being so disappointing. I get that it was trying to do a "realistic modern" turn like Final Fantasy VIII did, but then forgot that that game also had a demi-nazi state controlled by a super-powerful witch, a university that transforms into an airship, a lost technologically advanced civilization hidden away from the rest of the world, and a plot that has you launching into space, tractor-beaming the moon to the earth, and travelling through time.
And pretty much every Square game during this timeframe was this interesting, even the ones set in more generic settings. Even the most generic worlds they crafted seemed interesting because they put a lot of effort into the artwork. SaGa Frontier II was set in a pretty generic fantasy world, but the art and music makes it feel as fresh today as it did when it first released.
I remember playing Gran Turismo with a friend, and we saw how much air time you can get under certain circumstances. So we tried to set things up to see if we could actually jump over another vehicle. I think this was in GT2. We tried it on Laguna Seca. We used the Rahal Straight heading north, towards the Corkscrew. A nice straightaway to gather a lot of speed, with enough of a dip at the end to get some air. Well, try as we might, we could never succeed. I think it's just the way they coded the game; no matter how high you go, collision detection seemed to be strictly based on the x,y coordinates, without taking into account the z coordinate at all.
As a high schooler, I rented Metal Gear Solid 3 (my first MGS) and tried to go through guns-a-blazing. It didn't work at all. The game seemed super hard/un-fun. I think I gave up at The End boss fight and returned the game. I read more about the series years later, and I ended up picking it up again. MGS3 (along with the whole series) is now one of my favorite games of all-time; I've beaten it 25-30 times.
This may be less "wrong" than just playing a poorly designed game.
Rage 2 hides weapons and material upgrades (combat abilities, like ground pound) behind vaults. These vaults show up as unknown locations on a map, which requires visiting them to find out they are a vault, and then fighting your way into the vault and claiming the upgrade.
Nearly all of these vaults are optional, like every other open world game. They're just points on a map that give a much greater reward than every other open world activity in this game. You can complete this short game without ever finding all the fun weapons and abilities that make the gameplay more varied.
And that's exactly what I did. I got a couple weapons and a couple abilities, and I finished this game without unlocking its most powerful weapons. I just assault rifled and shotgunned my way through it. The game never demanded that I find all the stuff that makes the game fun, so I didn't. And it was a bland, repetitive experience.
I played through BioShock: Infinite for the first time not too long ago and was pretty frustrated by the vapors system -- basically a simple magic system where spells are called "vapors" for thematic reasons. You have access to two vapors at any given time, and whenever you collect a new vapor, it replaces your equipped vapor.
My equipped vapor was usually my best one so losing access to it was really annoying. Every once in a while I would check the gear screen and skim the keybindings menu to see if there was a way to access the vapors I had lost access to, but to no avail. It wasn't until about 3/4 of the way through the game that I figured out how to re-equip old "lost" vapors. Guess I should have looked at the keybindings more carefully. Anyway, I basically ignored vapors for most of the game.
Not a huge deal though, I kind of hate FPSes and was only playing through it for the story, so I was on easy mode where guns alone were enough to get through everything.
Throughout my entire childhood and teens I played Pokemon by only focusing on a single Pokemon (often my starter). They did all of my fights, got all of the XP, and I basically steamrolled through the game. Elite 4 usually required me catching a few high-level burner pokemon I could use while I used restores/potions on my primary Pokemon.
Then in my 20s I realized this was the "wrong" way and I started to curate a more balanced full team of 6. The game's much more fun and challenging when you play it the "right" way.
Prior to WoW the only 3D PC RPG I'd ever played was KOTOR1/2, which featured click-to-walk mechanics. And so I played WoW the same way for quite a while before I realized nobody else was doing that. I'm not sure if WoW even still supports that, but I can't imagine being proficient at PVP or even raids without utilizing WASD to walk.
Hah! That's pretty funny. I'm sure everyone must have stories like this when you're just learning the lingua franca of game controls. I remember one of the first games I played as a kid was X-WING. It was a Costco bundle that came with a flight-sim (for the time) joystick. A couple years later I was given a copy of Dark Forces which was the first FPS I played.
Anyways, I used the joystick to move and shoot in Dark Forces bedcause why wouldn't I, the joystick was meant for games! There was no real z-level look in DF (there was, but it was bound by default to pageup/pagedown IIRC and not needed very often) so pressing forward on the joystick moved me forward while pressing back moved my character backwards. Moving the joystick to the side spun my character excruciating slowly. I'm pretty sure I played the whole game like that before watching my friend play and realizing there was another way.