When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.
I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.
Lol, that’s me who was leveling with some wierd protopal build at the same time
Frankly, I enjoyed WoW more when there was that “freedom” to do what you wanted with the specs and not have the theory police breathing down your neck. The game felt much more imaginative. Once I found out the only way a class worked was by going down a specific path, I was incredibly disappointed. Specs never felt fun to me after that. It always felt like the developers didn’t have time to complete the design and lobbed the ball over the fence to the player to “code in” the last pieces - since even from Vanilla there was really only “one way” to do it (according to the theory police).
Storytime: It’s 1997, I play a game that my uncle shows me on his Playstation 1. There’s tons of reading and a weird fighting system but it seems really awesome and has some amazing FMV scenes. He tells me I’m too young to play it and won’t let me borrow it to keep playing… So I go to blockbuster and rent it for a few days.
I remember the back of the instruction booklet showing off one of those memory cards and saying “try beating the game without one” which is exactly what I tried to do, because I didn’t have a memory card! Then my mum turned the game off when I was at school one day and we had to take the game back to blockbuster after a couple of days. Damn I lost all my progress!
ADAMANT that I would play this game I got my own copy after swapping for it at my local game store and got my own memory card. Finally I could save my game and not worry about losing my progress. The game continues to challenge me a ton and I don’t really understand how the systems work but I’m 10 years old and having fun so who cares.
I figure out that I can buy grenades from the shops and I use that as my main attack for awhile… at least until I get to the big city with the gun on it. Buying and using healing items is such a pain all the time though but thankfully money isn’t hard to get.
Fast forward further into the story and one of my characters has to go one on one with another dude, this is like that other fight with the guy and his dog when I didn’t have 3 characters that could throw grenades and heal! I can’t beat this dude with the gun on his arm with just 1 guy!
… Then after failing over and over again, I finally figure out what putting “Restore” on his weapon does… then I figure out what putting “Fire” on it does…
Suddenly the FF7 materia system clicks into place in my brain and about 15 hours after the tutorial teaching you how to do it I figure out how to play the game.
Still my number 1 game of all time to this day. And I never forgot how much trouble Dyne gave me that first time playing through the game.
tl;dr I didn’t understand how the FF7 materia system worked until about 15~ hours into the game and was using grenades and potions for all fighting and healing for a loooong time.
Dwarf Fortress.
Enough said lmao
Nioh. You can transform into demon mode and I didn’t know until I played the sequel. It’s a soulslike so I played it exactly how I play Dark Souls which made me completely lose out on the unique and in-depth systems the game has to offer.
You can transform into demon mode and I didn’t know until I played the sequel
You didn’t miss that, that mechanic doesn’t exist in the first game. In Nioh 1, you can briefly power up your weapon. Nioh 2 removed that and introduced the demon transformation instead (and yokai cores, which also don’t exist in N1).
I know, that’s what I meant because it’s tied to the demons you equip, I used them solely as stat boosts.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
I played through Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, basically without the Flamethrower (for armor) or Grenades. I just constantly forgot they even existed, so I never used them.
Some fights were a total pain, but it wasn’t that bad. I still want to play through the game again, eventually, and hopefully this time with all the tools you have at your disposal.
I just beat BOTW for the first time and never figured out what to do with Korok Seeds. Missed out on the extra weapon/shield inventory slots the whole game!
Hammerwatch. You can reach the end of the game and be unable to proceed if you didn’t collect specific things. I believe it was wooden boards.
I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There’s even an achievement for it.
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I forced my way through that cave in Blue/Red that was completely pitch black. I don’t know why I didn’t get HM Flash (I was a dumb kid). I remember listening intenselywith headphones to the noises that would be made from running into walls, along with counting each press of the d-pad so I could sorta figure out where I was. Still got lost often. I don’t know how many poor Zubats I murdered in that cave trying to get through it. Nor do I remember how long it took me to get to the other side.
I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like “wow, this game is so much easier now!”
Yeah, it wasn’t until my second time starting the game that I took in any of the combat tutorials
I finished botw with 250 hours game play and currently on totk and cannot dodge, parry or flurry rush to save my life.
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How can you be under leveled? Isn’t Alduin level scaled?
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Yes and no.
Everything still has a minimum level. Alduin being the final boss is still pretty high level at his lowest level. Same with the Dragon Priests. Those dudes are almost impossible when you’re less than level 10.
If you just did the MQ and nothing else, even if you kill everything in your path during the dungeons, you’ll barely have leveled. You won’t level at if you just run through everything!
Turns out in Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go left when you leave the initial starting area so you can pick up the ability of teleportation to bonfires.
Well, imagine my surprise learning that from friends 10 play hours later after going right and opening up a teleporting treasure chest to some crystal cave…
In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment–I’d never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.
I always get stuck trying to replay FF8 because I can never properly get enough items to ever upgrade anyone’s main weapon- which is usually good enough to get through till mid-late game there’s some point that requires more physical weapon use and I just get roadblocked and give up. I could probably follow a guide but I always think I can do it myself.
More on track with your game though - I love Legend of Dragoons art style for their character sheet, but it feels so slow navigating it. I’d really really love a remaster.
In Breath of the Wild, I never learned how to cook in the starting area. I completely bypassed the intended path up to the cold area and somehow climbed up the other side, and then just froze my ass off while eating a bunch of apples. I made it out of the starting area and I think I beat two of the divine beasts before I finally looked up how to cook. I knew the game had cooking, but I thought there would be some kind of cooking menu when you walk up to a cooking pot, I didn’t realize you had to just hold items and then drop them in.
Doing the hermit’s cooking tutorial fully actually makes that Great Plateau mountain even easier, because not only you’d learn how cooking works but he’d also give you the warm doublet right away.
Most of the mountain (all? except maybe a small area around the summit) is only level 1-cold, so the doublet is enough even without cooking.
YES! This is actually how I finally learned how to cook. There was another cold area I was trying to get into, and looked up where to get warm clothing, and it said something like “You should already have the warm doublet from completing the hermit’s cooking tutorial.” and I was like “the what?”
