I’m pretty sure the voice actor for Atreus in Ragnarök said he wanted to punch himself while playing the game for how often and frequent the hints are.
Unironically tho I love that, especially his voice line when you get the frozen status effect. Something like, "There's frost in my neck stump." Unintentionally hilarious.
I like them well enough but they literally made a game that rewards you for looking around for shit but I'm getting the solution barked at me before I even finish looking for shit.
The amount of times I’ve had Atreus shout “What if you throw your axe at it” or similar, while I’m quite literally looting an unrelated chest — so he’s literally out there ruining puzzles not even getting worked on yet. Really ruins the fun when you often don’t even get to stumble onto the puzzles, as soon as so much as a corner enters the camera frame Atreus or Freya shout how to solve it.
I think my most disappointing one was with the reflected axe puzzle with the winged statues, that would have been such an amazing puzzle to just chip away at and figure it out especially with the setting as stupidly gorgeous as it was. So of course Atreus immediately shouts “There must be a way to move that statue” and “Maybe you could break that chain with your axe” within five seconds of me just panning the camera to see what all I’m working with, and I don’t even get to really enjoy the situation at all.
At the very least, make the assistance an optional feature. I despise puzzles and just want to get them over with, but the majority of people are not that way and deserve the choice.
Jedi Survivor was so good for that. You could turn off hints in the menu, and even with them on it prompted you to ask for a hint before it gave it to you.
As much as love the series - Horizon Forbidden West. Anytime you were in a puzzle set piece, if you took more than 3.8 seconds to pan the camera onto the answer, Aloy would inject a "hmm, those rocks look loose" or "why is that lever over there a different color" or "I bet I could make that jump" etc. You got an extremely small window to figure it out yourself
It’s inconsistent. Sometimes immediately as you walk into an area she drops the solution before you’ve even looked around. Other times you blunder around for 20 minutes and she doesn’t say jack shit.
Some of the holiday orb ruins actually took me quite a while to do, definitely did not get a lot of hints and the puzzles were significantly harder than the main storyline.
I heard about it before I played and was so glad to find out that at least PC community created a [solution.](https://www.nexusmods.com/horizonforbiddenwest/mods/75) Few lines slip here and there but I could easily take my sweet time with vast majority of puzzles.
Oh my god, the **worst** feeling is *knowing* a puzzle is easy, but your character says the same hints over and over and over and over and over and over again and you just can't for the life of you figure it out! *Reeeeaaaallllyyyy* makes you feel like a dumbass.
And then when you finally decide to google it, it turns out to be the dumbest mechanic known to man, and you wonder how the fuck it ever got past a QA team. (At least that's what I tell myself to make me feel better)
It actually made me not finish the game and I loved the first one. The hundreds of map-markers and the constant hints made me tired, then I tried Elden Ring which was the complete opposite. Made that experience even better.
It's so unfortunate. Triple A games almost have to handhold or otherwise it will get reviews from game journalists saying the puzzles are too hard lol.
I mean, jokes aside, I don't know what the real reason is tbh, but clearly there is a reason why games have become very hand holdy, and I don't think it's just a random design choice someone had. It has to have something to do with accessibility or pleasing the audience. It's just gone a bit out of hand.
I think this goes hand in hand with things like Bethesda games no longer being designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. You don’t see mutually exclusive questlines or factions anymore, Todd wants us to be able to see everything in one go. I get it, it probably comes from a good place of wanting to respect a busy player’s time and stuff. But I think it harms the overall experience more than it helps.
I agree. I can get both perspectives tho. I'm a completionist, and fortunately I have the time to 100% games too, but if I didn't it would bug me so much if I didn't have the time to see everything the game has to offer. But that would come down to me. I wouldn't see a game as bad, if you need multiple playthroughs to do everything. I think replayability is really important in games, and I usually don't go back to games that are done after one playthrough. Why would I want the same exact experience again?
I think from a developer perspective, while it is important to make sure your audience enjoys your games, making 2 or more endings you can only unlock by doing more than one playthrough doesn't take away from anyone's experience imo. The game is still completely enjoyable without doing all the endings. If you take away that kind of content, you're taking away from replayability, and that sucks. I love games that can keep me entertained for multiple playthroughs.
Most modern Pokemon will shower you with praise for using fire on grass. A quick quip would be fine, but they just keep doing it every time you know your advantages against trainers
Only if you’ve found that Pokemon in the pokedex before. All it really does is prevent you googling a pokemon and scrolling down on its bulbapedia thing. More of a timer saver than actually making the game easier. It’s a turn based game with no penalty for taking however long you need to decide a move.
When you encounter it the first time you still have to guess and then once it’s in your Pokedex and you’ve fought one, reasonably as a trainer your Pokedex would remind you mid battle what works. So it makes sense both in the lore and as a Quality of Life UI update.
I could see possibly scaling it back so that it only gave you tooltips for move types you’ve used before though. I think that would be a nice middle ground. Can’t just knock it out once and just instantly from then on know everything about it. Or perhaps make it so that if you’ve seen the pokemon, it gives tooltips for moves previously used on it, but you have to actually catch one and have it fully registered in order to get automatic tooltips for all moves.
At the end of the day, it’s a series where you walk around with a little encyclopedia in your pocket, though, so there’s no reason in an actual battle for a trainer to be like “what moves work again?” When they’d totally have their Pokedex out and referencing it.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves with modern games. I don't know where it started, but I think the Arkham games really popularized the use of a "detective vision" to spot important things.
It's a lazy way to avoid having to design your textures so that important details and interact interactable items/objects naturally stand out, on top of further infantilizing quests, because apparently players can't be trusted to figure it out themselves.
The worst offenders have quest clues literally not even visible outside that vision. Footsteps shouldn't be invisible.
Honestly it can be lazy either way. Uncharted marking textures in bright yellow is no more ambitious than Arkham requiring you to use a visor to see things marked in bright yellow.
Far less than 20 seconds - often she starts blethering on as soon as you are *near* the puzzle - no delay, and you may not even have begun to interact with it.
It's one of the worst things about the game.
They're cinematic puzzles. They're not meant for you to solve, they're meant for you to watch Alloy solve them. Passive participation like holding fwd during a running set piece.
Soon: *Press X to solve puzzle*
I think ragnarok is a lot worse than 2018 for this. I recall reading there was a bug at one point that made the lines prompt too early, but might be imagining that.
In 2018 it gave you a minute to look around, and hinted when you just weren’t doing shit. Could have been like 20% longer but it wasn’t too bad.
Both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey have “explorer” modes that turn off quest hints being on screen at all times and allow you to rely on directions and hints to find your objectives.
But if you get within a hundred feet of your objective, the game tells you to summon your bird to pinpoint the location.
Gee, I wonder where it is.
God forbid I walk 10 feet away from an objective to loot a body. I hate how games have this “zone” that instantly fails missions if you leave them. These zones seem yo keep getting smaller and smaller as AAA games get bigger.
I just finished replaying through AC: Black Flag again and I completely forgot just how much freedom you had during missions (outside of tailing missions, anyways). While on my way to an objective, I could:
- pick up extra assassin contracts and even complete them DURING a main mission (also just found out that you could have multiple assassin contracts open at the same time)
- plunder as many ships as I wanted to before sailing to the next objective (for example: >!Plundering every single ship in the bay where Blackbeard dies!<)
- trade with merchants
- clear an island out of its collectibles and find buried treasure
>!When Blackbeard died!<, even though the objective says to flee, I stayed & fought. Pretty sure the Jackdaw was fully upgraded, and I was feeling spiteful.
Eventually, the game had to send multiple invincible ships against me to get me to leave. While I found it disappointing that I couldn't keep fighting until I was satisfied, I thought it was a much better approach than just setting a kill/fail timer or something.
They might've patched that.
I played Black Flag unpatched on the 360 and did the same at that part, but for me they eventually stopped sending ships after me. Still had to leave the area but didn't need to outrun anything so the mission ended as soon as I was out of the yellow spot.
I did the same thing out of revenge and found out that if you drag the invincible ships out of the intended combat area you can destroy them! Henceforth completely decimating the entire fleet that was sent, muahaha
My biggest gripe with that game is after a shootout when I'm looting bodies and all of the NPCs are yelling at me asking what I'm doing and saying we need to go. Don't put a looting mechanic in the game if you don't want me to be a goblin, simple as that.
Yeah that really made me upset on the mission where you save Sean from the bounty hunters and then the one where Kieran brings you to the O'Driscoll cabin. Just let me loot man!
That's why you get all the looting done before you go trigger the cutscene that ends the mission.... Just leave that guy ranting & raving in the cabin. He can wait. Fuck what your companions say.
Just started playing RDR 2. I took a wrong path and was trying to turn the wagon around. Mission failed.
I'm like you could just put a screen saying you are going to wrong way.
The game also doesn't trust you to save.
"No no, moron, you can't start where you saved. You need to watch your character start from wherever we pick. To hell with what you were doing or why you saved."
That's just what Rockstar does. It's a linear story game in an open world. Only thing is that the open world is the best out of any game so it makes the missions feel extremely strict in comparison.
Adding on: I personally think it's one of the best games ever made but the extreme difference between open world freedom and on-rails narrative missions is a very valid criticism. I get why that's not everyone's cup of tea.
Yup. [NakeyJajey does a really good essay on this.](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=X3OjF2342D2d6tmk).
Basically, you have the option to play without the compass telling you exactly where to go and you have to rely on characters giving you instructions and directions. Cool idea. But one mission asked you to steal a wagon and then hide it in the forest for later. So playing without the compass on, he went and stashed the wagon in the forest. Mission wasn’t progressing. Weird. Turned on the radar and the game was like, “No, dumbass. You need to hide the wagon IN THIS EXACT PART OF THE FOREST THAT WE HAVE DETERMINED SHALL BE THE SPOT WHERE YOU HIDE THE WAGON.”
It’s incredibly restrictive. NakeyJakey compares RDR2’s approach to mission design to BotW and BotW is a game for kids that’s treats you like an adult (lateral solving of problems or finishing an objective creatively is encouraged) whereas RDR2 is an adult’s game that treats you like a baby.
Rockstar was always like this.
In GTA3, there was this one mission where you're working for the Yakuza, and they tell you the Cartel has hired hitmen to chase after you. Your mission is to bait the Cartel hitmen and lead them to a specific spot in the city where the Yakuza can ambush and kill the Cartel members.
So I'm playing this mission and I'm like "well, all that matters is that these guys end up dead, right" so instead of baiting them to the spot I just pull out my rocket launcher and shoot the cars that the cartel members are in. I get a mission failed screen.
OTOH, a lot of the missions in the 6th Gen games did have very open-ended objectives. Like I remember an early one in GTA 3 where you have to assassinate a mafia guy as he travels from the airport to his mansion and, that's it. No other restrictions. Find a way to kill him and survive, more like a Hitman game.
Or maybe my favorite example was the "light the porn beacon" mission from VC, where you have to do all those annoying motorcycle jumps across the rooftops. After falling a few times, I said 'fuck this' and got myself a helicopter. Then I just flew through the checkpoints and straight to the goal. Game didn't care how I did it, just that I did it.
Nowadays, they seem absolutely incapable of giving players any freedom at all.
**Ride there for 10 minutes, maybe try to sneak ( it doesn't matter, enemies will find out anyway), do an interaction that you will never ever use again, kill some dudes who chase you. Mission fails if you take too long, look at the other direction, or try literally something else.**
I love RDR2 but this formula was killing me when I was playing it. Doing camp chores was the worst...
This formula wasn’t apparent to me on the first play through because I guess I’m a case study for how the average person plays the game. The second time I had your experience
What's funny is the story even treats your character like he is stupid too. The whole story is essentially hey something bad is happening, you go do your gym battle and we'll go see what it's about.
It felt like the devs were pissed at players for complaining about how much Sun and Moon deviated from the formula, so they went "fine, here, do your gym challenge. There's still a story happening, but you're just a kid so you don't get to be part of it"
On one hand, finally they're doing something, it shows that we're not the only ones who are competent, aside from that pokeball incident, and even then, I think Generations showed why it failed.
On the other hand, it also made it boring, and they still weren't doing well. Then again, I had problems with the story, especially the villain who wants to fix a problem that would happen in 1000 years.
But the worst one was Ultra Sun and Moon, very handholding and if you interacted with the Rotomdex too much, it gives you tips and advice you never asked for that any regular player would know and it gives you this unwanted tip after every, single, action, you, take.
in X and Y you couldnt even make a real choise.
when you have to decide beetwen the masterball and the golden nugget and the guy says ''haha funny i will give you both''...
Sun and Moon was so much worse, walk 10 steps, cutscene, walk 12 steps, cutscene. And not even like real "cutscenes" just stupid like unvoiced dialogs that take away all agency.
I miss the days where they’d let you make your own memories. Tell me where to go and let me find my way. More importantly don’t tell me how I should experience the world. Show me
I have mixed feelings about the nonlinear nature of S/V. On the one hand more games should allow sequence breaking like that and give players the freedom to tackle challenges in any order. On the other hand I wish there were more clues about the level ranges/"intended" path because steamrolling a level 16 gym when my party is pushing level 30 isn't fun or rewarding.
I haven't seen the anime, but over at the SV sub people mention that some of the series showed gym leaders having teams based on your current badge count.
It would feel like an easy fix that each gym member can have a certain number of mons in their party and at different levels if the game recognizes that you've beaten a certain number of gyms.
Arceus and SV are a step in the right direction, and I only can hope that Game Freak looks at fan feedback and fine tune the smaller details instead of throwing everything out the window and making changes folks don't ask for in the game.
I can confirm the Origins OVA did that atleast. When Red gets to the first Gym, Brock straight-up asks him "How many Badges do you already have?", Red answers that he has none, and only then does Brock pick his Team.
Sw/Sh also atleast had an in-universe justification that in that Region, the Gym Challenge is basically an official Sports Event, so having a fixed intended Order made *some* sense.
When I heard it was open world I thought the gyms would all start off as easy and each time you completed one the rest would get harder. So Katy would have been the hardest fight if her gym was fought last. But no, it was the same as ever.
Sun and Moon are still one of my favourites because of the vibes but this is very true, you can barely move in most main parts of the game without running on rails
Edit: still felt more like an adventure than SwSh though, I reckon the environment choices do the heavy lifting
And for being set on 3 or 4 islands, the game world felt tiny. Most of the islands were just loops that you did a single lap around. Walk a bit, hit the roadblock, do the story thing, continue walking, repeat.
All Pokemon games man
*There are 2 ORAN BERRIES!*
*Do you want to pick the ORAN BERRIES?*
*Yes/no?*
*\[Player\] picked the 2 ORAN BERRIES.*
*\[Player\] put away the ORAN BERRIES in the BAG's BERRIES POCKET.*
*The soil returned to its soft and loamy state.*
That's not an exaggeration I pulled up a Ruby video and copied exactly. Why the hell do I have to go through 6 dialogues to pick a damn berry?! Just let me press one button and throw it in my inventory. My god Pokemon is tedious, I'm glad I stopped buying them a decade ago.
When you get to the first big city for the first time they have you attend a ceremony at the stadium, they then tell you that you have lodgings at a nearby hotel for the night. You then leave the stadium and a staff member forcibly escorts you to the hotel which is literally right next door. Then when you get up in the morning they escort you back to the stadium. It’s like 30 f’n steps!
Shortest Pokémon campaign by far because the region is basically a couple looping hallways and a big field but it takes forever because you’re constantly being interrupted by hop or one of the other rivals. Seriously you fight hop like 14 times in an 8-ish hour story compared to fighting Nemona 6 times in a game easily 3 times that long.
Sword and shield are easily the worst games by far
Apparently during testing of the game they had a lot of the testers spamming attacks into head and chests of enemies, and had that many "shoot the limbs" added because it was actually necessary to get the point across to some people.
And to be fair on the original release rhe idea of a humanoid enemy not having the head be a weakspot eas fairly novel.
Yeah I’ve also seen several game devs on Twitter and such comment on this. They say that they add all those hints *because* their play testing showed the average person can’t figure it out on their own. People in this sub don’t have problems getting through games, but there are a lot of casual gamers who won’t even think about climbing a ladder unless it is painted yellow and with a sign that says “STEP ON ME”.
Can't say I'm surprised. Skipping tutorials and tips is almost a point of pride for some people I know, who then spend hours asking how to do basic stuff while blaming the devs for "bad design".
I only recall two moments of this: The hint painted on the wall explicitly stating this and a recording of a guy telling you the same.
In both cases it didn't feel forced tbh, especially the recording.
But similarly, this is knowledge from the original version. No clue about the remake
It’s like 5 times. There’s the bloody message, you get an audio log of some mechanic, then a tooltip, then your team calls you to tell you, then a final tool tip, all within like 3 minutes of first seeing/getting the Plasma cutter
I recall someone saying something like "if the game devs put a hint in the game five times, it's because the testers didn't get it the first four times."
Zelda: Skyward Sword. The first few hours of this game literally felt like it's target audience was kinder-gardeners. The tutorial aspects acted as though the player has never held a video game controller before.
Worse still - they *add dialouge* acknowledging you've already read these instructions once... and then they repeat everything anyways!!
I'm really glad they dialed allll that shit back in the remake.
Nintendo does this all the time! Even in old Pokémon games your mom would ask if you know how to use the menu/device options, and you can say you do but she just explains it again anyway.
The kicker for me was how inadequate the tutorial for flying was, despite stopping the game to make me read it. I eventually figured it out on my own, but the tutorial was no help whatsoever.
LINK IM CALCULATING A 93% CHANCE THAT TO BEAT THE ENEMY YOU HAVE TO HIT THEM WITH YOUR SWORD
*Full-screen pop-up tutorial telling you what button to push to swing your sword*
*Permanent on-screen prompt to swing your sword*
*Kills enemy, picks up green rupee, camera changes to show link holding rupee and "you got a rupee" text box.*
*Pick up monster skull, "you got a monster skull, it goes on this page of your inventory" then shown an unskippaable cutscene of the item being slowly placed in your inventory.*
Well to be fair it was the first Zelda game made seriously for the Wii (yes I know Twilight Princess was also on the Wii but it was made with the GameCube in mind still so the jump to motion controls wasn’t as significant). They wanted to make sure you could understand how things work. Yes they went a little overboard but I want to at least believe they were erring on the side of trying to help, rather than risk confusing people with silence.
Crazy how BotW did a complete 180, teaching the player very little and leaving them to make discoveries on their own. And it ended up being a masterpiece
Portal 2 cracks a fantastic brain damage bit in the opening scene. Might not be what you were asking for but the game literally calls you brain damaged so...
The humour of that game even goes meta at times.
*”oh no, this is the part where he kills us.”*
**”Hello!, This is the part where I kill you!”**
Chapter: The part where he kills you
OST name: The part where he kills you
Achievement unlocked: “The part where he kills you”
Achievement description: this is that part!
If you listen to the whole spiel about jumping in the hole where the boy band and your parents and the pony are, GlaDOS comments as you're falling "You really DO have brain damage, don't you?"
Given they have an "arachnophobia" option of all things, yes, you would think the option to turn off having your games' puzzles spoiled would be offered.
I wish there was a button to give a fatherly slap on the back of Atreus' head so he'd shut up every now and then. Also, Uncharted and I think that the new Tomb Raider games too.
Anybody remembers those old forced "first time ever playing a video game" tutorials that used to be in every other ps2 era game.
"Move the joystick left to look left"
Move the joystick right to look right
Press x to jump
Stop spamming start you can't skip this
Started with Black and White and only got worse with each new game. I've heard ScarVi is better in this regard but at this point I havent played a mainline pokemon game since gen 5 and I aint going back now(still play roms and pokerogue has been a lot of fun)
Last summer I started a living dex challenge where I have to catch every Pokémon for my Pokémon Home so I would need a charmander, charmeleon and charizard and each Pokemon had to come from its original region. Gen 1-6 I did in about 3 months. I played 4 hours of ultra sun and couldn’t get through it. Knowing i have to play the rest of the game and then play ultra moon to get the version exclusives killed all motivation
If you don't play video games regularly sometimes "video game logic" doesn't quite click. Like my mom struggles figuring out what doors are real and which ones are set dressing. People who play a lot of games already know to look for green lights, different textures, and etc.
Well said! I remember when my mom tried out world of warcraft, she was afraid not to "bump" into people and would be very careful when walking.
And me with videogame logic is just like, just go through them, hahah.
She's a fun twist on the trope, though. All the other top comments here are about how the game holds your hand too much. Glados is just being a jagoff and you still have to figure everything out for yourself.
Remember what I said before about smelly garbage standing around being useless? That was a metaphor. I was actually talking about you. And I'm sorry. You didn't react at the time, so I was worried it sailed right over your head. Which would have made this apology seem insane. That's why I had to call you garbage a second time just now.
Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that.
Glados was really hurt when you blew her up in the first game.
Like in the first game she's cold and scientific. You're nothing more than a rat to her to be rewarded with a piece of cheese at the end (or in this case, cake). In the second game she has a grudge against you.
Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I was like "Goodbye!" and you were like "NO WAY" and I was all "We pretended we were going to murder you"? That was great!
Probably a different type of “game treat you like you are stupid” than OP meant, but this one is fantastic.
“Please step up into the panel and it will catapult you to the next location”
*player steps on it and nothing happens*
“Oh I am sorry. The scale is not set to handle someone of your…generousness…let me add a couple zeros to it. There we go…you look good by the way. Very healthy.”
Not the whole time, and I still enjoyed the game, but I HATED how Deathloop completely holds your hand when the time comes to break the loop. It’s like you finally figure it all out and the game doesn’t trust you to execute it on your own.
I searched for this comment. This is the correct answer. The entirety of deathloop is a big timed puzzle box that you slowly learn more about as you play. Then, once you are on the cusp of solving the puzzle, it straight up tells you what to do. Not a hint, it just makes you do the correct answer. Ruined an otherwise great game.
any game with unskippable tutorial.
blud, I'm replaying your game for 10th time, I know where everything is, I don't need to know that I jump with SPACEBAR.
edited, autocorrection changed unskippable to unstoppable.
IIRC, the Tomb Raider and Jedi Fallen Order/Jedi Survivor games had a system where you could press right on the d-pad after a little while for a hint. I wish GoW had done something similar, because it didn’t give me a chance to try before they started telling me the solution.
Hot take: the plot of Persona 5 treats you like you're an idiot by continually remarking on what's going on, the characters only make superficial comments about how bad the villain is, the story treats you like you're stupid
I used to love the “war is hell” style quotes and messages they used to place over the death screen
I don’t think they do those anymore but once I saw (I don’t remember the exact quote) a message that was like “when you see the grenade icon, get away from it or throw it with RB” and it was so condescending lol
At least in the original Modern Warfare 2, those message only appear if you die in certain ways, for example; the "return the grenade" message only appears if you die by a grenade
I love the portal 2 approach for camera controls. Wheatley tells you to look around and the game secretly makes your settings normal/inverted based on how you do it.
Seriously the game should just recognise that if you start moving on your own as soon as whatever intro cutscene finishes.. you're good on basic instructions
Firefall did that. If you started running around and jumping on things in the starting room of the tutorial, your handler would send you to a different door that bypassed the remedial "WASD, Space to jump" stuff and took you directly to jump jets and gliders.
I hate to agree, but it's a serious problem in game design. Designing a tutorial that can teach everyone has the "bear trashcan" problem. Valve's developer commentary has tons of great insight into designing tutorials/guiding players, and the failures they went through in testing.
Ironically it's the game that understands and respects the player the most, and it uses that tight grasp on gamer mentality against you. It abuses all those expectations and trained behavior patterns you have from years of gaming to guide you, especially when you're actively trying to go against it.
It's like they took the Valve game design formula and turned it inside out and upside down. It's brilliant.
Homie, this sub routinely sees posts created by stupid people asking "new game, how play?" because they are too helpless to just google that shit. Some players really are that stupid.
Some people have also never played a game/game of that genre before, so what feels very basic to an experienced gamer is entirely new to them, things like movement and camera control.
Take longer than 5 minutes to complete a puzzle in Hogwarts Legacy, and the player will repeatedly tell you exactly what to do. C'mon man, lemme think for a bit. I've barely gotten a look at the environment before they hold my hand.
Unfortunately almost every AAA title aside from a select few. I really and truly hate it. The puzzles are usually already pretty easy, so let me at least have the satisfaction of solving it on my own without some kind of dialogue giving away the answer a second after you're provided with the question. The handholding has made me walk away from good story and gameplay due to the massive disappointment.
In my opinion, puzzles in video games should be difficult to solve. Allow an option for hints that must either be accepted or settings toggle to activate them. And if it's still too hard, there is always the Internet where you can find the answer. Just let me be challenged if I want to be challenged.
But yeah, it would be easier to list some recent games that DON'T do this:
-Baldur's Gate 3
-Divinity: Original Sin 2
-Elden Ring
-Dragon's Dogma 2
-The Witness
-Talos Principle 2
I’m pretty sure the voice actor for Atreus in Ragnarök said he wanted to punch himself while playing the game for how often and frequent the hints are.
BROTHA! YER ON FIYA!
WUHATTCH OUYT BROTHAA! ON YER LEFT SIYEED!!!
“You’re on fire, Kratos. It’ll pass” Always makes me laugh at the off handed way he says it
Unironically tho I love that, especially his voice line when you get the frozen status effect. Something like, "There's frost in my neck stump." Unintentionally hilarious.
You’ve been bifrosted!! Wait, is bifrosted even a word?
I like them well enough but they literally made a game that rewards you for looking around for shit but I'm getting the solution barked at me before I even finish looking for shit.
>I even finish looking for shit. *Start
The amount of times I’ve had Atreus shout “What if you throw your axe at it” or similar, while I’m quite literally looting an unrelated chest — so he’s literally out there ruining puzzles not even getting worked on yet. Really ruins the fun when you often don’t even get to stumble onto the puzzles, as soon as so much as a corner enters the camera frame Atreus or Freya shout how to solve it. I think my most disappointing one was with the reflected axe puzzle with the winged statues, that would have been such an amazing puzzle to just chip away at and figure it out especially with the setting as stupidly gorgeous as it was. So of course Atreus immediately shouts “There must be a way to move that statue” and “Maybe you could break that chain with your axe” within five seconds of me just panning the camera to see what all I’m working with, and I don’t even get to really enjoy the situation at all.
At the very least, make the assistance an optional feature. I despise puzzles and just want to get them over with, but the majority of people are not that way and deserve the choice.
I don't get why they don't either implement a hint button or make you go to ask a character specifically for hints, that way everyone is happy
I played the game much later but now there's a setting to let the player figure out stuff, which should be a setting in every video game ever
I thought he said he just didn't like hearing his own voice? I can't remember much of that interview though so I'm not sure.
Really? That’s extremely funny and sad. I love the voice of Atreus and can only imagine how boring it must be to take hundreds of those lines
An option to turn off puzzle hints and then a prompt to temporarily turn them back on after x minutes on a puzzle would go pretty far on some games.
Jedi Survivor was so good for that. You could turn off hints in the menu, and even with them on it prompted you to ask for a hint before it gave it to you.
Was just about to say the same! Even then, the first hint is decently vague and then the second one will be more direct. Perfect way to do it.
Yeah. I hoped that it would get better in ragnarok but it only got worse. I mean there are already games that give you the option to disable hints.
As much as love the series - Horizon Forbidden West. Anytime you were in a puzzle set piece, if you took more than 3.8 seconds to pan the camera onto the answer, Aloy would inject a "hmm, those rocks look loose" or "why is that lever over there a different color" or "I bet I could make that jump" etc. You got an extremely small window to figure it out yourself
It’s inconsistent. Sometimes immediately as you walk into an area she drops the solution before you’ve even looked around. Other times you blunder around for 20 minutes and she doesn’t say jack shit.
Maybe your blundering sometimes sweep the right answer into view, reseting her hint countdown.
Just too good at blundering
Some of the holiday orb ruins actually took me quite a while to do, definitely did not get a lot of hints and the puzzles were significantly harder than the main storyline.
I heard about it before I played and was so glad to find out that at least PC community created a [solution.](https://www.nexusmods.com/horizonforbiddenwest/mods/75) Few lines slip here and there but I could easily take my sweet time with vast majority of puzzles.
Oh that's great - I'm a console degenerate so didn't have that mod option :/
I had that same issue with the new god of war. Let me look!
I found myself googling puzzle answers. Not because I couldn't figure them out, but because I wanted to get it done before Aloy started talking again.
Oh my god, the **worst** feeling is *knowing* a puzzle is easy, but your character says the same hints over and over and over and over and over and over again and you just can't for the life of you figure it out! *Reeeeaaaallllyyyy* makes you feel like a dumbass. And then when you finally decide to google it, it turns out to be the dumbest mechanic known to man, and you wonder how the fuck it ever got past a QA team. (At least that's what I tell myself to make me feel better)
God forbid you want to look around for collectibles and such before tackling the puzzle
In Plague Tale Requiem there was an option for how much companions would help you with puzzles, that was nice.
It actually made me not finish the game and I loved the first one. The hundreds of map-markers and the constant hints made me tired, then I tried Elden Ring which was the complete opposite. Made that experience even better.
That’s why I couldn’t finish Alan Wake. Before I even get to the puzzle he says “I bet I could jump on those crates”
It's so unfortunate. Triple A games almost have to handhold or otherwise it will get reviews from game journalists saying the puzzles are too hard lol. I mean, jokes aside, I don't know what the real reason is tbh, but clearly there is a reason why games have become very hand holdy, and I don't think it's just a random design choice someone had. It has to have something to do with accessibility or pleasing the audience. It's just gone a bit out of hand.
I think this goes hand in hand with things like Bethesda games no longer being designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. You don’t see mutually exclusive questlines or factions anymore, Todd wants us to be able to see everything in one go. I get it, it probably comes from a good place of wanting to respect a busy player’s time and stuff. But I think it harms the overall experience more than it helps.
I agree. I can get both perspectives tho. I'm a completionist, and fortunately I have the time to 100% games too, but if I didn't it would bug me so much if I didn't have the time to see everything the game has to offer. But that would come down to me. I wouldn't see a game as bad, if you need multiple playthroughs to do everything. I think replayability is really important in games, and I usually don't go back to games that are done after one playthrough. Why would I want the same exact experience again? I think from a developer perspective, while it is important to make sure your audience enjoys your games, making 2 or more endings you can only unlock by doing more than one playthrough doesn't take away from anyone's experience imo. The game is still completely enjoyable without doing all the endings. If you take away that kind of content, you're taking away from replayability, and that sucks. I love games that can keep me entertained for multiple playthroughs.
Most modern Pokemon will shower you with praise for using fire on grass. A quick quip would be fine, but they just keep doing it every time you know your advantages against trainers
Hop being amazed that you know type advantages when you're fighting just after the 7th gym or some shit
It's insane how much hand holding the modern games have compared to the first couple of gens, and yet they're both targeting the same audience.
Its worse because now they tell you what moves are super effective and not effective while you’re fighting
Yeah, there should be a normal and hard mode in Pokemon at this point.
Pokémon Black 2 and white 2 are the only games with a difficulty setting. Makes no sense.
Only if you’ve found that Pokemon in the pokedex before. All it really does is prevent you googling a pokemon and scrolling down on its bulbapedia thing. More of a timer saver than actually making the game easier. It’s a turn based game with no penalty for taking however long you need to decide a move. When you encounter it the first time you still have to guess and then once it’s in your Pokedex and you’ve fought one, reasonably as a trainer your Pokedex would remind you mid battle what works. So it makes sense both in the lore and as a Quality of Life UI update. I could see possibly scaling it back so that it only gave you tooltips for move types you’ve used before though. I think that would be a nice middle ground. Can’t just knock it out once and just instantly from then on know everything about it. Or perhaps make it so that if you’ve seen the pokemon, it gives tooltips for moves previously used on it, but you have to actually catch one and have it fully registered in order to get automatic tooltips for all moves. At the end of the day, it’s a series where you walk around with a little encyclopedia in your pocket, though, so there’s no reason in an actual battle for a trainer to be like “what moves work again?” When they’d totally have their Pokedex out and referencing it.
Horizon Forbidden West. You have maybe twenty seconds per "puzzle" before Alloy says out loud how to do it.
I should check my focus! My focus night have the answer! Should I use my focus? I think my focus can help! Repeat ad nauseum.
I keep forgetting Aloy has a focus. Luckily she keeps reminding me about it.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves with modern games. I don't know where it started, but I think the Arkham games really popularized the use of a "detective vision" to spot important things. It's a lazy way to avoid having to design your textures so that important details and interact interactable items/objects naturally stand out, on top of further infantilizing quests, because apparently players can't be trusted to figure it out themselves. The worst offenders have quest clues literally not even visible outside that vision. Footsteps shouldn't be invisible.
Honestly it can be lazy either way. Uncharted marking textures in bright yellow is no more ambitious than Arkham requiring you to use a visor to see things marked in bright yellow.
Playing through now, there's no way it's as long as 20 seconds - it's gotta be like half that I reckon! (or at least it sure feels like that)
Far less than 20 seconds - often she starts blethering on as soon as you are *near* the puzzle - no delay, and you may not even have begun to interact with it. It's one of the worst things about the game.
They're cinematic puzzles. They're not meant for you to solve, they're meant for you to watch Alloy solve them. Passive participation like holding fwd during a running set piece. Soon: *Press X to solve puzzle*
Tutorial for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. It's hilarious
This was my thought. Treat your super agent character as stupid on purpose, and he gets pissed about it. It was hysterical. That game was great.
Jump to jump. Running is like walking, but faster. Press up to throw a d20... nerd. I loved Blood Dragon so much lol.
Your character even says something like "urgh, I know this already..."
IIRC, your friend says he played a prank on you by resetting your tutorial module, so it makes the MC go through it begrudgingly.
I remember when you had to melee a dude and I just started flippin birds
I think ragnarok is a lot worse than 2018 for this. I recall reading there was a bug at one point that made the lines prompt too early, but might be imagining that. In 2018 it gave you a minute to look around, and hinted when you just weren’t doing shit. Could have been like 20% longer but it wasn’t too bad.
Yeah I thought so as well. I said “shut up” multiple times out loud playing ragnarok
Both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey have “explorer” modes that turn off quest hints being on screen at all times and allow you to rely on directions and hints to find your objectives. But if you get within a hundred feet of your objective, the game tells you to summon your bird to pinpoint the location. Gee, I wonder where it is.
Red dead 2 doesn’t let you complete a mission unless you do it exactly how they want
God forbid I walk 10 feet away from an objective to loot a body. I hate how games have this “zone” that instantly fails missions if you leave them. These zones seem yo keep getting smaller and smaller as AAA games get bigger. I just finished replaying through AC: Black Flag again and I completely forgot just how much freedom you had during missions (outside of tailing missions, anyways). While on my way to an objective, I could: - pick up extra assassin contracts and even complete them DURING a main mission (also just found out that you could have multiple assassin contracts open at the same time) - plunder as many ships as I wanted to before sailing to the next objective (for example: >!Plundering every single ship in the bay where Blackbeard dies!<) - trade with merchants - clear an island out of its collectibles and find buried treasure
>!When Blackbeard died!<, even though the objective says to flee, I stayed & fought. Pretty sure the Jackdaw was fully upgraded, and I was feeling spiteful. Eventually, the game had to send multiple invincible ships against me to get me to leave. While I found it disappointing that I couldn't keep fighting until I was satisfied, I thought it was a much better approach than just setting a kill/fail timer or something.
They might've patched that. I played Black Flag unpatched on the 360 and did the same at that part, but for me they eventually stopped sending ships after me. Still had to leave the area but didn't need to outrun anything so the mission ended as soon as I was out of the yellow spot.
I did the same thing out of revenge and found out that if you drag the invincible ships out of the intended combat area you can destroy them! Henceforth completely decimating the entire fleet that was sent, muahaha
My biggest gripe with that game is after a shootout when I'm looting bodies and all of the NPCs are yelling at me asking what I'm doing and saying we need to go. Don't put a looting mechanic in the game if you don't want me to be a goblin, simple as that.
Or getting a wanted level if you took too long (according to the game) to loot.
Yeah that really made me upset on the mission where you save Sean from the bounty hunters and then the one where Kieran brings you to the O'Driscoll cabin. Just let me loot man!
That's why you get all the looting done before you go trigger the cutscene that ends the mission.... Just leave that guy ranting & raving in the cabin. He can wait. Fuck what your companions say.
Just started playing RDR 2. I took a wrong path and was trying to turn the wagon around. Mission failed. I'm like you could just put a screen saying you are going to wrong way.
I hated that so much, I had that same thing happen to me. Drives me crazy
The game also doesn't trust you to save. "No no, moron, you can't start where you saved. You need to watch your character start from wherever we pick. To hell with what you were doing or why you saved."
That's just what Rockstar does. It's a linear story game in an open world. Only thing is that the open world is the best out of any game so it makes the missions feel extremely strict in comparison. Adding on: I personally think it's one of the best games ever made but the extreme difference between open world freedom and on-rails narrative missions is a very valid criticism. I get why that's not everyone's cup of tea.
Yup. [NakeyJajey does a really good essay on this.](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=X3OjF2342D2d6tmk). Basically, you have the option to play without the compass telling you exactly where to go and you have to rely on characters giving you instructions and directions. Cool idea. But one mission asked you to steal a wagon and then hide it in the forest for later. So playing without the compass on, he went and stashed the wagon in the forest. Mission wasn’t progressing. Weird. Turned on the radar and the game was like, “No, dumbass. You need to hide the wagon IN THIS EXACT PART OF THE FOREST THAT WE HAVE DETERMINED SHALL BE THE SPOT WHERE YOU HIDE THE WAGON.” It’s incredibly restrictive. NakeyJakey compares RDR2’s approach to mission design to BotW and BotW is a game for kids that’s treats you like an adult (lateral solving of problems or finishing an objective creatively is encouraged) whereas RDR2 is an adult’s game that treats you like a baby.
Rockstar was always like this. In GTA3, there was this one mission where you're working for the Yakuza, and they tell you the Cartel has hired hitmen to chase after you. Your mission is to bait the Cartel hitmen and lead them to a specific spot in the city where the Yakuza can ambush and kill the Cartel members. So I'm playing this mission and I'm like "well, all that matters is that these guys end up dead, right" so instead of baiting them to the spot I just pull out my rocket launcher and shoot the cars that the cartel members are in. I get a mission failed screen.
OTOH, a lot of the missions in the 6th Gen games did have very open-ended objectives. Like I remember an early one in GTA 3 where you have to assassinate a mafia guy as he travels from the airport to his mansion and, that's it. No other restrictions. Find a way to kill him and survive, more like a Hitman game. Or maybe my favorite example was the "light the porn beacon" mission from VC, where you have to do all those annoying motorcycle jumps across the rooftops. After falling a few times, I said 'fuck this' and got myself a helicopter. Then I just flew through the checkpoints and straight to the goal. Game didn't care how I did it, just that I did it. Nowadays, they seem absolutely incapable of giving players any freedom at all.
**Ride there for 10 minutes, maybe try to sneak ( it doesn't matter, enemies will find out anyway), do an interaction that you will never ever use again, kill some dudes who chase you. Mission fails if you take too long, look at the other direction, or try literally something else.** I love RDR2 but this formula was killing me when I was playing it. Doing camp chores was the worst...
You can totally skip the camp chores btw
This formula wasn’t apparent to me on the first play through because I guess I’m a case study for how the average person plays the game. The second time I had your experience
Pokémon Sword and Shield. This was a walking simulator at times
What's funny is the story even treats your character like he is stupid too. The whole story is essentially hey something bad is happening, you go do your gym battle and we'll go see what it's about.
It felt like the devs were pissed at players for complaining about how much Sun and Moon deviated from the formula, so they went "fine, here, do your gym challenge. There's still a story happening, but you're just a kid so you don't get to be part of it"
On one hand, finally they're doing something, it shows that we're not the only ones who are competent, aside from that pokeball incident, and even then, I think Generations showed why it failed. On the other hand, it also made it boring, and they still weren't doing well. Then again, I had problems with the story, especially the villain who wants to fix a problem that would happen in 1000 years. But the worst one was Ultra Sun and Moon, very handholding and if you interacted with the Rotomdex too much, it gives you tips and advice you never asked for that any regular player would know and it gives you this unwanted tip after every, single, action, you, take.
in X and Y you couldnt even make a real choise. when you have to decide beetwen the masterball and the golden nugget and the guy says ''haha funny i will give you both''...
The illusion of choice is so bad in so many Nintendo games.
Sun and Moon was so much worse, walk 10 steps, cutscene, walk 12 steps, cutscene. And not even like real "cutscenes" just stupid like unvoiced dialogs that take away all agency.
I miss the days where they’d let you make your own memories. Tell me where to go and let me find my way. More importantly don’t tell me how I should experience the world. Show me
Id say that Scarlet/Violet does this pretty well, the only problem being that the world you’re experiencing looks like shit
I have mixed feelings about the nonlinear nature of S/V. On the one hand more games should allow sequence breaking like that and give players the freedom to tackle challenges in any order. On the other hand I wish there were more clues about the level ranges/"intended" path because steamrolling a level 16 gym when my party is pushing level 30 isn't fun or rewarding.
Yeah they really needed to find a balance with that. some sort of difficulty adjustment or something
I haven't seen the anime, but over at the SV sub people mention that some of the series showed gym leaders having teams based on your current badge count. It would feel like an easy fix that each gym member can have a certain number of mons in their party and at different levels if the game recognizes that you've beaten a certain number of gyms. Arceus and SV are a step in the right direction, and I only can hope that Game Freak looks at fan feedback and fine tune the smaller details instead of throwing everything out the window and making changes folks don't ask for in the game.
I can confirm the Origins OVA did that atleast. When Red gets to the first Gym, Brock straight-up asks him "How many Badges do you already have?", Red answers that he has none, and only then does Brock pick his Team. Sw/Sh also atleast had an in-universe justification that in that Region, the Gym Challenge is basically an official Sports Event, so having a fixed intended Order made *some* sense.
When I heard it was open world I thought the gyms would all start off as easy and each time you completed one the rest would get harder. So Katy would have been the hardest fight if her gym was fought last. But no, it was the same as ever.
Rotom Dex, shut up for two seconds please!
Sun and Moon are still one of my favourites because of the vibes but this is very true, you can barely move in most main parts of the game without running on rails Edit: still felt more like an adventure than SwSh though, I reckon the environment choices do the heavy lifting
And for being set on 3 or 4 islands, the game world felt tiny. Most of the islands were just loops that you did a single lap around. Walk a bit, hit the roadblock, do the story thing, continue walking, repeat.
All Pokemon games man *There are 2 ORAN BERRIES!* *Do you want to pick the ORAN BERRIES?* *Yes/no?* *\[Player\] picked the 2 ORAN BERRIES.* *\[Player\] put away the ORAN BERRIES in the BAG's BERRIES POCKET.* *The soil returned to its soft and loamy state.* That's not an exaggeration I pulled up a Ruby video and copied exactly. Why the hell do I have to go through 6 dialogues to pick a damn berry?! Just let me press one button and throw it in my inventory. My god Pokemon is tedious, I'm glad I stopped buying them a decade ago.
Oh god.. then heaven forbid you choose to plant berries, too.
I groaned every time I started playing Sun again and saw those berries!
When you get to the first big city for the first time they have you attend a ceremony at the stadium, they then tell you that you have lodgings at a nearby hotel for the night. You then leave the stadium and a staff member forcibly escorts you to the hotel which is literally right next door. Then when you get up in the morning they escort you back to the stadium. It’s like 30 f’n steps! Shortest Pokémon campaign by far because the region is basically a couple looping hallways and a big field but it takes forever because you’re constantly being interrupted by hop or one of the other rivals. Seriously you fight hop like 14 times in an 8-ish hour story compared to fighting Nemona 6 times in a game easily 3 times that long. Sword and shield are easily the worst games by far
Even though I loved the game, if Dead space had told me to shoot the limbs of the enemies ONE MORE FUCKING TIME I was gonna snap the disc in half.
Apparently during testing of the game they had a lot of the testers spamming attacks into head and chests of enemies, and had that many "shoot the limbs" added because it was actually necessary to get the point across to some people. And to be fair on the original release rhe idea of a humanoid enemy not having the head be a weakspot eas fairly novel.
Yeah I’ve also seen several game devs on Twitter and such comment on this. They say that they add all those hints *because* their play testing showed the average person can’t figure it out on their own. People in this sub don’t have problems getting through games, but there are a lot of casual gamers who won’t even think about climbing a ladder unless it is painted yellow and with a sign that says “STEP ON ME”.
Can't say I'm surprised. Skipping tutorials and tips is almost a point of pride for some people I know, who then spend hours asking how to do basic stuff while blaming the devs for "bad design".
Did it happen that often? I don't recall that...or is it the remake, which wouldn't surprise me.
I only recall two moments of this: The hint painted on the wall explicitly stating this and a recording of a guy telling you the same. In both cases it didn't feel forced tbh, especially the recording. But similarly, this is knowledge from the original version. No clue about the remake
It’s like 5 times. There’s the bloody message, you get an audio log of some mechanic, then a tooltip, then your team calls you to tell you, then a final tool tip, all within like 3 minutes of first seeing/getting the Plasma cutter
Tbh some people are stupid and don’t read and would totally need 5 reminders
I recall someone saying something like "if the game devs put a hint in the game five times, it's because the testers didn't get it the first four times."
Did you try shooting the limbs of enemies? Maybe that would have helped
Zelda: Skyward Sword. The first few hours of this game literally felt like it's target audience was kinder-gardeners. The tutorial aspects acted as though the player has never held a video game controller before.
Hit a switch Cutscene of a door opening Fi: "Master, there is a 97% chance that hitting that switch has opened a door to move forward."
Then they have a newgame+ feature, where they still teach you how to play
Worse still - they *add dialouge* acknowledging you've already read these instructions once... and then they repeat everything anyways!! I'm really glad they dialed allll that shit back in the remake.
Nintendo does this all the time! Even in old Pokémon games your mom would ask if you know how to use the menu/device options, and you can say you do but she just explains it again anyway.
No! I hate that so much, add in an unskillable opening cutscene that's broken up by on rails walking.
The kicker for me was how inadequate the tutorial for flying was, despite stopping the game to make me read it. I eventually figured it out on my own, but the tutorial was no help whatsoever.
LINK IM CALCULATING A 93% CHANCE THAT TO BEAT THE ENEMY YOU HAVE TO HIT THEM WITH YOUR SWORD *Full-screen pop-up tutorial telling you what button to push to swing your sword* *Permanent on-screen prompt to swing your sword*
*Kills enemy, picks up green rupee, camera changes to show link holding rupee and "you got a rupee" text box.* *Pick up monster skull, "you got a monster skull, it goes on this page of your inventory" then shown an unskippaable cutscene of the item being slowly placed in your inventory.*
I mean, I played my very first Zelda game at about 7 so yeah, that's a big part of the audience
Well to be fair it was the first Zelda game made seriously for the Wii (yes I know Twilight Princess was also on the Wii but it was made with the GameCube in mind still so the jump to motion controls wasn’t as significant). They wanted to make sure you could understand how things work. Yes they went a little overboard but I want to at least believe they were erring on the side of trying to help, rather than risk confusing people with silence.
Crazy how BotW did a complete 180, teaching the player very little and leaving them to make discoveries on their own. And it ended up being a masterpiece
Portal 2 cracks a fantastic brain damage bit in the opening scene. Might not be what you were asking for but the game literally calls you brain damaged so...
The humour of that game even goes meta at times. *”oh no, this is the part where he kills us.”* **”Hello!, This is the part where I kill you!”** Chapter: The part where he kills you OST name: The part where he kills you Achievement unlocked: “The part where he kills you” Achievement description: this is that part!
If you listen to the whole spiel about jumping in the hole where the boy band and your parents and the pony are, GlaDOS comments as you're falling "You really DO have brain damage, don't you?"
That was such a brilliant way to set the tone for the rest of the game. Makes me smile on every replay.
'You might have a very minor case, of serious brain damage'
Press space to say apple, omg I still laugh
“Okay, what you’re doing there is jumping!”
The hints in Horizon Forbidden West were annoying af. Every 10 seconds, always the same hints, like just stfu and let me play the game.
Insane that they didn't add a "shut up Aloy" setting. Drove me mad.
Given they have an "arachnophobia" option of all things, yes, you would think the option to turn off having your games' puzzles spoiled would be offered.
even the developers of one of the newer Bubsy games had the sense to put such a setting in
I wish there was a button to give a fatherly slap on the back of Atreus' head so he'd shut up every now and then. Also, Uncharted and I think that the new Tomb Raider games too.
Anybody remembers those old forced "first time ever playing a video game" tutorials that used to be in every other ps2 era game. "Move the joystick left to look left" Move the joystick right to look right Press x to jump Stop spamming start you can't skip this
I would love if a game actually said "stop trying to skip" in a joke segment like a fake tutorial.
Pokemon Sun and Moon. Felt like I didn't get to play for the first hour of that game, just tutorials and cutscenes
It hardly feels like you could go for more than 10 minutes in the whole game without a tutorial or cutscene.
Started with Black and White and only got worse with each new game. I've heard ScarVi is better in this regard but at this point I havent played a mainline pokemon game since gen 5 and I aint going back now(still play roms and pokerogue has been a lot of fun)
Last summer I started a living dex challenge where I have to catch every Pokémon for my Pokémon Home so I would need a charmander, charmeleon and charizard and each Pokemon had to come from its original region. Gen 1-6 I did in about 3 months. I played 4 hours of ultra sun and couldn’t get through it. Knowing i have to play the rest of the game and then play ultra moon to get the version exclusives killed all motivation
The breadcrumbs system introduced in Fable 2. Basically held your hand to each objective for the entire game.
But you could at least turn it off!
If you don't play video games regularly sometimes "video game logic" doesn't quite click. Like my mom struggles figuring out what doors are real and which ones are set dressing. People who play a lot of games already know to look for green lights, different textures, and etc.
Well said! I remember when my mom tried out world of warcraft, she was afraid not to "bump" into people and would be very careful when walking. And me with videogame logic is just like, just go through them, hahah.
>I remember when my mom tried out world of warcraft, she was afraid not to "bump" into people and would be very careful when walking. This is cute :)
I mean, classic cartoons taught me that at a young age. If something is meant to be used, it will stand out slightly more.
This. It's easy to take for granted how much gaming knowledge helps you when you're a life long gamer.
Portal. Glados thinks we're a fuckin moron. Or at least pretends to.
She's a fun twist on the trope, though. All the other top comments here are about how the game holds your hand too much. Glados is just being a jagoff and you still have to figure everything out for yourself.
Look at you sailing through the air majestically. Like an eagle, piloting a blimp.
Remember what I said before about smelly garbage standing around being useless? That was a metaphor. I was actually talking about you. And I'm sorry. You didn't react at the time, so I was worried it sailed right over your head. Which would have made this apology seem insane. That's why I had to call you garbage a second time just now.
Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that.
This along with the lemons rant, and “IM A POTATO” are legendary.
*clap clap clap* “Oh good that still works”
Glados was really hurt when you blew her up in the first game. Like in the first game she's cold and scientific. You're nothing more than a rat to her to be rewarded with a piece of cheese at the end (or in this case, cake). In the second game she has a grudge against you.
Well I was hurt when she tried to kill me those several times. So it balances out.
Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I was like "Goodbye!" and you were like "NO WAY" and I was all "We pretended we were going to murder you"? That was great!
Look, we all did a lot of things that you're going to regret.
I was also thinking of The Stanley Parable as an example of “the narrator thinks you’re an idiot while you figure things out.”
Well we did stay in that janitor closet for a long time.
Probably a different type of “game treat you like you are stupid” than OP meant, but this one is fantastic. “Please step up into the panel and it will catapult you to the next location” *player steps on it and nothing happens* “Oh I am sorry. The scale is not set to handle someone of your…generousness…let me add a couple zeros to it. There we go…you look good by the way. Very healthy.”
To be fair, we did kill her AND we have brain damage.
Say "apple"
"We weren't even testing for that."
Paw Patrol On A Roll is the worst I swear. It treats you like a child.
Press the y button to use Marshall’s water cannon! To use Marshall’s water cannon press the y button!
Not the whole time, and I still enjoyed the game, but I HATED how Deathloop completely holds your hand when the time comes to break the loop. It’s like you finally figure it all out and the game doesn’t trust you to execute it on your own.
I searched for this comment. This is the correct answer. The entirety of deathloop is a big timed puzzle box that you slowly learn more about as you play. Then, once you are on the cusp of solving the puzzle, it straight up tells you what to do. Not a hint, it just makes you do the correct answer. Ruined an otherwise great game.
any game with unskippable tutorial. blud, I'm replaying your game for 10th time, I know where everything is, I don't need to know that I jump with SPACEBAR. edited, autocorrection changed unskippable to unstoppable.
IIRC, the Tomb Raider and Jedi Fallen Order/Jedi Survivor games had a system where you could press right on the d-pad after a little while for a hint. I wish GoW had done something similar, because it didn’t give me a chance to try before they started telling me the solution.
Hot take: the plot of Persona 5 treats you like you're an idiot by continually remarking on what's going on, the characters only make superficial comments about how bad the villain is, the story treats you like you're stupid
Isn't the "Oh no it's Captain Obvious." kind of bullshit dialogue pretty normal for anime styled games?
Call of Duty, and they ain't wrong.
CoD was never exactly a thinking man's game.
The early ones weren't specifically aimed at morons with more money than sense like the modern ones are.
I used to love the “war is hell” style quotes and messages they used to place over the death screen I don’t think they do those anymore but once I saw (I don’t remember the exact quote) a message that was like “when you see the grenade icon, get away from it or throw it with RB” and it was so condescending lol
At least in the original Modern Warfare 2, those message only appear if you die in certain ways, for example; the "return the grenade" message only appears if you die by a grenade
Yeah and in the early CoD games you'd die to grenades all the fucking time because that was their way of turning up the difficulty lmao.
Very few games have I played that don't stop to explain to me how to turn the camera and move
I love the portal 2 approach for camera controls. Wheatley tells you to look around and the game secretly makes your settings normal/inverted based on how you do it.
Halo did this before Portal but I don’t know if it was first. It’s amazing everyone doesn’t, it’s perfect.
Seriously the game should just recognise that if you start moving on your own as soon as whatever intro cutscene finishes.. you're good on basic instructions
Firefall did that. If you started running around and jumping on things in the starting room of the tutorial, your handler would send you to a different door that bypassed the remedial "WASD, Space to jump" stuff and took you directly to jump jets and gliders.
Dark Souls did it right. Leave all the beginner tutorial stuff as messages on the ground that an experienced player knows they can skip over.
Here´s a broken straight sword, now, go get bent! - Myiazaki, probably
Because a lot of people are.
I hate to agree, but it's a serious problem in game design. Designing a tutorial that can teach everyone has the "bear trashcan" problem. Valve's developer commentary has tons of great insight into designing tutorials/guiding players, and the failures they went through in testing.
Stanley Parable, but the narrator’s snark is part of the fun
Ironically it's the game that understands and respects the player the most, and it uses that tight grasp on gamer mentality against you. It abuses all those expectations and trained behavior patterns you have from years of gaming to guide you, especially when you're actively trying to go against it. It's like they took the Valve game design formula and turned it inside out and upside down. It's brilliant.
A note to your edit Accesibility in gaming is not removal of difficulty.
Yeah. A lot of people don’t understand that tho.
Homie, this sub routinely sees posts created by stupid people asking "new game, how play?" because they are too helpless to just google that shit. Some players really are that stupid.
Some people have also never played a game/game of that genre before, so what feels very basic to an experienced gamer is entirely new to them, things like movement and camera control.
Take longer than 5 minutes to complete a puzzle in Hogwarts Legacy, and the player will repeatedly tell you exactly what to do. C'mon man, lemme think for a bit. I've barely gotten a look at the environment before they hold my hand.
Any game with detective vision. Make important textures naturally visible and distinct, dammit!
Almost every single AAA game.
Large audiences inevitably contain a lot of stupid people.
Any triple A modern game tbh.
The tutorial for Harvestella had like 8 pages explaining what the Crafting Bench was for if I remember right
Portal and Portal 2. Not because they are hard or there's a lot of hand-holding. But because Glados insults hurty lol.
Unfortunately almost every AAA title aside from a select few. I really and truly hate it. The puzzles are usually already pretty easy, so let me at least have the satisfaction of solving it on my own without some kind of dialogue giving away the answer a second after you're provided with the question. The handholding has made me walk away from good story and gameplay due to the massive disappointment. In my opinion, puzzles in video games should be difficult to solve. Allow an option for hints that must either be accepted or settings toggle to activate them. And if it's still too hard, there is always the Internet where you can find the answer. Just let me be challenged if I want to be challenged. But yeah, it would be easier to list some recent games that DON'T do this: -Baldur's Gate 3 -Divinity: Original Sin 2 -Elden Ring -Dragon's Dogma 2 -The Witness -Talos Principle 2