Because obviously save/reload on a speech challenge rather than simply living with the results will permanently damage my long term ability to press a button on a controller.
Turns out it’s possible to put plot in games. Freaky, I know.
Sometimes, cheating adds to the challenge, as people have been explaining throughout the thread.
I dunno, you tell me how 20+ hours of level grinding is a challenge. I see it as the developers saying ‘Oh hey, we’ve set out 15 hours of plot and characterization. Let’s put in another 30 hours of level grinding. Hmmm, well, we can just recolour this sprite 3 times and make each colour a harder enemy, and then we can initiate a random battle every three steps!’
Or, how kushiel got bitter when she got to the end of disc 3 of Final Fantasy VIII only to realize she wasn’t leveled up enough to defeat the bosses but she couldn’t leave the area to level grind and so had to start a new game file.
Is playing make-believe challenging? Not really. But it is fun.
Consider a game like Flower. Your goal is to collect petals. It’s not hard, there’s no time limit, and no way to lose. There’s no real challenge to it, but it’s still a satisfying and interesting experience.
If the only thing that makes games fun is the challenge, why is *Flower *fun?
I think one of the things that has been holding back the evolution of games as an art form is the idea that they must *always *be structured so that they require significant effort to beat. It’s like dismissing ballet as viable form of entertainment because the dancers aren’t competing for a prize.
You know, I strongly suspect that the people getting upset about people “cheating” in single-player games don’t actually play “modern” PC games, because it’s one of those things that if you were a regular game-player you’d either A) agree with the idea of modding/meta-gaming or B) Choose not to mod/meta-game as a personal choice, but not care if other people do so with their single-player games.
It’s probable. I mean, depending on the game, many of the posts above make sense. Take Tetris. The challenge is the entire point of playing Tetris; any sort of cheating (giving yourself an incredibly high score or something) completely defeats the purpose of the game. (Even then, one might ‘cheat’ to access the higher levels of the game faster, because they’re good enough at it that the first, say, 10 levels of speed are just boring.)
Modern games tend to be more complex than that, though. Many games these days are rich in detail and story. Cheating provides a way to bypass those aspects of the game you’re bad at in order to enjoy the parts of the game you want to see. Why should I be stymied in a first-person shooter game just because it threw one of those 15-tile slider puzzles at me, which I hate and don’t like to do?
Now, I’m not condoning cheating as standard practice, and I think people who cheat to win and then boast about winning are incredibly immature. But there are situations in which cheating is not automatically morally bankrupt.
I dunno…plot, atmosphere, humor, blowing shit up, puzzle solving(provided the puzzles aren’t running on moon logic).
Maybe I don’t feel like replaying the same ****ing race sequence in GTA for the 30th time just to proceed with the game because the designers were dicks and decided to make this rather difficult race MANDATORY for no good reason other then the make the game longer.
Or in C&C where the AI never seems to follow the same rules you have to, and they have the added advantage of being able to do 20 things at once while you can only do one. And they can see the whole map.
Some challenge is needed or the game gets boring. Too much challenge and the game becomes frustrating and most people don’t play games to be annoyed. They’ll just give up because they don’t feel it’s worth it anymore.
If the developers play fair, I’ll usually play fair. If they want to be cheating assholes, turnabout is fair play.
I do sort of the same thing, but for a different reason. I don’t want the game to be like real life, I want the game to be a good narrative. And if, in the narrative I have in my head, Soldier A is the star, then there are certain narrative conventions that need to be obeyed. One of those conventions is, “The main character doesn’t get killed in Act 1.” So if my star character steps on a land mine during mission 4 and gets his legs blown off - I reload. Because I want to craft an interesting story, not a realistic story.
Of course, there are times when a good death makes a better story than surviving a fight. If my star character dies, but after single handedly killing twenty enemies, I’ll keep that result, because that’s an interesting ending to the character. If he dies because there was a sniper on the other side of the map that I had no way of knowing about, I’ll reload. Because that’s a pointless and stupid way for the character to die.
I don’t see the appeal in about 95% of the multiplayer games out there. Especially in FPS. Deathmatch has got to be the most tedious thing ever devised for a computer that did not involve Will Wright. There are a few exceptions, mostly involving co-op or story-based play, but mostly, multiplayer options are a gigantic waste of time as far as I’m concerned.
I pretty much only play PC-based first-person shooters, and often use God mode to Rambo through games. I don’t always want to stop and strategize and sneak up on enemies and change weapons for different situations. That’s just not fun to me. I just want to run through and kill everything in my path. Normally, in subsequent plays, I’ll play the games as they were meant to be played, only using God mode to get through difficult parts.
Hence the Allure of The Drink!
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that some times it’s fun just to try to figure cheats out. I often get more enjoyment fiddling with Cheat Engine trying to figure out how to make my character jump higher or trying to figure out why a seemingly bizarre game mechanic works the way it does then i do from actually playing the game. Or spending hours looking through save files with hex editors trying to figure out what all the values represent. And what would happen if i replaced them with numbers outside of their normal scope.
How about that; I just ran into a perfect example of why someone would cheat when playing on their own.
I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. because in my foolishness I figured a few years were enough time to get all the bugs worked out. It wasn’t. And the game suffers from a particularly strange case of split personality: the combat is structured like the game should be a stealth based sneaker (your weapons are wildly inaccurate and you die in half a second if you get attacked; and this is playing on the medium difficulty) but many other aspects of the game design (AI that knows from half a kilometer away that you’re there once you draw a gun and aim at them, locked down environments that you can’t sneak through). I suspect that the game was going to be stealth based until about half way through when they shifted tone.
The reason that I stuck with it is that if it had been titled “Exploring Run Down Soviet Architecture” and that’s all there was to it then it would have been brilliant. The environments are some of the greatest I’ve ever encountered. And considering that it’s mainly gray and brown industrial facilities that’s an astounding accomplishment. It may be gray and brown but nothing looks monochrome (at least not unless your brain is being fried by the hole in reality Chernobyl left behind). It maybe industrial facility #435 but they look like they have a purpose and are in appropriate states of decay.
Still I’m getting fed up with having to crawl through combats. Like I said, combat is brutal and fast and you’re just as likely to die as the enemy which makes engaging in it frustrating. I just want to get to the sarcophagus and check out what the nuclear plant is like. I finally complete the mission that opens up the route to get to through and as I enter the zone to start the game changes so that I’m escorting a team through sniper hell. Fine. At this point I’m worn out and I just want to get into the next section and take a look around. I do that and once you’re at the plant it starts a sequence where you’re forced to go to the end game. Oh, and if you didn’t ditch the guys you were escorting to explore the previous map section you can’t through to the proper ending (which goes on for a while past the false ending including letting the player continue to explore the environment). Didn’t keep your save from back there? Oh well, you get to start over.
Screw that, I say. I got to poke around the top of reactor #4; that was the only thing I was playing for. I’m not going through the irritation again just to complete the game. So I thought I’d just cheat and walk to the end. Nope. No can do. There are no cheats for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so I can’t just noclip through the last door and end it.
I want to explore radioactive ruins that I’ll never get to check out in real life and the game won’t let me. That’s what cheating is for.
You may be on to something there. I know when my friends drop by and we put on a game, they often don’t want a competition - they want to put on something free-form like GTA and run around doing random stuff just to see what happens. And to make things go boom.
Sometimes it isn’t about winning. Not everything on a planet is a competition. Do you win or lose when you watch a movie? (Well, maybe you lose if the movie is Transformers 2, but I digress).
I played Far Cry 2 for weeks when I first got it, and I steadily made may way through the story, but after a while, the gleam of lost its luster a little and I lost track of playing it. But lately, I decided I was interested in the story, so I’ve been re-playing it on Easy mode – not exactly cheating, but not a huge challenge … because I want to know where the story goes without investing 3 months of my life.
I’m also doing the same thing with Medal of Honor: Airborne at the moment. It is fun, even if I can’t brag to the uber-nerds online about how great I am at a video game.
I was called out of town on biz…
I see some peeps have agreed with me and made posts I fully agree with.
As I’ve said before, it’s your life. Yes, it bugs me but do what you will.
I do, however, like to participate in ‘strategy’ boards…where people discuss strategy/the game. However, most posts are irritating to me because IT IS TERRIBLE STRATEGY.
Why is it terrible?
-
They play on too easy a level. You will go back and forth a bit until you realize that this must be the case and so you ask ‘what difficulty level do you play on?’ Invariably it is ‘baby cake walk mode’. Well, hell dude…ANY strategy will work on baby cakewalk mode! Play at a real, manly level next time!
-
It is terrible strategy because they cheat. For example, in Civ someone will recommend (just making this up) - build 2 armies right off the bat and attack the player next door! I then ask…“What do you do if the 2 armies don’t take the city?” (actually this is the most probable outcome)…silence…This is because THEIR answer is that their armies ALWAYS take the city. Well…DUH!..ANY strategy will work if you don’t allow it to fail!
So…go ahead and cheat. However, do it in private. Do NOT pretend you have actually played the game. Also, for the love of Pete, do not advocate to others reloading after failed speech challenges in FO3. 
Okay, this? This makes a lot more sense and I heartily empathize. I have no desire to defend people who act like cheating to win a game means you’ve accomplished something.
I still think it’s anyone’s business what difficulty level what people play at. Of course, people play games at higher difficulty levels for boasting rights, but I don’t see any need to tell people who play at easier level not to post their experience (I don’t mean you are not suggesting that explicitly), but for people who post strategies, it could be a good idea for them to state their difficulty levels.
I still think it’s anyone’s business what difficulty level what people play at. Of course, people play games at higher difficulty levels for boasting rights, but I don’t see any need to tell people who play at easier level not to post their experience (I don’t mean you are not suggesting that explicitly), but for people who post strategies, it could be a good idea for them to state their difficulty levels.
As for speech challenges in Fallout 3, this is how I see it. The designers made Charisma a dump stat. Some people doesn’t want to be bothered with it, and hence make the choice to say “this is a faulty design, screw it, I am going to just save and reload”. For me I just accept my lot and give a 6 for Charisma and invest in Speech.
Sorry, double post
I suggest you keep in mind that some of us are much less skilled than you, would still like to win eventually, and have little to no chance of ever winning above carebear level without cheating.
I also suggest you remember that not everyone plays the same way. Games are supposed to be fun, not work; some of us play to have fun and enjoy the story. What’s it to you that we don’t play your way, Mr. Albertson?