I’d say the legitimate sense of accomplishment is down at the homeless shelter, where I could be volunteering to feed the hungry instead of sitting on my ass in front of a screen playing pretend.
Computer games (and tabletop roleplaying games, too, another subject where I’ve had this same conversation) are great entertainment, great for passing the time–but they’re crap for accomplishing anything. The challenges are pretend, and so are the victories. If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right; and if you’re not having fun, you’re completely wasting your time.
There are some games that you practically have to play with a FAQ next to you if you want to see everything. Chrono Cross, for example, although that has a New Game+ option. Also Final Fantasy XII with the Zodiac Spear that you can only get if you didn’t open four arbitrary chests you encountered earlier. It’s especially annoying in long RPGs because I don’t want to play for 30 hours just to find that I screwed myself out of some item that I might really want.
I’ve found myself save scumming the Fallout 3 speech challenges as well. Now that I think about it, Bethesda probably added the speechcraft and lockpicking minigames in Oblivion so that those actions would be more than just a cycle of saving before you try to pick a lock or raise someone’s disposition and reloading if you fail.
I’m not sure where all the apparent vitriol is coming from. Come on, we’re on an internet forum dedicated to gaming. I’m not sure why you seem to think that any sort of discussion of that nature is somehow beneath your standards. I’m not going to go around posting on the various LoTR threads in Cafe Society saying that everyone there interested in a spirited debate on something like the nature of the Maiar is pathetic and should either go somewhere else or spend the energy reading a “real” work of fiction instead.
I agree you, but that really depends if the user is truly going to get a more enjoyable long-term experience out of it. I think in many cases, a user attempting to modify or customize their product right off the bat (whether a videogame or a fancy BMW) winds up with a less enjoyable experience, because they simply just didn’t know any better.
IMHO, I think that a good percentage of the people that cheat or put the game on baby-mode the first time through would probably have a more favorable view of the game in the long-run if they just played it like the developers intended the first time.
And because I like certain videogames a whole lot, I get a little disappointed to see that sort of behavior, because I want others to have as much enjoyment out of them as I did. Why should I care? It’s just human nature I guess.
How do you know they’re not? Getting as much enjoyment as possible out of a game sometimes means having to cheat in order to progress past a certain area.
Games aren’t designed with the intention that the player will have internet access to read a walk-through or the extra money for a players’ guide. If you take the time to explore the world and talk to the NPCs, you can’t beat (or “finish”) games without an extra guide. If you have a guide to tell exactly what to do, when and how, you lose a huge chunk of the experience of the game. You might as well just have the author of the guide come in and play the game for you, and you can watch. If anything, I’m a gamer, and you’re not.
Are you saying you really only play video games for the story?
I’ll grant you some gray area on the definition of a game, but I don’t see how you can consider making the game harder cheating. Cheating specifically means giving yourself an advantage, not just “breaking the rules”.
The players’ guide was only included with the US release. It was a marketing decision, since they didn’t think the game would sell well on it own with American consumers. I’m not really sure how the developers felt about all the puzzles and secrets they took the time to build into the game being given away with it.
Anyway, I agree with most of what you say here. I understand the distinction between being completely stuck at a part of a game, and after trying everything you can think of, looking at a walk-through for that specific part just so you can progress to the next part of the part of the game.
And, I’m not above trying to squeeze a little more entertainment out of a game that I’ve beat many times over by enter a code. But for me personally, I can only use the the levitate code to drop Link head first into a bridge so many times before the novelty wears off.
Tch. Of course not. What I’m saying is that there are legitimate reasons other than challenge, such as story, for wanting to play through a game, and saying “go watch a movie” doesn’t cut it, because there are quite a few unique stories you can only get through games. Games provide depth movies lack and a visual element books lack.
What about games with a built-in map function that isn’t exactly user-friendly? Fallout 3 comes to mind; I’m sure there are people who bought the guide to that game because they couldn’t figure out what the local map was trying to tell them.
In the thread that spawned this one, the OP claimed adding any mod is cheating; some mods are designed to make a game harder.
Disclaimer: I did buy the guide to the Fallout 3 but didn’t use it, or any mods save one that added more music, until after the first time I played through.
Notice I qualified my statement with “a good percentage of people”. Certainly you’re correct that in some cases (whether to poor game design, lack of time to develop appropriate skill needed for completion, or a user that just plain doesn’t care about the intended story and pacing of the game and just wants to smash things with a Mjöllnir-wielding-god-of-destruction), plenty of people that “cheat” might end up having just as much of an entertaining first experience as I did, maybe even more so. I can’t fault that.
But some people just plain don’t know whats best for themselves, and get cheated out of a better experience because they aren’t forced to play it as the developers intended for their first-run.
Obviously you haven’t played Final Fantasy XII and tried to complete the beastiary.
What was it I had to do now to get the obscure rare monster to show up? Stand on my head and whistle Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony backwards when it’s after Midnight but before Noon and make sure I have the Sword Of Doom equipped on one of my party…
You forgot the part about wrapping the power cord around your pinky finger and catching every 5th raindrop in Malaysia in your mouth for EXACTLY 6.73 picoseconds and then giving a pit bull an acorn you’re forced to use in the tutorial but can get around by pressing X, O, Triangle, X, X, R1, L2, L3, selecting “time travel” and then using a T-Rex to impale the tutorial giver on his 3rd most right tooth. (That is to say, the T-Rex has to pull out the tutorial giver’s third most right tooth and then impale him on it, not the T-Rex’s tooth).
My son, even at 16, goes straight for God Mode on single-player games, then plays for an hour and says the game is too boring. Well, duh. It bugs me a bunch when he plays god mode, which just reinforces his laziness.
Once, playing Oblivion, I tried playing with unlimited wealth, so I could buy all the cool stuff the pirates sold. After that, the game lost all its fun for me. Clearly, that’s not for me.
But I do a few small cheats now: in Fallout 3, I force all map locations to be shown at the beginning, get rid of encumbrance limitations, make my canine companion immortal. These just ease up the things that massively irritate me so that I don’t quit playing, without removing the other challenges.
I agree that the experience belongs to the player, but I think many players might give up a game too soon, when all it needs is more (or fewer) cheats.
What do some of you anti-cheaters define as cheating anyways?
Reloading a level when you make a mistake?
Turning on a developer-provided purchased “Extra” (Lego Star Wars I’m looking at you)?
Utilizing a hidden but still developer-provided cheat code (Starcraft, Warcraft, I’m looking at you)?
Exploiting a game-loop to super-level your characters (Final Fantasy VI, I’m looking at you)?
Using a game guide?
And I’ll freely admit to doing all of the above on occasion. Because I personally don’t play video games to feel accomplished. I’m not good enough at them for that. I play them for the fun, the story, or even just to pass the time.
Whoa now, let’s not go too far. Some people see games–and some games are specifically designed–as a gauntlet; a series of difficult and complex challenges that the player is trying to accomplish. Sure it may be virtual, but it’s like…say…completing a Professor’s Cube without memorizing any algorithms. Or being able to run the yard in 45 seconds. Or FINALLY being able to toss the stupid *&#(ing ring on the stupid (#^%ing bottle for the stupid #$)*ing teddy bear. Would you deny those people their sense of accomplishment? Their activities were just as pointless and frivolous.
I agree entirely - for me the story is the most important thing and I make up my own backstory for myself and for enemies, most of the time. I “cheated” like a motherfucker in Sim City (a singleplayer game) when it first came out and it was so much more rewarding for me that way. I had no interest in seeing if I could play by the designers’ rules to see if I could build a functioning city despite the impediments thrown at you. I wanted to build my perfect utopia, and then when I go bored of that, seeing if I could turn the same city in to a perfect dystopia. Then I wanted a totalitarian regime where the wealthy lived in splendor and the poor toiled in slums. And so on, and so on.
Despite the hours I put into that game I don’t think I ever once tried to play a game without “cheating”. I’m so ashamed. :rolleyes:
(well…except for an extra that doesn’t make gameplay easier like, an example given above, adding more music to FO3 or making a game harder, not easier.)
I agree with Left Hand of Dorkness. Chrissakes, I’m 44 years old and I play video games … do I have to further patheticize myself by bragging about how good I am at it?
I cheat for two reasons- either I cheat because something in the game is obviously broken and I cannot progress without cheating or would take a silly penalty for not cheating, or I cheat because I know that I’m capable of beating the game to the designer’s capability and want to see if I can beat it to my own goals without worrying about the more tedious aspects or want to pick apart the game mechanics.
An example for the first condition would be Medieval II: Total War.* My computer is only marginally capable of running this game. Occasionally the game will repeatedly crash 2/3rds of the way through a battle that I’m clearly winning. I cannot beat this battle because the game is crashing. However, autoresolving this battle will result in a spectacular defeat or a Pyrrhic victory for me, which is a silly penalty because I can indeed beat this if given the chance. (I’m typically speaking about siege defenses, wherein I believe the autoresolve doesn’t give enough credit to the defenders.) So I cheat to win that battle because I can indeed beat it, but see no reason to spend days hoping that the machine won’t crash while I try.
The second condition is better shown in Age of Empires II. I can beat this game by playing the developers’ rules. But doing so will involve a lot of tedious micromanaging resource gathering, and I’m more interested in whether I can create an army of exactly 40 men (the largest number that can be selected at once) that can defeat an enemy base without losing a single man. In Medieval II, I might play through trying to keep maximum chivalry, or using all-cavalry armies, or without siege equipment. In Delta Force: Landwarrior, I played through using each character’s stereotypical loadout (sniper rifle for the sniper, silenced weapons for the sneaker, explosives for the demolitions expert) and once without any weapons except my knife and those I took from an enemy’s body. In each case, I learned something about how the game mechanics work and could then apply that to how I played in the vanilla game. And if I had to savespam to do it, who cares? Each time I had to reload, that was a failure in my eyes, and I had to refine my tactics to succeed.
*Yes, I know that playing this game unmodded was my first mistake. Can we move on?
I’ve always cheated in Sim City and The Sims games. They’re more like toys than games anyway, and I doubt that many the anti-cheater folks actually like that kind of game.
In Fallout 3, I cheated by ramping up the rate I regained VATS points. I much preferred the old turn-based system. The FPS style is simply too difficult for me. My character is supposed to be good at combat, it’s silly that the character should be limited by the player’s limitations. The VATS lets the character be as accurate as the game says.
