Common stuff in video games you never (or rarely) do

The Game Room
1

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I built a cobblestone generator in Minecraft.

I’ve known about cobblestone generators for a long time, of course, but never saw the point of making one. Why on earth would anyone build a contraption to generate rocks??? Ninety percent of Minecraft is made of rocks! Most of the time, thanks to digging mine shafts and tunnels, I have way more cobblestone than I know what to do with – and if there’s ever a situation where you need more (such as the early game) all you need to do is dig a great big hole in the ground somewhere.

But in my newest world, for some strange reason, I have a chronic cobblestone shortage. Maybe because my spawn was in flat plains and desert, which doesn’t easily lend itself to digging structures underground. Maybe because the caves I’ve explored were a crazy set of intersecting ravines which I had to bridge across (using cobblestone, natch.) Maybe because the newest patch added bunches of other rock types which are mostly useless. Maybe it’s because I haven’t bothered to build an actual branch mine yet.

At first I supplemented my cobblestone collection by digging a random tunnel in a nearby hillside, but after digging for about half a kilometer, it got kinda silly. So finally, I broke down and constructed an actual cobblestone generator using water & lava. I’m actually feeling a bit ashamed, considering my prior anti-generator stance. But hey, try anything once.

TL;DR version: What common activities, quests & other stuff have you never (or rarely) done in video games you’ve played forever?

2

Crafting in general. A lot of times it’s just not clear what the benefits are relative to store bought or found items. Feels like a lot of crafting options and ingredient lists just get absurdly large for no reason, without making the overall game more fun. It’s a mini-game I just can’t get into.

3

I will always avoid an escort mission if given the chance.

Use a secondary weapon in an FPS that is not a missile launcher of some type.

Finish open world GTA style games - I just get bored partway through - although I am almost done with Skyrim which is open world.

4

Block. Also Combos.

If it’s a game like Devil May Cry or something like that I generally just keep spamming X or whatever until the things are dead

5

I’ve only ever played one game where this was an issue (Champions Online, but crafting was still fun, and a good income generator, then they altered the crafting system and made it worse). Quite the opposite, generally, in fact. I can craft shit that’s significantly better than even the best rewards in most games. By the time I retired my last Skyrim character, the only reason she was using ANY non-crafted gear was because I couldn’t make a light armour that matched the aesthetics I wanted better than the Nightingale Armor set. (Now I have the Immersive Armors mod, and can make armours to match almost any aesthetic.)

6

I rarely bother with crafting, because the ROI just rarely feels worth it. The time spent learning the crafting system, figuring out which bonuses are worthwhile, etc just aren’t usually how I want to spend my time.

In shooters, I pretty much always use the high accuracy, low ROF weapons. Rifles and pistols are in use 90% of the time, unless it’s a shotgun horde level. The only exception is playing online, where SMGs are hard to ignore.

I also avoid using consumables like the plague. In RPGs and stuff, I almost never use potions or one-use scrolls or wands or anything like that except as a last, last, last resort. I tend to finish levels / games with inventories full of stuff that would have made certain sections so much easier.

7

Achievements. Generally once I finish a game I don’t go back to get all the Achievements.

Leveling up to defeat some ridiculously hard non story character in a RPG. Final Fantasy is particularly bad about doing this in their games. Somebody must enjoy doing it:dubious:

8

Good call. I rarely if ever go out of my way for acheivements (although I do like them as it’s fun to have the game acknowledge when I do something clever or challenging or off the beaten path). I know some folks who aggressively try to 100% all their games, and I find it somewhat baffling.

The weird joke being that my gamerscore is higher than almost all my gaming friends, admittedly because in part some of split time between platforms and I game on Xbox (between my 360, One, and Windows Phone) pretty much exclusively.

9

Optional time challenges.
I will get achievements if it takes minimal effort, but the ones I especially don’t bother with are any of the “beat the game in X hours” or “beat the game saving only X times.” Those methods are the exact opposite of how I play.

Avoiding consumables is common. There is a very narrow “sweet spot” between “there are only 5 MegaPotions so you’ll never use them” vs. “these are so common they make the game easy,” and most games opt for the former.

10

It’s true that it’s a rare crafting system that I find worth bothering with beyond a few simple tricks. Probably this is because there’s a good reason not to design a crafting system so that you can unlock ungodly power not available to people who skip it.

I also generally ignore the part of a tutorial that deals with blocking. I assume it’s true that particularly good players can take advantage of it, but I find that I do better focusing on attacks. I think I found it worthwhile to block in the South Park RPG, but that was the first time in a long time I remember that mattering.

On achievements, I generally mean to go back and pick up a few more, but in the end I don’t. I did one time try to get some achievements in Metro: Last Light that it turns out required that you never ever re-played a level. Fuck that. The only game I ever had all the achievements on was Mass Effect, and those don’t appear now that it’s on an Origin account.

Long ago, I used to replay battles until absolutely no innocents or NPC combatants died. I wouldn’t dream of bothering now.

Even now, though, I treat even my low-level consumables as desperate last resorts – healing potions, bits for the crafting system I don’t bother with. Final boss battle? I guess I’ll pull out those +2 sling bullets I’ve been hoarding all this time. The bigger pile of +1 bullets will remain untouched forever. No matter how many times I play Baldur’s Gate, I never trust that more consumables will come by the time they’re needed, or that the arrows of lightning that are never used are just as wasted as if I had just used them as soon as I got them.

Games that give you no place to dump crap do not force me not to hoard. They force me to spend more time hoarding carefully.

I also do not micromanage except where absolutely necessary. I don’t find the effort pays off, when there usually turns out to be a cruder way to handle the encounter. Everybody attacks the same target, and moves on when it’s down. In StarCraft, I build only the most mobile unit available and in massive numbers. In Infinity Engine games I pull, I root and nuke, and I lead enemies across huge fields of Glyphs of Warding and Skull Traps I’ve set off. I camp the party in front of doors and blow spells like they’re going out of style when I open the door.

I feel under no obligation to set up for a known encounter as if I didn’t know what’s coming up. Forced dialogue encounters happen with one fleet-footed hero who will go around the minefield that has already been set up, so the enemies who try to follow the hero in a straight line are led directly through.

11

I rarely go after collectibles. If I should stumble across one, I’ll grab it, but I won’t go out of my way to find them. There’s one game that I did get all the collectibles – Sleeping Dogs. This is because (a) certain missions rewarded you with showing the locations of the collectibles on the mini-map and (b) grabbing the collectibles actually had a tangible benefit.

12

Crafting systems are usually bad. They tend to either fall under the Minecraft “you need a wiki to figure this shit out” type of thing, where it’s just arbitrarily slamming ingredients together to get something.

The other extreme is Elder Scrolls style where you’re basically just grinding materials from your shopping list to stack buffs.

Crafting systems could be better if the game is built around it. After all, Kerbal Space Program is effectively a game built around its crafting system, you combine parts in a meaningful way that interacts with the environment in a detailed manner. You could easily use some form of that, or even something more complex with Constructive Solid Geometry or whatever to make cool swords in your RPG, but it’s take a lot of work and effort to get right and make it intuitive enough to not need a degree in YourGameWiki to use it.

13

The game Anachronox had a collectible item called a T.A.C.O. It was shaped like a taco, but the acronym stood for Totally Arbitrary Collectible Object. I’ve been using the term ever since, but I’ve never known anyone else to do so.

14

Read anything.

15

I read quests, dialogue, and item/ability descriptions, but you cannot pay me enough to read one of those fucking books in Skyrim or the bajillion notes in Pillars of Eternity.

16

Any game that has a barter system and a haggling skill that you can put points in I just don’t bother with it. Bartering in games is pointless, you get the best gear from missions and you often wind up richer than Jesus H. Super-Trump anyways.

17

Any “evil” route in a game with moral choices. I’m a hero, dammit.

18

Ship/Tank/Boat design in 4Xs. Like Galactic Civilizations, which had a whole editor to build cool-looking starships, then add functional components to them to turn them into game units.

I used it a couple times to make a smaller Constructor ship that looked like a Lambda shuttle, then I made a TIE Fighter and then, fuck it, this takes a whole lot of time for a ship that’ll be replaced in 20 minutes, I’ll just use the default ships of my race. I’ve also made ships that were just heaps of functional components glued together to form a sort of shapeless ball - the game doesn’t care if they look pretty or not, it only cares about what modules are present.

Use narrow spells/potions/weapons in RPGs. I know that I could take marginally less damage from this fight if I took the time to root through my stuff for a fire resistance potion, or if my wizard prepared the “fire don’t burn” spell or whatever ; and thus I’d consume fewer healing resources… but eh. I’d rather just rub my face on the fire damage and not care. I can buy more healing potions/rest up later while my cleric does his thing.

Same goes for having multiple spell/weapon setups to go after specific monster immunities : I could do that, or I could just hit the bad guys a couple times more with a regular weapon and be just fine (if less efficient).
The only exception to that rule was when I was farming the sewer blobs for titanite in Dark Souls, at which point I went and removed all my spells for all Pyromancies in order to clear the sewers in 5 seconds flat. But then I learned about slug farming instead and did that. With my usual setup :).

19

Fight uber-hard bosses.

Most games, like Final Fantasies, include crazy hard bosses for people who have leveled their party up to 100+ or so.

I just have no interest in challenging my group to that extant. Some bosses let you get ahead on them, then double or triple their power when weak and can wipe you out in one attack. One of the bosses in FFXII took several hours of attacking even with a super strong party.

Lots of games have them, though. I avoid them and stick to the main bosses and any fun ones that aren’t super hard.

20

I’m another consumable-hoarder. Yes, I could use that thingy right now, but what if I’ll need it even more later? And then when that later comes, well maybe there’ll be another later after that. I’m so bad about it I have a hard time even using spell slots.

Contrary to some folks who said they ignore achievements, I always go for them. But on the other hand, I generally ignore competitive leaderboards. In fact, I’m usually not interested in competition against other humans at all, including any sort of PVP.

Chaos, the end boss in the original Final Fantasy, was something like this. One of the spells on his standard spell rotation was Cur4, which restored his HP to max. So unless you could completely defeat him before he got to that (which would require extremely high level), your best bet was to spend the fight doing nothing but buffing your party and healing to stay near max HP, waiting until he cast his (useless, since he was uninjured) Cur4 spell, and then unloading the buffed can of whoop-ass.