Ugh. Me to. One thing I hated about about Far Cry 4 was having to choose between the two leaders on the island, both of which have negative repercussions.
Amita doesn’t care about the history, or ruining the temple. She wants to free the female enslavement while securing its treasures to build up the society. However she’s also planning on building a drug empire with child labor. Meanwhile Sabal wants to preserve the old traditions and ways to re-unite the people. But in so doing he turns the society into an oppressive religious state. Killing anyone who disagrees with his vision.
Two words: Fuck That.
I found the latest Wolfenstein at a good discount, so I bought it. The boss levels (especially the last one) for that game were so ridiculously hard for me that I just switched the game to the easiest level, just to finish it off. I never even went back to collect any trophies, etc. which is something I usually enjoy doing. It just isn’t fun to me to lose over and over and over and never even feel like you came close to beating the boss level. I will never play that game again. I’m way too old to deal with that type of frustration.
I actually liked the grinding. In those JRPG games it used to be that you’d walk into a new area, and it was tricky. So I would grind until it became trivial before moving on. Maybe I’m the only one that found that overcoming challenging random combats was fun, running around trying to advance the plot was fun, but having the latter interrupted by the former was obnoxious. At some point, it was widely decided that letting players enjoy this kind of play style was bad design, so they started having enemies scale as you became more powerful. So, the rewards of being able to seek out a path of least resistance, build your party, and move on with confidence were excised out of every game.
So, I don’t grind as much, because games now punish it. But what I will not do is go out of my way to make a minimal-power run through of a game to make the boss encounters that much weaker. Screw that.
That’s basically what I was getting at- I always loved the plot stuff, but I’ve always hated the mindless grind to level up enough to beat the boss/navigate the dungeon to the boss. The Diablo games have always been very guilty of this; it’s easy to know where you need to go to advance the plot, but more often than not, you have to roam around tearing up mooks in order to either level up enough, or worse, so you can find one stupid plot item to open the gate or whatever.
I understand the idea of having to find the Key of Whatever, but making you mindlessly explore the dungeon to find it is irritating. Make it a sub-quest of it’s own or something with actual plot points and what- not, instead of just a “Look everywhere and find a needle in a haystack” type thing.
I think Johnny Angel is talking about games where it does no good to level up to beat the boss, because the boss will always have X times as many hit points as you and will always do y times the damage you can, so you’re stuck doing the same battle over and over and over until the “dice rolls” finally fall your way.