The first four pretty are easy. That last one, though – I used console commands to turn off clipping.
I don’t rush to outside tutorials for most games as they are usually straightforward with standard methodologies in their set up. Occasionally I will feel more comfortable starting a new game after watching a couple of let’s play YouTube videos, as a starting guide.
But a few months ago I started playing Satisfactory and the initial steps to do the multiple things you need to even get your base ready were so complicated and unintuitive that I had to view some tutorials, read a screed of tips and tricks lists, and even then it was too overwhelming and haven’t gone back to it since. I’m sure I will like it once I get over the hump, but I’ll need a week of dedicated play before then, and I’m not sure I’m motivated enough to get through it.
“I murdered so much, I never actually got into the plotline about murder.”
“Murderception.”
I don’t go out of my way to avoid spoilers because I usually play games several years after they are released and by that time I have forgotten most of the details.
I’m probably weird - I often go to wikis to learn to play, the old equivalent of reading the entire game manual prior to play. Sure, most modern games tend to some degree of tutorial early on, but I find that the creative team and my assumptions of what is key and what is obvious are very different.
Which sometimes leads to you being 2-3 hours into a game only to find your build is so sub-optimal that you’re going to have a hard time finishing. For example, a heavy Energy Weapons build in Fallout 1 or 2 early on is going to suck due to a shortage of energy weapons and cells. Sure, you can do it, and well, once you know where to go… but on that first playthrough? Ouch.
Otherwise, other than researching mechanics and how to’s, and maybe builds that match my playstyle, no, I don’t normally use Mods on first play throughs, and only use console codes or the like for glitches (I’m eyeballing you Bethesda!). I’ll also generally avoid walkthroughs unless I’ve tried and died (or gotten totally lost) the 2-3 times.
As for switching around? It’s complicated. I’m generally playing one game at a time in terms of offline games, but I have other games I play socially weekly, with in-week play to support said social gaming. So for example, right now I play World of Warcraft with group play every Friday night, but substantial weekly play to earn cash, play other characters, etc. We also generally play Towerborne (a friend is on the developing team, so in the beta), Starcraft 2 (for some classic RTS), and even Diablo 3. Generally I will play one “other” game, most recently Cyberpunk 2077, but I’m torn between working through my Steam backlog, a replay of The Outer Worlds, or finally making a commitment to start Baldur’s Gate 3.
First World Problems FTW!
When playing Counter-Strike against bots, I found that bots would never fire through smoke because they couldn’t see the human player (me.) However, I knew when the bots would be coming. So just by crouching at a place and using the M249 SAW machine gun (and firing through smoke while they didn’t fire back but kept running headlong at me), I could rack up as many as 100+ kills while suffering almost no deaths, over the course of multiple rounds.
I do enjoy tower defense, and this looks pretty fun. Thanks for mentioning it.
It’s a lot of fun! This one’s a roguelite though (meaning your trap upgrades are randomly available each wave). It adds to replayability and coop multiplayer is a blast.
Orcs Must Die 1, 2, and 3 are all excellent too and follow a traditional campaign and progression structure if that’s more your jam. They often go on sale for a few dollars. Multiplayer for them are pretty much dead, though, unless you have friends to play with.
Nah I am pretty much exclusively a solo player. Got way too into DDO for like 7 years and swore off multiplayer once I managed to kick that habit.
I’ll take a look at the first three as well.
Yeah, this is the thing. If you’re playing a game where the game play is basically, “It just gets harder until you lose”, like say, Tetris, cheating is kind of silly. It misses the point of the whole game.
But if there’s a story involved? I’ll cheat if I have to, or just want to. It offends me that I arbitrarily can’t see the end of the story just because I failed one “gaming challenge” or some shit. I paid serious money for this game, and I’m not even allowed to know how it ends? Would we just accept that from a book? “Oh, btw, the rest of this book is written in Sanskrit, so go learn that if you want to know how it ends, loser.”
I’m currently playing Kerbal Space Program again, and it’s a good example of how to tailor a base game to your style of play. There are basically three game modes: Building rockets, flying rockets, and mission control. For the first two, you can automate a lot of the game. You can download ship designs from other players, if you have trouble building rockets that don’t blow up, and you can mod the game to have auto pilots, if you have trouble flying the rockets. I’ve never looked into mission control because I like that part, but there’s probably mods for that too. I suck at the flying part, mostly, so I automated that. I have fun with building a rocket to try to carry out my mission designs.
Yeah, the DiMA memory puzzles weren’t that difficult once you got the hang of them-- it was just the tedium of getting pulled out of the world of Far Harbor and being stuck in a whole different, to me very silly thing that I didn’t like that was frustrating to me. Felt like I was suddenly playing Minecraft or something (never played Minecraft, but I watched my kids play when they were young).
Interesting. I had had my eye on Satisfactory, but I got Subnautica a few month ago, which is also a building style game which I thought I’d enjoy because I kind of liked the scavenging / building aspect of FO4; kind of a nice break between battles. So far I figured out how to do almost everything in the game without any tutorials (other than in-game) or internet help, other than a couple minor things. But I found the constant diving looking for natural resources and spare ship parts, without really gettin’ to shoot any stuff, kind of tedious. Beautiful looking game, though.
Yep, I loved FO4 but it’s the only game I’ve ever used console cheat codes on. And then only to fix glitches or visit undeveloped areas that were impossible to get to otherwise.
How you like OW? I just bought it in the Steam Spring sale, and I’m just a little ways into it. I had heard “if you like Fallout, you’ll like Outer Worlds”. I thought that meant in the general corporate satire and dystopic sci-fi sense. But I’m finding that game play-wise, it seems like a complete Fallout knockoff. VERY samey-samey. Not surprising since it’s made by Obsidian, I guess. Does the game eventuallfy establish its own ‘feel’ or identity? I’m at the point where I just talked to Adelaide in the greenhouse and have to decide whether to take her side or the cannery kingpin’s side.
I don’t have a true answer to your question, but as a giant fan of Fallout I had a blast with The Outer Worlds (even more so on console after playing on PC).
To me, TOW’s humor was much deeper and clever than what I encountered in Fallout, to the extent that’s important.
The skill tree is probably its weakest element, but I enjoyed finding and modifying weapons. It isn’t nearly as open world as Fallout 3+, but it hides that fact fairly well. I found the selection of companions to be varied and useful than Fallout, but that’s likely just due to my playstyle.
Thanks for the TOW feedback. So far, like I said, I’m just finding it kind of a weak knockoff of a Fallout game (Fallout in Space! 
), but your positive feedback is a good impetus for me to give it a chance and keep playing. Appreciate it!
As a Fallout fan, I also thoroughly enjoyed The Outer Worlds. Liked it way more than Starfield, for what it’s worth…
The locations were a lot more colorful and interesting than most of the Fallout games (and definitely more than Starfield).
It is a Fallout-lite ripoff, yes, but a well-made one in a “best of” kind of way. Rather than Starfield’s vast miles of procedurally generated nothingness, it has small handcrafted sets, fun quests, better writing, etc. It is a shorter, tighter experience, and better off for it, packed with memorable events one after another and not much time wandering around empty areas. It respects your time and intelligence as a player much more than Starfield. Outer Worlds feels like a labor of love, rather than a money-grab by the suits like Starfield.
It’s not really open world, more like Knights of the Old Republic in that it has a bunch of interconnected areas that you can explore around, just not wander off infinitely. You still have a lot of different ways to tackle any given area (combat, dialog, stealth, hacking, lockpicking, etc.)
One of the very few games where I actually did NOT kill everyone (it wouldn’t let me) and bothered to pay attention to the story (it was short and sweet and well written enough).
Oh gosh yes, I enjoyed TOW much much more than Starfield (which I preordered the deluxe edition, and did enjoy some of the quest lines, but ultimately found it too tedious and…just not fun).
Thanks! Great in-depth, thoughtful review. I’ll definitely give TOW a fighting chance to win me over now.
I used to be amused by cheat codes but rarely use them any more. I found that I quickly burned out on games after I became all powerful and could do anything.
For complex games like X4 Foundations or Distant Worlds 2 I will certainly watch/read tutorials.
If I get stuck on part of a game that I am otherwise enjoying before I quit out of frustration I allow myself to “ask the townspeople”, look the answer up online. Often the solution is something completely outside my logic that I would have never thought of.
I found Subnautica to be a much easier game to get into than Satisfactory, but it was one of the games I had seen Let’s Plays of before I bought it. There is a lot of tedium at first, but once you get past that initial stage (around the time you get access to the crashed ship) it gets really good from there on. There’s no combat, though.
Satisfactory and Subnautica are very different genres, though, even though both feature some “building”.
Satisfactory is a factory game (a huge genre mostly started by Factorio, but also includes Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez, and many others). The focus is on production line automation rather than scavenging or combat, and you’re trying to scale up production by tens of units, then hundreds, and eventually thousands and maybe billions, by using and reusing sub-factories and automated pipelines. Shapez is the purest abstraction/distillation of that genre.
Meanwhile Subnautica is survival + exploration, with minimal automation and logistics. You’re mostly just swimming around and grabbing things on your own and there’s not really any focus on ramping up production. There are also many survival games, including many with combat (Ark, Once Human, Enshrouded, 7 Days to Die, so many others).
One game is Henry Ford managing a factory, the other is underwater MacGyver.
There are a few games (but rare) that combine both survival and factory automation, like Volcanoids.
Gameplay-wise, as the quote above indicates? Honestly, no. Gameplay (with one minor exception) is one of the weaker points of the game. If anything, it’s further along the spectrum of heavy RPG with some gaming/FPS elements than Fallout 3/NV/4. Which was actually a complaint for some of the players, in that the PC is less of a character in and of themselves, and more a vehicle for you to explore the world/story/settings.
I do think that the storytelling is very good, I liked a lot of the weird Corporate Stupid alignments and actions to the tune of Idiocracy, and had a lot of fun playing the game, but again, gameplay was not the highlight, and probably never expected to be. I will say that while I personally didn’t like it, the new mechanics and mechanisms for the Murder on Eridanos DLC were a bit more unusual and unique, just didn’t match well with my tastes.