My first playthrough of Mass Effect I had no idea there was a second level of my ship. I totally missed all of the crew member backstory dialogue and relationship building, which is pretty essential to the game… the second playthrough was much better once I found the elevator!!
That seems kind of ridiculous that they technically make it all optional.
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How can you be under leveled? Isn’t Alduin level scaled?
Oh… I’m not sure but I had a really hard time beating him… maybe I just sucked.
Just before you fight Alduin there’s some dude you have to beat up if I remember correctly, I think Tsun guarding the bridge to the Hall of Valor? I remember him just one-shotting me so I had to crawl into some terrain he couldn’t hit me from and I just very slowly killed him with a bow and arrow when I had absolutely no proficiency in archery.
Yes and no.
Everything still has a minimum level. Alduin being the final boss is still pretty high level at his lowest level. Same with the Dragon Priests. Those dudes are almost impossible when you’re less than level 10.
If you just did the MQ and nothing else, even if you kill everything in your path during the dungeons, you’ll barely have leveled. You won’t level at if you just run through everything!
Half Life. Final boss fight. Not enough ammo and I couldn’t be bothered to go several hours of saves back to replay and conserve ammo.
I’m playing a similar game called just “Life”. I seem to have misplaced the manual for it which is quite the hurdle because there are no save/restore points.
It’s an open-world game and there are many NPC’s, but the few bosses seem randomly placed (at least, I haven’t found any pattern to it) and what’s worse is that you can’t really tell them apart from regular NPC’s until you’ve already engaged them! Got burned by that a fair bit more than once.
I’ve considered just starting over but the prospect of losing literally my entire progress… 😬
I have a similar experience with Quake’s final boss. It’s the only thing in the entire game you don’t kill by shooting. Took me 3 freaking days to figure it out.
It’s stupid as hell because it’s like the easiest thing to do, but no game had anything remotely like that, and it wasn’t a mechanic shown to the player at all in SP (if you don’t know you have to telefrag the boss by jumping into a gate when a purple spikey thing flying around the room clips through the boss).
I got stuck on Resident Evil Rebirth for the same reason. Took me years before I motivating myself to give it an other shot.
Hammerwatch. You can reach the end of the game and be unable to proceed if you didn’t collect specific things. I believe it was wooden boards.
I’m pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident… I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.
In the game bug fables I missed that there was a badge shop in one of the starting areas. I played through most of the game without using any of those badges. You don’t need them, but it’s nice to have options
About 50 hours into xenoblade chronicles 3 I realized I could pick character order when doing chain attacks. Up to that point I had been going left to right every time.
I went from doing 200k damage per chain attack to 17 mil lol
I was doing the same thing with driver combos back in XC2
I’m 50 hours in, choose my character order and still getting like 500k. What’s your secret?
Ngl it’s been a long time but a mixture of grinding like hell and maxing out damage related stones for pretty much everyone
But I love that game an abnormal amount so I wouldnt recommend that, 500k is more than enough damage for anything that isn’t post-game
Took quite a while for me to find out about queens in Starcraft 2 as a Zerg player.
I don’t know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren’t easily resettable. I’m so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played regarding skill progression is Oblivion.
Honestly, that game’s levelling is completely busted. Basically your class has a couple major and minor skills. You gain skill levels automatically by using them, and when you got enough levels in your class skills, you are supposed to rest and gain a character level.
Almost everything in Oblivion is levelled to match your character’s level. Gaining a level only serves three purposes : gaining a very small amount of health, gaining a few points in two stats depending on which skills you’ve used … And most of all spawning more, stronger enemies.
Lots of skills in Oblivion are not directly (or absolutely not at all) combat-related. Lots of default classes come with quite a few of them as major or minor skills. And those that don’t come with several damage-related and several defence-related skills.
Progressing in non-combat skills, or in too many at once in a “master of none” fashion, will make your game impossible. “Playing well” requires knowing and exploiting this by blocking your level up until you’ve maxed the right skill. Or even having some of your favourite skills not class skills at all.
This is really not my idea of fun character progression.
And you can make Acrobatics a class skill for super fuck you hard mode. I didn’t know this as a 13 year old playing Oblivion, and I thought “levels good” and wondered why I couldn’t get into the game for years until I learned about this little “quirk” of the leveling system.
Oh yeah, acrobatics and athletics, the two skills that go up every time you jump and run. Good ways to fuck your progression both.
Also the social skills, Mercantile and Speechcraft.
In Breath of the Wild, I never learned how to cook in the starting area. I completely bypassed the intended path up to the cold area and somehow climbed up the other side, and then just froze my ass off while eating a bunch of apples. I made it out of the starting area and I think I beat two of the divine beasts before I finally looked up how to cook. I knew the game had cooking, but I thought there would be some kind of cooking menu when you walk up to a cooking pot, I didn’t realize you had to just hold items and then drop them in.
I did that, but I was eating whole chillis in the first area rather than cooking with them.
Doing the hermit’s cooking tutorial fully actually makes that Great Plateau mountain even easier, because not only you’d learn how cooking works but he’d also give you the warm doublet right away.
Most of the mountain (all? except maybe a small area around the summit) is only level 1-cold, so the doublet is enough even without cooking.
YES! This is actually how I finally learned how to cook. There was another cold area I was trying to get into, and looked up where to get warm clothing, and it said something like “You should already have the warm doublet from completing the hermit’s cooking tutorial.” and I was like “the what?”
FF7 Remake. I played the original but didn’t pay attention to differences in the remake. I went the entire game with only the Buster sword, and thus did not learn any new abilities. Still beat it though.
I did this exactly, I went through like half then realized that you learn new abilities by equipping weapons and using their ability 10 times.
Star Ocean 2! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to find a save point, that I could just save on the world map, until like 90% through the game cause I noticed when I was in the menu screen that save was lit up like it was useable. Oops.
Also, the first time I played, I didn’t use the feature that empowers your stats on FFVIII, cause I didn’t bother to read the directions. Got caught on a late game boss fight and gave up until years later when I finally read the directions and had so much fun save scumming and exploiting renewing magic draw points. (Basic memory from like 15 years ago so I could have some details wrong, but you get the point)
I played through all of mirrors edge when it first came out (10 years ago?) without realizing you could pick up a gun.
This is the right way to play the game, IMO. There’s even an achievement for it.
Doesn’t Mirrors Edge have a forced tutorial at the beginning and it literally requires you to pick up a gun at some point? 🤔
To be fair, that game really isn’t about shooting or even taking out enemies. Taking their gun only slows you down!
I should go play that again. It’s got a great atmosphere (and soundtrack)
I missed the dodging and flurry-rush shrine in BoTW. Beat Ganon without ever learning. Finally went back much later and was like “wow, this game is so much easier now!”
I finished botw with 250 hours game play and currently on totk and cannot dodge, parry or flurry rush to save my life.
Yeah, it wasn’t until my second time starting the game that I took in any of the combat tutorials
In Hollow Knight I didn’t learn the stab down feature and by the time I found that out I couldn’t go back to learn it.
