Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate.
I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.
I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it’s an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.
So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?
E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!
For destiny, I have no idea. I first played D2 when it launched and that was fine, but I attempted to pick it up again a year or two later and I was immediately lost.
For overwatch I agai haven’t played in quite some time. But for multiplayer shooters like that I try to go into a casual mode or training mode first and just get a feel for everything. Eventually you get the hang of things.
For RPG’s it depends. Some games can benefit from reading up online. For example I’m playing bloodborne right now and I had no idea how I wanted to spec out my character. So I looked up what weapons and abilities are in the game and made my decision based around that. If a game features a respec option, I’ll be more likely to just go in and wing it and change things up when I need to.
These usually don’t have any explanation of the game mechanics though. Like you’d have to sit down and analyze all the character traits on some web forum in order to not get immediately slaughtered by other more experienced players, since it’s multiplayer only.
Getting repeatedly beaten in competitive multiplayer games is just kinda par for the course if you haven’t learned the meta, strategies, etc. If you lack game knowledge and your opponents have that game knowledge, you will mostly lose.
If winning in the game is the only way you find enjoyment in them, then those kinds of games require significant investments of time and energy to “git good”.
I say this as someone who is repeatedly shit on in every game of CoD I’ve ever played and will play in the future. That said, I don’t gain particular enjoyment from winning alone - not that it isn’t fun to win, just that I get just as much enjoyment from other aspects of the game.
It sounds to me, mostly, that these games just don’t really appeal to your idea of what’s fun.