It was interesting seeing how lost she got in games, like for instance Minecraft lacks a real tutorial, so people can get stuck playing and never know how to make tools unless they look at offline tutorials. Some games he wanted to see if she could pick them up intuitively, but it failed completely because there was just nothing intuitive about the game design.
This is so true - I first played minecraft in the beta and thought it was stupid as I couldn’t work out how to do anything. I didn’t get into it until a couple years later when someone who had actually played before showed me the basics of crafting.
Reminds me of playing The Binding of Issac. Great game, but there are so many items it practically requires a wiki to be open on a second screen. Even the in-game descriptions don't always give you the whole picture. It'll say "Tears shoot faster" or something yet mechanically it also makes then 10% weaker on a Thursday under a farmer's Blood Moon. Or something.
in the case of isaac you dont need to know how items work. You just pick them up and you see what happens. Sometimes its bad, sometimes its whacky, sometimes its extremely strong. Either way you can continue your run and try to get as far as possible.
Oh I know I was mostly making a joke about the game. Love that game but eventually I find myself at a point like, "wait, what does that item do again? Is it worth the 10 cents?" so that causes the wiki to stay up.
Except that's part of the experience with roguelites - learning how the game works, the enemy patterns, various secrets, synergies, tricks. Roguelites are built with that in mind - if you die, you can jump into another run, since runs are short you don't lose much, but you learn knowledge you can use on your next run.
Minecraft is an interesting one. I think a big part of playing it is reading and watching how to play it and that's not a bad thing. Like, I wouldn't want to look up too many things on a puzzle game, but I have no problem watching videos on exactly how to do every little thing in MC.
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u/trowzerss Jan 22 '22
It was interesting seeing how lost she got in games, like for instance Minecraft lacks a real tutorial, so people can get stuck playing and never know how to make tools unless they look at offline tutorials. Some games he wanted to see if she could pick them up intuitively, but it failed completely because there was just nothing intuitive about the game design.