Another mind goblin I encountered in Prey: -Upgrade pistol -Find gold pistol with better base dmg -Old pistol is now obsolete, weapon kits wasted -Stop upgrading all my other weapons because im afraid the same will happen to them.
see when that happens to me i just instantly think "oh well, i'll just have to compensate with skill alone then" cuz most games are overly forgiving in combat these days to the point where i can usually just go with how much i like shooting a particular gun or sometimes the look of a weapon alone rather than bullshit numbers telling me what to use.
Woolie: “I press A to talk to people, right? The tutorial told me so.” **accidentally walks 2 feet from an npc, just out of range of its dialogue trigger** Woolie: Reality isn’t real, I can’t trust anything the game told me, all of my buttons need to be remapped, and I’ll ignore talking to any NPC until just before the end of the game.
Yeah, Woolie has a bad habit of fucking up dead simple core mechanics, blaming the game and then insisting that he’s doing everything right the game just sucks.
@@LaBarata12 It’s his QA Tester days that get to him, there’s the assumption that the game is bugged. And to be fair, we’ve all done that to a certain extent. “I can’t beat the final boss! I don’t have enough health! What? My 5 elixirs each fully restore my health and magic, AND give me an attack boost? BUT WHAT IF I NEED THEM LATER?!” The mind goblins are strong.
I feel like if you already suffer from mind goblins and happened to get into survival horror as one of your favorite genres early on it just makes it a million times worse too. The urge to save everything you have never goes away.
Playing things like early Final Fantasy games probably didn't help either. I'm SURE you can end in an unwinnable game in those if you don't have enough items
My fear of continuing down the hallway when I hear ominous noises in the distance is greater than my willingness to even play the game, let alone play it efficiently.
Speaking of Dishonored mind-goblinery... That tiny bit of regenerative mana that always leaves enough for one teleport ? The designers built it as a mercy feature so that you'd never be unable to teleport but what it meant was that I always waited for it to regen after every teleport to avoid using a mana potion. So much time wasted...
Oh god, I remember that. I played Dishonored at launch and haven't touched it afterwards, and I remember that shit. Even in situation where I should really have been teleporting all over the place, I zapped once, sat down (even when being shot) and did absolutely nothing for a hot moment. I was constantly full on mana potions and I felt physical revulsion at the mere thought of actually using any.
Deus Ex Human Revolution also basically gimps you if you use your augments, becuase you can't even knock guys out without using power. It's ridiculous.
The way i've started getting around this mentality is just use everything. If i'm not using it now, then its the same as when I use all of it. So might as well burn it.
I think New Vegas has the best way of handling this. The complete edition comes with all the DLC, including the OP preorder gear, but the game's loader on PC (and on consoles I think it's on the options menu) lets you manually toggle each individual dlc pack on and off. So if you just want to play vanilla NV, you can.
Or a Console user, just throw that stuff in a box and forget it, done it many times. Or the long way, just playthrough the game and at points, install the DLCs.
The Prey Water thing reminds me of Witcher 3 and that busted perk that gives you like 10 minutes of health regen from any food you eat instead of like 5 secs
@@TOGYS7 I have just the opposite problem, having the extra consumables makes me think they are virtually unlimited so I use them more than I should, so I get empty when I really need them
playing dungeon crawler based roguelikes gets you out this mindset real quick end up in a bad situation? better use all your shit to get out of it because those items are gone when you're dead
The problem with putting in 'anti-goblin' techniques that stop people from optimizing out the fun is that if you do it badly, it just creates entirely different mind goblins that do the same thing, if not worse. Remember Final Fantasy VIII, and how enemies scaled with your character levels but not to your junctioned stats? That was an ANTI-grinding system, they wanted to disincentivize people grinding out the difficulty by overlevelling. But their system still ended up rewarding unfun grinding, the grinding just looked different.
The prey fountain made me think of bioshock 2 passive power of "healing when standing in water". It was slow but I would stand in puddle for a while just to save on healing items. Did I need to, not really. But it felt kind of good to save ressources.
I struggled with these goblins for YEARS with modded Skyrim... Subsystems like survival mods, or elaborate crafting, etc make the game immersive and fresh feeling, riiiight up until I realize I've spent 20 mins JUST eating, tending wounds, getting warm, etc AFTER EVERY DUNGEON. As realistic as it is, clearing like one bandit camp per in-game day is a slog compared to vanilla. Also? Scripts! Looove crashing and having to do all that shit again. Now I just roleplay that shit. Carry food, sleep & eat when it makes sense, no bikinis in a blizzard, etc, and VOILA the game is just as fun, but stable & playable! No more limping back to an inn immediately, because a skeever nipped me and I've already used every bandage in the region! No crashing, because the game is tracking 3 followers' hunger meters AND their warmth!
I did that in red dead 2. Camp at night, eat dinner. Wake up at sunrise, eat breakfast. And dress sensibly. Although the game does have a temperature system where you need to dress fir the weather, id take it further by matching my surroundings. Rugged cowboy in the wild, sharp dressed in civilization.
For the fountain, I think their point is to give a tiny reward to the player for trying to interact with things in a game where you want the player to pay attention to everything, important in a immersive sim. I think the solution would have been to reduce the delay on the fountain, and make it just sputter and stop working after 5 uses.
The Monster Hunter World DLC gear problem happened to my best friend but his situation is slightly different. He used the gear and easily flew through the game no problem but because it was so braindead effortless he never actually learned the controls and systems and mechanics. So when he realized he was using the speedup to endgame gear he took it off and tried playing normal but hated the controls and couldn't reset them to buttons he felt comfortable with and then quit because "game feels bad so game bad." He explained this to me the other day since I just started Rise and asked him if he was going to play with me. Holy shit.
I definitely ping pong water fountains in prey, and I just realized an elegant solution would be to make the drinking give you a 5 minute buff that provided slight health regeneration so spamming it gained no extra benefit. If you're willing to take the time it's still heals you efficiently however it does not interrupt playing the rest of the game.
Pat should play Breath of Fire: Dragon's Quarter, a game that forces you to defeat your mind goblins because the items are ALL YOU HAVE and you can't be stingy
@@crybirb If you approach it like any other RPG you will get thrown off it so hard you'll make a crater on impact, teen you wasn't expecting what it was serving
that is one of my favorite games. there's one point, right after ice caves, where there's a series of battles and bosses, I'd just use up my counter on them, then revert the save with carried over bonus xp, level up, save, and repeat until I was strong enough to beat them handily without transforming.
Having got back into it recently, I'd say it's less not using it to defeat your mind goblins. By trying to find ways and playing as lame/smart as possible to not get hit and use any. At least until equip drops get your free money and you can spend more freely. Plus the game gives you incentive to restart and curb stop the beginning of the game.
Ah yes, the good ol' Master Ball dilemma. I member back on the first time I played HL1, I was so keen on conserving ammo and health, I practically only ever used the pistol and the shotgun for everything. I would only ever use the other weapons when their ammo would be full and there was more laying around. Plus, if I took any damage, then we restoring back a savestate, baby. This only became worse when I got the Hivehand weapon, which is a ranged weapon with infinte ammo, but very little damage. What this meant was, I had everything maxed, 14 weapons at my disposal, I was fully prepared for everything, but then the game ended and I realized I didn’t get to use any of it, and never got to do any of the cool stuff. The Tau Cannon is the single coolest gun I've ever tried in an FPS and my mind goblins told me I was better off having 100 ammo on it than actually using it. Few years later, I replayed the game on Hard, and just didn't give a care about anything: no savestates, I use the guns I actually like first, and everything else just as last resort. The game immediately became 700% more fun than it was with my first playthrough.
I had a friend use that same defender set for most of the base game and it made her a worse player overall. To the point that she had to cheat(hack the game) for decos, used meta builds and still would cause us to fail missions because she never learned how to fight those lower ranked monster. So when the higher ranks started to show up they would crush her.
@@EnsignEpic Yeah there's absolutely no shame in using the all items shop mod and just buying decorations. And it's not like It completely removes the effort factor since most of the good decos are pretty damn pricey, so I still need to actually PLAY the game in order to get it, but knowing that I only need to grind money and not pray for RNGsus takes away a lot of the tedium
Well he simply does not care about the game balance in that game. It's not uncommon for Pat to not care at all about combat balance in RPGs and simply wants to be overpowered so he can get to the next story bit. I can kinda understand this, I play a lot of JRPGs on easy just to take out the grind and not have to spend any more time in combat than I have to, it's kind of the least interesting part of the game.
Outer Worlds had something that was pretty bad like this as well. On supernova mode you couldn't save your game at will so there was no save scumming, HOWEVER when you fast travel it saves your game not after you arrive at the location but BEFORE you travel. I'm sure you can imagine how this was used.
Final Fantasy 7 is a good example of what Sid Meier was talking about. Where people see a big open-ended system, do the absolute most boring things with it (like giving every character the same Materia build), and then complain about all their characters being the same and treat it as a fault of the game.
But, as we know, it's the fau|t of a game designer that s[]me pe[]ple don't have enough wi|| to contro| themse|ves, so everyone shou|d aссommodate just them. Similarly, how games should not use character positioning by stereo sound because professional streamer/entertainers use tvs without channe| separation or with mishand|ed mix1ng headphone deck with mono only.
@@rensato5027 I mean designing games around the most extreme of player tendencies is a lesson learned pretty early in game design history. There's loads of stories of "well we designed it to be played like __________ but players just ended up doing ______ which ended up being much more effecient so we nerfed that method ." Hell I think theres an instance of that rather recently with Classic WoW's dungeon grinding.
It depends whether is a good thing (rewards creativity) or not. Sure running from fountain to fountain in Prey is extreme, but Bioshock 2 has a similar perk where you get health/mana by standing in water, but it takes a slot so it balances it out. On the other hand, in Rimworld for example, instead of gunning raiders, people used the temperature system to stroke/freeze, and that was patched out because the dev said "we don't think you should play that way" and he still keeps adding ways to make raids harder (with sappers/drop pods that destroy your kill box) so it depends. I guess making the game more fun and allowing people to do crazy shit is always the goal, so removing fountains in Prey is okay, removing the perk in Bioshock 2 is not because it has a tradeoff, and nerfing weird ways to defeat raids in Rimworld is not okay.
@@NaderinZim I really don't understand why that Rimworld dev is so obsessed with making raids challenging for 1% of players and really daunting and unfair for just about everyone else in the process.
@@Zangelin "Drama" he says, but I just call it bullshit, at least the stuff around it (though raids got harder) is way better with the ideology update.
My partner is currently playing AC Odyssey, her mind goblins are that she can’t move past an area until everything on that portion of the map is clear. She’s approximately 20% through the story and has been playing for at least 100 hours. It’s interesting to see it happen in front of you
Fuck AC Odyssey, that game is GLACIAL in it's progression. It took me 100 hours to beat Dark Souls the first time, and it felt like a LONG journey, AC Odyssey was frustratingly slow. The worst part is that the game has the balls to pull you out of the world for some pointless bullshit. Ship combat was fun, 4/10
Whenever I play rpgs, I immediately try to get exp boosting skills/equipment to maximize my leveling, even if it makes me weaker. Scarlet Nexus has a Deluxe Edition equip item that has a 5% money and exp bonus, but I won’t use it because even in a single-player game it still FEELS like pay to win.
I actually kind of enjoy playing games like this though because it encourages you to improve your actual skill or tactics to compensate for lack of stats, abilities, or upgrades, until later in the game when those XP boosts have propelled your character to greater heights and you have both skill *and* an overpowered character.
I encountered this exact problem playing Yakuza Kiwami 2, I refused to upgrade anything else and ate food at any opportunity because I wanted to save my points to max out the "EXP Boost" skills, even though it's only like 1 extra EXP per street enemy per level of upgrade.
This is me with Pokemon. I'll be running around in a patch of grass to grind xp for my pokemon and when they inevitably get low hp from all the fighting, I'll run allllll the way to the pokemon center and go through that whole ordeal instead of just using a super potion on them.
In Darkest Dungeon and Dont Starve on Switch, you have to manually activate each DLC per save. Im not a big fan of this, but its probably the best solution to this very problem. On the topic of optimizing the fun out of games, that was my only gripe with Metroid Fusion/Zero Mission, in the form of hauling my ass back to the closest energy room, which could be 5-15 minutes of walking past enemies with little to no threat to them.
I thought about some of this until I realized I don’t at all care what my clear time for a game is. Spent like two hours in the literal first Japan area of nioh just to practise on the npcs
The better implementation is when you try to go to Iceborn depending on your rating the NPC will give you the armor saying "hey, its tough out there. use this!" so you know its connected to iceborn
For that second topic on "is it the dev's job to design to make sure people don't optimize the fun out of things" the answer is a resounding YES and it's one of the most difficult/annoying things there are. There are multiple GDC talks on that very subject, and it comes up all the time in talks that aren't specifically devoted to it as well. The stated rule is more or less verbatim "If a player has the opportunity to optimize at the expense of fun, always assume they will". Hey look, that's what I get for writing before continuing. Well played.
Of course, there comes edge cases that are impossible to design out, simply because the person doing it is that fundamentally broken. Love ya, Billy-Minh, but you're fucking bonkers bro.
I feel like that responsibility only goes so far, though, and the case given in the discussion of the water fountains in Prey is one example. If a player is willing to ruin their own experience by spending hours recovering HP one at a time, there comes a point where they bear responsibility for that decision. It reminds me of when people used to complain about the FF12 gambit system for letting the game play itself. Which you could certainly set the system up so that battles would require no input from you, and I could see how that would become boring. And that's exactly why I didn't set up gambits like that when I played the game. A player should be capable of looking at the less fun option and saying, "Yeah, I'm not gonna do that."
@@Smileyhat Iunno, there is a line but it's pretty far in. I would say the XII example isn't really fair, since if the opportunity is there for a major gameplay system to be gamed like that, it's fair for them to not wanna continue playing it. It's a fair critique. Feels like when people say to do a challenge run rather than complain about a game's difficulty. The PS1 FF games have so many missables that it just makes me feel nervous about playing the game and missing any. You might think it's easy to just ignore them and have fun with the rest of the game, but to lose out on options in an RPG (or any game really) hits that mind goblin spot so hard.
@@pixelsheep3443 In the XII example, I could understand if the system was on by default and, by default, set up for the game to play itself for you. But to the contrary, you have to go out of your way to set it up to play for you. You have to spend your gil buying all of the logic pieces from various stores in the game, you have to spend...whatever the points were to advance on the level-up grid system to get more gambit slots, and then you have to manually figure out how you want to logic each character into playing themselves. Just like how in Prey you have to go out of your way to try to restore health 1 at a time, and that going out of your way is the entire problem. In either case it is far easier not to do the thing you dislike than to spend time (and resources, in the FFXII case) using/abusing them. As a fan of older FF games, as well, I guess I just don't have those mind goblins, but I've never been bothered by not having everything. In fact, I kinda like finding out there's stuff I missed, especially major side content stuff, because it gives me a reason to go back and play the games again. It's the whole reason I've played through FF7, as well as some of the Tales games, several times over.
@@Smileyhat I think an easier way to describe it is like the OCD reaction. It's not something most people would feel like they need to do. but for that few, it really just comes out. Same as with XII, some people wanna see it all and then move on to the next. Some people just naturally feel the urge to break systems. At least with XII, I get what you're saying, but I personally wouldn't mind if people still took issue with some of the streamlining or systems that the game had, even if personally I liked what I played of it. I love replaying FF1 and 3 personally, it's just the whole disc change thing that puts extra fear into the missables for me. That and things being all 3D make it a bit harder to fully comb places for secrets. It got so bad for me that I didn't mind spoilering FF7 for myself just so that I could get a list of when to look for Enemy Skill Materia stuff. I'd say a good chunk of these are pretty rare complaints on the whole, but there's a good chunk of stuff like this that is a bit more commonly annoying out there, like the timed FF9 sword or Pokemon BW2's hard mode unlock. More of an accessibility thing, but honestly, experiences like that are what made me want to start getting into game dev stuff myself.
God, THANK YOU for saying this! I had such a rough time with Borderlands 2, because I got it with all DLC's, but it doesn't tell you when's a good time to do each one! I remember loading up the Dungeons & Dragons parody one, because everyone said that was the best one, and the opening cutscene IMMEDIATELY spoils major characters deaths for the main campaign! Maybe that shit should unlock after a certain amount of main game progress! I mean, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition doesn't let you warp straight to Oolicile from the 1st bonfire!
Question for people who do the water fountain stuff to save using in game resources: Do you consider time a resource or not? See I always avoided making use of slow, inefficient healing like that, because in my mind I'm giving up my time resources to save my healing resources, and my time resources are more valuable because I can't get more.
When you're playing a game that has this stupid feature, you realize that your time isn't precious at all and you just take the hard way because you just can.
Here's what Pat needs to do to fix his Dishonoured goblins: play it twice, doing the first one high chaos and the second one low-chaos / ghost or whatever he thinks he needs to do to make it perfect.
Abomi Nation has a cool feature where it institutes a boss-to-boss level cap. This can be turned off but it makes playing the game feel a lot more relaxing and a lot less grindy. Not to mention the 'wild' encounters give a very low amount of EXP and there is a limited number of 'trainer' encounters that are gonna be the source of most of your EXP.
Dark Souls 2 did pre-order weapons ok, the weapons they gave you were barely a tier up over the beginner weapons and you'd typically replace them around the time you approached the first boss or right after it
Something that I did in re4 (specifically on ps4) was that I didn't upgrade my gear once until I got the final versions of the guns. All because I knew that that any money I put into the old guns would be wasted when I progressed through the story an hour later. Oh, and rune system that don't let you remove runes from gear without breaking them. In ANY game that does this I will just flat out not use them under the pretense of "But what if I find better gear and end up wasting the rune?". I'm also like woolie in that I will never use my 9999999 elixirs. Not in the sense of like "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SECRET SECRET BOSS AFTER FIGHTING THE SECRET BOSS". My reasoning is that I don't want to get through a stage (or whatever) using "buffs" since if I do I feel like I'll be in a situation of "I can't beat X thing without X consumable". Mind goblins fooking suck ace.
The mind goblins involved in Pokemon breeding are wild. Want a pokemon with the right nature and IVs for your run on the Battle Frontier? Be prepared to run in a circle for hours on end waiting for eggs to hatch. Is one IV sub-optimal? Can't risk losing because of bad stats -- I better start the whole process again.
honestly, i can understand some mind goblin stuff but this is are levels to it and consequently, there are levels to how much i'd sympathize/empathize with someone who is enslaved to these goblins. people have the gobline of "but what if i need this item later" or "i need to optimize my gameplay to be as efficient as possible" while i have the mindset of "god i hate persona. i do not want to be rushed or have my shit overly gated and scheduled cus that just makes me not play the game" i essentially see mind goblines the same way as min-maxing, you wanna do it the most efficent possible? fine but so long as what your doing doesnt make the rest of the game virtually unplayable (because it's just not something that is a bug or experienceable in normal gameplay) then you do you
The way I see it if someone wants to optimise the fun out of the game that's fine but they better not complain when it isn't fun. That shit's infuriating to see
@@thedom2753 it's like saying you'll always walk off the side of the path if there arent any railings. sometimes the railing is there for a needed and obvious purpose, sometimes its there because the creator wanted it there and other times it isnt there because there really isnt a need for them. if you're gonna go out and make a problem for yourself that really isnt the fault of no railings.
When I started MW I had the guardian armor without even owning the Iceborne DLC, just the base game. My friend that starting playing since its launch and had over 500 hours I caught up to in about 200
I don't know. Sounds like a couple of people saying "you must take the choice away from the player" since they have a hard time reconciling their own tendency for controlling their impulses.
That's totally what this argument sounds like; "I'm deliberately going out of my way to make the game less fun for myself, and it's your fault for not stopping me."
I thought this was gonna be about goopy-gamer-goblin-brain-syndrome. Different goblins I guess. I had this pretty bad in DragonFable, where some classes had moves to steal HP and regain MP. I'd wear down the last enemy in an encounter, and then stall on cooldowns until I could full-heal both bars. I liked to imagine that I was eating people alive when I killed them using lifesteal moves. Did _not_ want to have to deal with attrition. Eventually broke out of this when I found a class with a busted desperation move, so running around at 20% HP and nuking everyone I ran into was more optimal than obsessively keeping myself topped up.
My friend did the same thing with the Iceborn armor Prey does have a momnet where they shame the way you play, with the alien augments. One of the more antagonistic characters calls you a dumb dumb if you used alien powers. So I didn't.
The game Final Fantasy Legend (aka the first SaGa game) has a really interesting version of this, because it is an RPG with a finite amount of lives. If your party member dies X number of times, you actually lose that character, forever. In every town in that game there is a "revival store," and I believe (though I'm working on old memories here) that there is a mechanic to get an extra life or two, but all of that is PERMANENTLY wasted, because most players will simply just save scum their way through the entire game. And this is a gameboy game, so no quicksave / quickload, just turn the system off and on, off and on, until you get fed up.
It just hit me that this is very much a thing with Pokemon Centers with me. I am very susceptible to this mind-goblin habit in any Pokemon game, where I'll frequently backtrack along a route to heal my team at a Pokemon Center rather than stock up on healing items, even though it'd probably be more fun to treat the route as one long-form challenge of battling and resource management. The annoying thing is that I can't think of any reasonable solution except player-imposed challenges.
12:30 - I don't really have *that* much of an issue with Dishonored on this, but Hitman Absolution fucking pissed me the fuck off with the points system so much. Kill a dude and it subtracts points, hide the body and you get points back, you still lose points. You even lose points for killing targets, but make more points on average for kill the the target. It made me so mad.
LFG tools in MMOs is usually a go to complaint for my friends who are into the more hardcore MMOs because they want to sit in town spamming LFG in the chat or get involved in the high school clique bullshit that is guild drama.
@@Revan058 most of them got into MMOs far too late and fell the romanticism/nostalgia of "hardcore" MMO's like classic EQ, ultima online, vanilla WoW & EvE online. the problem is that the stories people tell of those games are far more interesting than the actual games.
Dishonored 2 fixed some of the problems in 1, a part of me is disapointed they didnt give more tiers to Chaos lvl. Imagine if the more High Chaos you gotten you were more likely to see more areas locked off or infested or boobytrapped? Or finding guards with new weapons like harpoon-guns that can stun you and pull you off ledges. Or if the Overseers showed up with "Miracles" as a way to negate and cripple your abilities. So you would have to balance the power use on the normal guards and the mundane options on the antimagic peps. Or if in very Low Chaos, if you got spotted by a guard theres a chance theyll just ignore you cause you been doing more good and it has began to affected some of the guards or have an equivelant of this scene - th-cam.com/video/pMd4S-LkywI/w-d-xo.html -
The Monster Hunter thing was ESPECIALLY frustrating for PC players because we got Iceborne six months later than console. So imagine you play base World. You grind the hell of it perfecting your build. And then all of a sudden new weapons just drop for free that take zero effort to upgrade that immediately outclass EVERYTHING you worked for so far. And unlike console players who just got to jump immediately into Iceborne where their old stuff becomes obsolete anyway, on PC we had to send six long months knowing every hunt we ever did was meaningless as everyone was eventually funneled into using nothing but the defender weapons which someone with hundreds of hours of gameplay or someone that just started playing are now at the same level.
My favorite and probably worst example of this is how obsessed I was with a single charm in Dishonored 2 called Spirit Water. What does this do? It allows you to restore mana by drinking water from the fountains and sinks around the place. Very slowly. So you essentially have infinite mana if you're willing to waste enough time! I did have lots of fun crafted a x4 Bonecharm on NewGame+ out of that perk and restoring my entire mana bar in a few gulps though
The shitty DLC practices of the 7th Console Generation continue to echo through time and become more and more ridiculous as years go on and people like Josh Sawyer explicitly shit on the preorder DLC from his own game.
@@leeohx7174 They are baked into the game as default options. Different from say, if theres DLC or MTX on the store somewhere that you can seek out. As they said if it was a code or a toggle outside of the game it would be a different thing.
@@leeohx7174 Not quite, jump potions in FFXIV are separate purchases you have to buy for 10 bucks separately from the game, you don't just get one for buying the DLC. If you did, the situation would apply.
I maintain that any kind of regenerating health mechanic should just increase exponentially if the player is safe for a short period. Players are going to abuse periods of safety to let their health regen anyway, so you might as well save them some real-world time.
Nah. If they want to abuse it, make them suffer for it. You *can* do it, but it's meant to be a small bonus, so if you want to waste your time? Well, it's going to waste your time.
@@Revan058 That's stupid and accomplishes nothing. If there really must be a downside, make health regen gradually lower the player's maximum health over time or something. That way the health gained from regen isn't really "free".
@@tbotalpha8133 Oh, it accomplishes exactly what I want: Suffering for people who ruin the experience for themselves. It's a totally self-inflicted harm, and it's really kinda funny.
Mind Goblin critiques always pissed me off, even though I know a lot of people can't help themselves. Big examples include: "FFII/FFVIII lets me grind really easily, so it's bad", "Doom 2016 has too many collectables, I spend too much time finding them", "post-MGS2 Metal Gear is too easy, I can just kill everyone and walk through the stage", "FFXII is boring, I can just turn on gambits and let it play itself", etc. I'm always like, just choose to have fun! You don't have to torture yourself going after every icon on the map in an open world or optimize your build like a speedrunner!
FFXII is a peak example that EVERYONE is ready to get fucked by mind goblins at the drop of a hat, I realized really quick how bad it could get so I just set it for auto attacks and casting stuff like Haste because I was to upkeep that anyways every so often or "use weakness" on a spell caster when I'm farming something. But EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. The game comes up the shit about people spending half their playtime on working on gambits comes up and I hate it because that system is still better than most party member AI in JRPGs (Xenoblade games feel fucking terrible at times with how bad they can be holy shit) but it probably won't ever show up again.
The ability to customize the AI and cut down the micromanaging is part of the reason I actually adore FFXII. Especially because I don't play optimally, I like having the ability to designate a target, use the abilities I like and let the AI do the rest. Sure it's less engaging that something like Persona in terms of moment by moment action choice, but it lets me run around in a zone when Im grinding license points and eat a sandwich without really having to focus. Switch on 4x Speed mode and I can grind my a** up to whatever I want/need to be in way less time.
@@jariu9612 FF12 Zodiac Age was such a brilliant fix for people's mindgoblins. The game literally would not allow you to just make 6 copies of the same character without seriously hamstringing yourself.
When I do something like the fountain thing, I usually get a little hit of good-feeling, because it feels like I'm tricking the game into giving me an advantage.
I find it a little silly that Pat says he throws out every pre order item as soon as he gets it but he will cheat the mass effect credit store right away
The difference is "I went out of my way to cheat" versus "The cheating is put into my inventory." One you actually kinda gotta do manually, while the other is literally Right There. Yes, it's silly, but there is a visible difference.
Kingdoms of Amalur Re Reckoning had a BUNCH of good gear for any build, that stops being useful after like level 5 because everything has better stats. I think that's a good approach, tbh. A taste of power yet to come, but only a little ahead. You will soon find far stronger.
My personal goblins: Halo 2 specifically where I wouldn’t waste any powerful weapons like rockets or the sniper rifle on weak enemies, but never ended up using it for the entire level. And obviously the weapons don’t carry over and you only have two weapon slots.
I never had problems with mind goblins until I got to play online RPG games AND persona. Persona in particular made feel uncomfortable to use items outside moment I'm now about to get my ass wiped. Normally I'm the kinda of guy who will use the weaker armor if it looks better on character
robin walker not letting players optimize the fun out of TF2 by removing the mechanic from TF classic (where demo could blow up part of the map) that made players choose between playing the game and actually having fun but losing more often, or winning more but doing a bunch of drudge work. a true master.
Code Vein is guilty too, best cape in the game is a preorder bonus. My friend recently started and I told him to use it but forgot it was a pre-order bonus...oops
I mind goblin on that water fountain thing pretty hard, but I can't really get behind it being an objective flaw that needs to be fixed just by how a tame example it is. I think saying that it's some obvious mistake that needs to be fixed because a micro percent of us can't control it is more than a little silly.
My mind goblins come from character action games. Been playing bayonetta recently and everytime I get hit, everytime I use an item or when I hit continue the mind goblins come a knockin telling me I'm a bad player despite the fact I haven't even finished my first playthrough.
If you have the Ultimate Edition of New Vegas you congeal off the bed in Doc Mitchell's house with ten spears, a semi automatic pistol, an over-under break action shotgun, a 40mm grenade launcher, ammunition for all of it, a machete, a pair of binoculars, and like four sets of great early armor, all of it at full condition so the weapons don't jam and the armor confers its full protection. I'd have to check to be sure, but I think you also start with a few healing items like stimpaks and doctor's bags.
The Defender sets frustrate me so much, and it's coming to Rise as well. I think that a lot of people will have this experience when first getting into MH now, and that's really unfortunate
I get why they did it. maybe you had beaten monsterhunter, and you deleted your stuff for space. So you hear about the DLC, start a new save, and without this you think "it will take me weeks to get to that content". This item lets you skip that, and just blitz through the early content. And honestly? While it ruined it for this guy, but when you sell DLC, your target customer is a person that has already played the game, and that was a valid consideration for the deleted save guy. The real problem is that they don't make any difference for a bundled set. Maybe add in Bob the OP item vendor for that kind of stuff.
Dragon's Dogma. A game with a ton of classes you can switch between at inns. Problem is though that when you level up, the stats you get are based on your current class. As you can imagine this leads to a TON of frustrating min maxing nonsense where you don't play the class you want to actually play until you hit the level cap (which is 200 btw) so you have "the best" stats for the build you're playing. People always say that it doesn't matter though, your gear determines damage much more than your leveled up stats. But I'LL know I'm not "perfect" dammit, and that'll bug me forever! Especially since you only get one save file!
A good way to preventing hoarding is implementing certain mechanics such as; limit how much they can hold items in their inventory, adjust the game in a way that has the player want to use items to prevent being too full of inventory. RE4 and the Souls series do this well. BotW in my opinion doesn't because they use weapons, which people are attached to, as one of the items that break and need to be replaced.
I think the best way to deal with the Defender armor is to also allow players that choose it to have access to more challenging hunts. That way experienced players can skip the tutorial/early game and to show new players what to expect.
I used the DLC armor in MH World and I didn't get bored. I actually thought it made the early game fun cause I didn't need to worry about grinding early. I know that's the loop, but I could only play for a few hours at my grandparents before I left, so it was kind of neccessary. Also I played World so I could get hyped for Rise and I loved both!
I started up World again after over a year of ignoring it and the Defender weapons and Guardian armor they gave me upon logging in is helping me in easing back into the game. From a fresh save file too since I couldn't remember anything.
I mean yeah, grinding for gear is the loop of Monster Hunter... but it is incredibly annoying and I don't want to do it so I'll wear the OP armor so I don't have to.
9 times out of 10 DLC armor/weapons usually get phased out within an hour of gameplay. yes I think it's dumb to lock it behind a preorder but it's not like you automatically win the game just because you preordered it and got a gun or something.
I really don't feel like this is something that should be viewed as such a negative. Seems silly. One mechanic I can think of like this is the coffee machine and the potato chips in Subnautica. They restore a tiny bit of water and food respectively, they're infinite, and they're free. So is any fish pulled out of a fish farm someone could easily make and the special fish that can be used to filter water, both of which will give more food/ water than the coffee or the chips. Does that mean I want the chips and coffee removed just because they don't have much of a practical purpose, and someone like that person the email here was about might go crazy about trying to minmax it, such as by making dozens of coffee makers and vending machines for chips to try and make them useful through sheer volume? No, I don't, that's a weird fringe case and should be ignored because the coffee and chips are a fun novelty that add flavor and a touch of life and soul to the game. A handful of obsessive crazies shouldn't be allowed to ruin that magic for everyone else just because they want to try and optimize until the game isn't fun anymore.
MHW is definitely triggering my mind goblins, being able to just use the Defender stuff to bypass the main gear is neat but also it invalidates all the other content but also it kills grinding which I typically hate but also it let me kill a Rathian the first time I saw it before I ever had any right to.
I hate cheat armor and weapons. Especially when it comes to action games with a high skill ceiling. Noobs will get carried through the early part of the game when your supposed to be learning things like managing health stamina. Micromanaging item and equipment load outs. And most of all crafting higher level gear and items. Then when iceborne starts they call it bs cuz it’s too hard now. The cheat equipment won’t stop banbaro from three shotting them. They then start chugging their supplies of mega potions only to quickly run out of because they never considered thinking ahead and making more for back up, (or they never considered using the crafting system because they didn’t need too). Which then becomes a slow process because they never once upgraded the harvest box, little loan use it. And now they can’t even farm beotodus cuz they don’t have the supplies, or skill to out damage him. See the problem? Cheat equipment encourages bad habits in players. In this case the defenders gear encourages players to neglect the core features that are required to enjoy the game.
Lucky for me I preferred playing pacifist in Dishonored. I guess they figured it would be harder to sell the game if there was only stealth with little-to-no flashy combat options. Those StealthGamer montages are pretty sick though.
I think dark souls 2 Scholar of the first sin deserves credit for taking all the pre-order items that would spawn in your new character inventory were instead Moved to different vendors.
I store pre-order items, until I get an item or equipment that is one or two points worse, or never use them. With Witcher 2, I had bonus items for importing a Witcher 1 save. I used the armor and sliver sword, because I felt that I earn it. The gear becomes outdated in chapter 1.
Eh, 2 star missions are Kestodon, Great Jagras, and Kulu-Ya-Ku. Defender Armor or no, those missions are easy enough that I don't think you can reasonably say the player in question even gave the game long enough for any of that to matter. It does suck to lose the entirety of the learning experience by trivializing the difficulty of early fights, but I can't say I didn't use the Defender Armor when I played through a 2nd time on PC to play with my friends that only got it there after playing on PS4. Even then I picked up Charge Blade for the first time on that playthrough, and still learned plenty about how to use the weapon from going through all the old monsters, even if I can't say they were all that difficult with the Guardian weapon/armor. Not that a veteran picking up a new weapon can be compared to a first timer that still needs to learn all the basics, but they still served a legitimate function in making that playthrough not waste nearly as much of my time on the way to the content I gave a shit about.
I don't see the "OP" Gear concept as the problem. If a game I wasn't particularly interested in at launch lasts a few years and then comes around with an expansion or DLC that catches my attention or that my friends are hyping up and wanting me to join, I gladly and happily use that powerful gear because 1. I like feeling powerful where appliccable in certain games and 2. I want to be where the most amount of people and hype are. I don't want to be stuck in the vanilla content while everyone else is engaging with the thing that I'm actually picked up the game for. The mechanics and/or story should be strong enough to keep my interest even if I'm breezing through the early game content
Hot take I suppose, but if the point of your game is "It's not fun if you're not getting into the tedium of the grind" then the game sucks. That's not a game at that point, it's a job.
Another mind goblin I encountered in Prey:
-Upgrade pistol
-Find gold pistol with better base dmg
-Old pistol is now obsolete, weapon kits wasted
-Stop upgrading all my other weapons because im afraid the same will happen to them.
see when that happens to me i just instantly think "oh well, i'll just have to compensate with skill alone then" cuz most games are overly forgiving in combat these days to the point where i can usually just go with how much i like shooting a particular gun or sometimes the look of a weapon alone rather than bullshit numbers telling me what to use.
@@god47398 Imagine being bullied by inconsequential numbers.
This is not a mind goblin this is you being extra 😂
Resident Evil 8 experience
Woolie: “I press A to talk to people, right? The tutorial told me so.”
**accidentally walks 2 feet from an npc, just out of range of its dialogue trigger**
Woolie: Reality isn’t real, I can’t trust anything the game told me, all of my buttons need to be remapped, and I’ll ignore talking to any NPC until just before the end of the game.
Yeah, Woolie has a bad habit of fucking up dead simple core mechanics, blaming the game and then insisting that he’s doing everything right the game just sucks.
@@LaBarata12 *ARKHAM FLASHBACKS*
The Woolie Way. For Woolie.
@@LaBarata12 It’s his QA Tester days that get to him, there’s the assumption that the game is bugged.
And to be fair, we’ve all done that to a certain extent. “I can’t beat the final boss! I don’t have enough health! What? My 5 elixirs each fully restore my health and magic, AND give me an attack boost? BUT WHAT IF I NEED THEM LATER?!”
The mind goblins are strong.
@@cyberninjazero5659 I don't even like the Arkham games but "nO oNe ToLd mE aBouT cOmbOs" still makes question existence
0:45 "It was on Stale on Seam" DAMN THOEE STALE SEAMS!
The biggest thing that fucks me up is when a game has limited exp. Limited exp means i *have* to get all of it.
Never play the older fire emblem games then, limited money, exp,units, gold and items as core design will hurt you.
I hate how I feel targeted by someone's self-diagnostic.
What? Chrono Cross has stat caps per star level? Bitch don't tell me to not reach the cap every time.
I feel like if you already suffer from mind goblins and happened to get into survival horror as one of your favorite genres early on it just makes it a million times worse too. The urge to save everything you have never goes away.
Playing things like early Final Fantasy games probably didn't help either. I'm SURE you can end in an unwinnable game in those if you don't have enough items
My fear of continuing down the hallway when I hear ominous noises in the distance is greater than my willingness to even play the game, let alone play it efficiently.
Speaking of Dishonored mind-goblinery... That tiny bit of regenerative mana that always leaves enough for one teleport ? The designers built it as a mercy feature so that you'd never be unable to teleport but what it meant was that I always waited for it to regen after every teleport to avoid using a mana potion.
So much time wasted...
Oh god, I remember that. I played Dishonored at launch and haven't touched it afterwards, and I remember that shit. Even in situation where I should really have been teleporting all over the place, I zapped once, sat down (even when being shot) and did absolutely nothing for a hot moment. I was constantly full on mana potions and I felt physical revulsion at the mere thought of actually using any.
Deus Ex Human Revolution also basically gimps you if you use your augments, becuase you can't even knock guys out without using power. It's ridiculous.
As much as I love Dishonored I have to agree that it's a game *definitely* not for ppl with ocd
The way i've started getting around this mentality is just use everything. If i'm not using it now, then its the same as when I use all of it. So might as well burn it.
Isn't there an older podcast video where pat has this exact problem?
I think New Vegas has the best way of handling this. The complete edition comes with all the DLC, including the OP preorder gear, but the game's loader on PC (and on consoles I think it's on the options menu) lets you manually toggle each individual dlc pack on and off. So if you just want to play vanilla NV, you can.
The stuff you get at the beginning is not super broken either, just the grenade launcher and armor stand out
Theres also mods that will scatter the gear throughout the world.
@@logansackett3416 I believe the JSawyer mod does this, which is good because getting all those messages and shit as you start the game really sucks
Or a Console user, just throw that stuff in a box and forget it, done it many times. Or the long way, just playthrough the game and at points, install the DLCs.
That, and honestly only the grenade rifle is worth keeping from all that stuff after a while.
Anyone else catch woolie saying, "on stale on seam".
The Prey Water thing reminds me of Witcher 3 and that busted perk that gives you like 10 minutes of health regen from any food you eat instead of like 5 secs
"I could use that life-saving medicine now....
....but what if I need it later?"
No you don't GET IT. Sure, I'm actively dying at this very moment, but what if I end up MORE dying in the future?
@@idiotcube "Well if you become Undead Healing potions will hurt you"
it's for this reason that getting free consumables has no affect on me
@@TOGYS7 I have just the opposite problem, having the extra consumables makes me think they are virtually unlimited so I use them more than I should, so I get empty when I really need them
playing dungeon crawler based roguelikes gets you out this mindset real quick
end up in a bad situation? better use all your shit to get out of it because those items are gone when you're dead
I can confirm I slowed down a few of my early Duke Nukem 3D playthroughs DRASTICLY by restoring my health with water fountains/fire hydrants
The problem with putting in 'anti-goblin' techniques that stop people from optimizing out the fun is that if you do it badly, it just creates entirely different mind goblins that do the same thing, if not worse.
Remember Final Fantasy VIII, and how enemies scaled with your character levels but not to your junctioned stats? That was an ANTI-grinding system, they wanted to disincentivize people grinding out the difficulty by overlevelling. But their system still ended up rewarding unfun grinding, the grinding just looked different.
The prey fountain made me think of bioshock 2 passive power of "healing when standing in water".
It was slow but I would stand in puddle for a while just to save on healing items. Did I need to, not really. But it felt kind of good to save ressources.
I struggled with these goblins for YEARS with modded Skyrim...
Subsystems like survival mods, or elaborate crafting, etc make the game immersive and fresh feeling, riiiight up until I realize I've spent 20 mins JUST eating, tending wounds, getting warm, etc AFTER EVERY DUNGEON. As realistic as it is, clearing like one bandit camp per in-game day is a slog compared to vanilla. Also? Scripts! Looove crashing and having to do all that shit again.
Now I just roleplay that shit. Carry food, sleep & eat when it makes sense, no bikinis in a blizzard, etc, and VOILA the game is just as fun, but stable & playable! No more limping back to an inn immediately, because a skeever nipped me and I've already used every bandage in the region! No crashing, because the game is tracking 3 followers' hunger meters AND their warmth!
I did that in red dead 2. Camp at night, eat dinner. Wake up at sunrise, eat breakfast. And dress sensibly. Although the game does have a temperature system where you need to dress fir the weather, id take it further by matching my surroundings. Rugged cowboy in the wild, sharp dressed in civilization.
That's literally no one's fault but yours.
For the fountain, I think their point is to give a tiny reward to the player for trying to interact with things in a game where you want the player to pay attention to everything, important in a immersive sim. I think the solution would have been to reduce the delay on the fountain, and make it just sputter and stop working after 5 uses.
Or stop restoring health because you aren't thirsty anymore.
Or just have it stop working until after you take damage again.
If you do the psychic water side quest they will restore your psi by a good amount though.
MIND GOBLIN DEEZ NUTS???
This comment section really is a diamond mine for Deez Nuts enthusiasts.
The Monster Hunter World DLC gear problem happened to my best friend but his situation is slightly different. He used the gear and easily flew through the game no problem but because it was so braindead effortless he never actually learned the controls and systems and mechanics. So when he realized he was using the speedup to endgame gear he took it off and tried playing normal but hated the controls and couldn't reset them to buttons he felt comfortable with and then quit because "game feels bad so game bad."
He explained this to me the other day since I just started Rise and asked him if he was going to play with me. Holy shit.
I definitely ping pong water fountains in prey, and I just realized an elegant solution would be to make the drinking give you a 5 minute buff that provided slight health regeneration so spamming it gained no extra benefit. If you're willing to take the time it's still heals you efficiently however it does not interrupt playing the rest of the game.
Pat should play Breath of Fire: Dragon's Quarter, a game that forces you to defeat your mind goblins because the items are ALL YOU HAVE and you can't be stingy
I dropped that game when I was a teen because of mind goblins.
@@crybirb If you approach it like any other RPG you will get thrown off it so hard you'll make a crater on impact, teen you wasn't expecting what it was serving
that is one of my favorite games. there's one point, right after ice caves, where there's a series of battles and bosses, I'd just use up my counter on them, then revert the save with carried over bonus xp, level up, save, and repeat until I was strong enough to beat them handily without transforming.
the ptsd I still have from somehow getting through that game..
Having got back into it recently, I'd say it's less not using it to defeat your mind goblins. By trying to find ways and playing as lame/smart as possible to not get hit and use any. At least until equip drops get your free money and you can spend more freely. Plus the game gives you incentive to restart and curb stop the beginning of the game.
Ah yes, the good ol' Master Ball dilemma.
I member back on the first time I played HL1, I was so keen on conserving ammo and health, I practically only ever used the pistol and the shotgun for everything. I would only ever use the other weapons when their ammo would be full and there was more laying around. Plus, if I took any damage, then we restoring back a savestate, baby. This only became worse when I got the Hivehand weapon, which is a ranged weapon with infinte ammo, but very little damage.
What this meant was, I had everything maxed, 14 weapons at my disposal, I was fully prepared for everything, but then the game ended and I realized I didn’t get to use any of it, and never got to do any of the cool stuff. The Tau Cannon is the single coolest gun I've ever tried in an FPS and my mind goblins told me I was better off having 100 ammo on it than actually using it.
Few years later, I replayed the game on Hard, and just didn't give a care about anything: no savestates, I use the guns I actually like first, and everything else just as last resort. The game immediately became 700% more fun than it was with my first playthrough.
I had a friend use that same defender set for most of the base game and it made her a worse player overall. To the point that she had to cheat(hack the game) for decos, used meta builds and still would cause us to fail missions because she never learned how to fight those lower ranked monster. So when the higher ranks started to show up they would crush her.
Let's be real though, even if you're good hacking decos in makes sense, lol. Fuck the droprates on some of them.
@@EnsignEpic Yeah there's absolutely no shame in using the all items shop mod and just buying decorations. And it's not like It completely removes the effort factor since most of the good decos are pretty damn pricey, so I still need to actually PLAY the game in order to get it, but knowing that I only need to grind money and not pray for RNGsus takes away a lot of the tedium
The real issue are the people who will get mad at and view the game negatively if it was designed to prevent their goblins
Hmm, who does that remind us of?
And they're allowed to.
Meanwhile Pat cheats in infinite money in ME3 to buy every gun at max upgrade
Has he beaten it before at least? I understand it more if it isn’t the first time through
@@606hunter1 no he's never played me3
Well he simply does not care about the game balance in that game. It's not uncommon for Pat to not care at all about combat balance in RPGs and simply wants to be overpowered so he can get to the next story bit. I can kinda understand this, I play a lot of JRPGs on easy just to take out the grind and not have to spend any more time in combat than I have to, it's kind of the least interesting part of the game.
Outer Worlds had something that was pretty bad like this as well. On supernova mode you couldn't save your game at will so there was no save scumming, HOWEVER when you fast travel it saves your game not after you arrive at the location but BEFORE you travel. I'm sure you can imagine how this was used.
I thought there was no fast travel on Supernova.
@@Entropic_Alloy only back to your ship
Final Fantasy 7 is a good example of what Sid Meier was talking about. Where people see a big open-ended system, do the absolute most boring things with it (like giving every character the same Materia build), and then complain about all their characters being the same and treat it as a fault of the game.
meanwhile here i am managed to beat yiazmat in FF12 without ever utilizing the gambit system. it was time consuming as shit but it was fun lol
I love how the letter was worded like "my friend is nuts, amirite?" and then Pat and Woolie spent the next 30 minutes ragging on awful game design
But, as we know, it's the fau|t of a game designer that s[]me pe[]ple don't have enough wi|| to contro| themse|ves, so everyone shou|d aссommodate just them. Similarly, how games should not use character positioning by stereo sound because professional streamer/entertainers use tvs without channe| separation or with mishand|ed mix1ng headphone deck with mono only.
@@rensato5027 I mean designing games around the most extreme of player tendencies is a lesson learned pretty early in game design history. There's loads of stories of "well we designed it to be played like __________ but players just ended up doing ______ which ended up being much more effecient so we nerfed that method ."
Hell I think theres an instance of that rather recently with Classic WoW's dungeon grinding.
It depends whether is a good thing (rewards creativity) or not. Sure running from fountain to fountain in Prey is extreme, but Bioshock 2 has a similar perk where you get health/mana by standing in water, but it takes a slot so it balances it out.
On the other hand, in Rimworld for example, instead of gunning raiders, people used the temperature system to stroke/freeze, and that was patched out because the dev said "we don't think you should play that way" and he still keeps adding ways to make raids harder (with sappers/drop pods that destroy your kill box) so it depends.
I guess making the game more fun and allowing people to do crazy shit is always the goal, so removing fountains in Prey is okay, removing the perk in Bioshock 2 is not because it has a tradeoff, and nerfing weird ways to defeat raids in Rimworld is not okay.
@@NaderinZim I really don't understand why that Rimworld dev is so obsessed with making raids challenging for 1% of players and really daunting and unfair for just about everyone else in the process.
@@Zangelin "Drama" he says, but I just call it bullshit, at least the stuff around it (though raids got harder) is way better with the ideology update.
My partner is currently playing AC Odyssey, her mind goblins are that she can’t move past an area until everything on that portion of the map is clear. She’s approximately 20% through the story and has been playing for at least 100 hours.
It’s interesting to see it happen in front of you
Fuck AC Odyssey, that game is GLACIAL in it's progression. It took me 100 hours to beat Dark Souls the first time, and it felt like a LONG journey, AC Odyssey was frustratingly slow. The worst part is that the game has the balls to pull you out of the world for some pointless bullshit. Ship combat was fun, 4/10
Whenever I play rpgs, I immediately try to get exp boosting skills/equipment to maximize my leveling, even if it makes me weaker. Scarlet Nexus has a Deluxe Edition equip item that has a 5% money and exp bonus, but I won’t use it because even in a single-player game it still FEELS like pay to win.
I actually kind of enjoy playing games like this though because it encourages you to improve your actual skill or tactics to compensate for lack of stats, abilities, or upgrades, until later in the game when those XP boosts have propelled your character to greater heights and you have both skill *and* an overpowered character.
I encountered this exact problem playing Yakuza Kiwami 2, I refused to upgrade anything else and ate food at any opportunity because I wanted to save my points to max out the "EXP Boost" skills, even though it's only like 1 extra EXP per street enemy per level of upgrade.
If Int speeds up my gaining levels and my levels can buy more Int why would I ever invest in anything but the long term rewards.
"It was on stale on Seam."
Best note Woolie ever read.
This is me with Pokemon. I'll be running around in a patch of grass to grind xp for my pokemon and when they inevitably get low hp from all the fighting, I'll run allllll the way to the pokemon center and go through that whole ordeal instead of just using a super potion on them.
In Darkest Dungeon and Dont Starve on Switch, you have to manually activate each DLC per save. Im not a big fan of this, but its probably the best solution to this very problem.
On the topic of optimizing the fun out of games, that was my only gripe with Metroid Fusion/Zero Mission, in the form of hauling my ass back to the closest energy room, which could be 5-15 minutes of walking past enemies with little to no threat to them.
I thought about some of this until I realized I don’t at all care what my clear time for a game is. Spent like two hours in the literal first Japan area of nioh just to practise on the npcs
The better implementation is when you try to go to Iceborn depending on your rating the NPC will give you the armor saying "hey, its tough out there. use this!" so you know its connected to iceborn
For that second topic on "is it the dev's job to design to make sure people don't optimize the fun out of things" the answer is a resounding YES and it's one of the most difficult/annoying things there are. There are multiple GDC talks on that very subject, and it comes up all the time in talks that aren't specifically devoted to it as well.
The stated rule is more or less verbatim "If a player has the opportunity to optimize at the expense of fun, always assume they will".
Hey look, that's what I get for writing before continuing. Well played.
Of course, there comes edge cases that are impossible to design out, simply because the person doing it is that fundamentally broken.
Love ya, Billy-Minh, but you're fucking bonkers bro.
I feel like that responsibility only goes so far, though, and the case given in the discussion of the water fountains in Prey is one example. If a player is willing to ruin their own experience by spending hours recovering HP one at a time, there comes a point where they bear responsibility for that decision.
It reminds me of when people used to complain about the FF12 gambit system for letting the game play itself. Which you could certainly set the system up so that battles would require no input from you, and I could see how that would become boring. And that's exactly why I didn't set up gambits like that when I played the game. A player should be capable of looking at the less fun option and saying, "Yeah, I'm not gonna do that."
@@Smileyhat Iunno, there is a line but it's pretty far in. I would say the XII example isn't really fair, since if the opportunity is there for a major gameplay system to be gamed like that, it's fair for them to not wanna continue playing it. It's a fair critique. Feels like when people say to do a challenge run rather than complain about a game's difficulty.
The PS1 FF games have so many missables that it just makes me feel nervous about playing the game and missing any. You might think it's easy to just ignore them and have fun with the rest of the game, but to lose out on options in an RPG (or any game really) hits that mind goblin spot so hard.
@@pixelsheep3443 In the XII example, I could understand if the system was on by default and, by default, set up for the game to play itself for you. But to the contrary, you have to go out of your way to set it up to play for you. You have to spend your gil buying all of the logic pieces from various stores in the game, you have to spend...whatever the points were to advance on the level-up grid system to get more gambit slots, and then you have to manually figure out how you want to logic each character into playing themselves. Just like how in Prey you have to go out of your way to try to restore health 1 at a time, and that going out of your way is the entire problem. In either case it is far easier not to do the thing you dislike than to spend time (and resources, in the FFXII case) using/abusing them.
As a fan of older FF games, as well, I guess I just don't have those mind goblins, but I've never been bothered by not having everything. In fact, I kinda like finding out there's stuff I missed, especially major side content stuff, because it gives me a reason to go back and play the games again. It's the whole reason I've played through FF7, as well as some of the Tales games, several times over.
@@Smileyhat I think an easier way to describe it is like the OCD reaction. It's not something most people would feel like they need to do. but for that few, it really just comes out. Same as with XII, some people wanna see it all and then move on to the next. Some people just naturally feel the urge to break systems. At least with XII, I get what you're saying, but I personally wouldn't mind if people still took issue with some of the streamlining or systems that the game had, even if personally I liked what I played of it.
I love replaying FF1 and 3 personally, it's just the whole disc change thing that puts extra fear into the missables for me. That and things being all 3D make it a bit harder to fully comb places for secrets. It got so bad for me that I didn't mind spoilering FF7 for myself just so that I could get a list of when to look for Enemy Skill Materia stuff. I'd say a good chunk of these are pretty rare complaints on the whole, but there's a good chunk of stuff like this that is a bit more commonly annoying out there, like the timed FF9 sword or Pokemon BW2's hard mode unlock. More of an accessibility thing, but honestly, experiences like that are what made me want to start getting into game dev stuff myself.
biggest mind goblin is that you always have to do your best to do the best / good ending on your first try
God, THANK YOU for saying this! I had such a rough time with Borderlands 2, because I got it with all DLC's, but it doesn't tell you when's a good time to do each one! I remember loading up the Dungeons & Dragons parody one, because everyone said that was the best one, and the opening cutscene IMMEDIATELY spoils major characters deaths for the main campaign!
Maybe that shit should unlock after a certain amount of main game progress! I mean, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition doesn't let you warp straight to Oolicile from the 1st bonfire!
Question for people who do the water fountain stuff to save using in game resources: Do you consider time a resource or not?
See I always avoided making use of slow, inefficient healing like that, because in my mind I'm giving up my time resources to save my healing resources, and my time resources are more valuable because I can't get more.
Please don't mind break goblin gamers even more.
Potions are fake; minutes are real
When you're playing a game that has this stupid feature, you realize that your time isn't precious at all and you just take the hard way because you just can.
Here's what Pat needs to do to fix his Dishonoured goblins: play it twice, doing the first one high chaos and the second one low-chaos / ghost or whatever he thinks he needs to do to make it perfect.
Abomi Nation has a cool feature where it institutes a boss-to-boss level cap. This can be turned off but it makes playing the game feel a lot more relaxing and a lot less grindy. Not to mention the 'wild' encounters give a very low amount of EXP and there is a limited number of 'trainer' encounters that are gonna be the source of most of your EXP.
Dark Souls 2 did pre-order weapons ok, the weapons they gave you were barely a tier up over the beginner weapons and you'd typically replace them around the time you approached the first boss or right after it
Something that I did in re4 (specifically on ps4) was that I didn't upgrade my gear once until I got the final versions of the guns. All because I knew that that any money I put into the old guns would be wasted when I progressed through the story an hour later. Oh, and rune system that don't let you remove runes from gear without breaking them. In ANY game that does this I will just flat out not use them under the pretense of "But what if I find better gear and end up wasting the rune?". I'm also like woolie in that I will never use my 9999999 elixirs. Not in the sense of like "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SECRET SECRET BOSS AFTER FIGHTING THE SECRET BOSS". My reasoning is that I don't want to get through a stage (or whatever) using "buffs" since if I do I feel like I'll be in a situation of "I can't beat X thing without X consumable". Mind goblins fooking suck ace.
I was down health in Prey once and just went left and right between 4 or five sinks to gain heath and it took like 2-3 minutes.
The mind goblins involved in Pokemon breeding are wild. Want a pokemon with the right nature and IVs for your run on the Battle Frontier? Be prepared to run in a circle for hours on end waiting for eggs to hatch. Is one IV sub-optimal? Can't risk losing because of bad stats -- I better start the whole process again.
honestly, i can understand some mind goblin stuff but this is are levels to it and consequently, there are levels to how much i'd sympathize/empathize with someone who is enslaved to these goblins. people have the gobline of "but what if i need this item later" or "i need to optimize my gameplay to be as efficient as possible" while i have the mindset of "god i hate persona. i do not want to be rushed or have my shit overly gated and scheduled cus that just makes me not play the game"
i essentially see mind goblines the same way as min-maxing, you wanna do it the most efficent possible? fine but so long as what your doing doesnt make the rest of the game virtually unplayable (because it's just not something that is a bug or experienceable in normal gameplay) then you do you
The way I see it if someone wants to optimise the fun out of the game that's fine but they better not complain when it isn't fun. That shit's infuriating to see
@@thedom2753 it's like saying you'll always walk off the side of the path if there arent any railings. sometimes the railing is there for a needed and obvious purpose, sometimes its there because the creator wanted it there and other times it isnt there because there really isnt a need for them. if you're gonna go out and make a problem for yourself that really isnt the fault of no railings.
When I started MW I had the guardian armor without even owning the Iceborne DLC, just the base game. My friend that starting playing since its launch and had over 500 hours I caught up to in about 200
Woah snazzy new thumbnail! TH-cam interaction!
I don't know.
Sounds like a couple of people saying "you must take the choice away from the player" since they have a hard time reconciling their own tendency for controlling their impulses.
That's totally what this argument sounds like; "I'm deliberately going out of my way to make the game less fun for myself, and it's your fault for not stopping me."
They both have hard core.mind goblins tho tbh
This was actually a really good conversation for me, cause it got me thinking more about how I design my games.
I thought this was gonna be about goopy-gamer-goblin-brain-syndrome. Different goblins I guess.
I had this pretty bad in DragonFable, where some classes had moves to steal HP and regain MP. I'd wear down the last enemy in an encounter, and then stall on cooldowns until I could full-heal both bars. I liked to imagine that I was eating people alive when I killed them using lifesteal moves. Did _not_ want to have to deal with attrition.
Eventually broke out of this when I found a class with a busted desperation move, so running around at 20% HP and nuking everyone I ran into was more optimal than obsessively keeping myself topped up.
Deathknight?
@@BasicSub Yep! Think Dragonlord had something like that too lol
My friend did the same thing with the Iceborn armor
Prey does have a momnet where they shame the way you play, with the alien augments. One of the more antagonistic characters calls you a dumb dumb if you used alien powers. So I didn't.
That guys an asshole, don't listen to that guy. The alien power ending should genuinely be the Canon ending.
The game Final Fantasy Legend (aka the first SaGa game) has a really interesting version of this, because it is an RPG with a finite amount of lives. If your party member dies X number of times, you actually lose that character, forever. In every town in that game there is a "revival store," and I believe (though I'm working on old memories here) that there is a mechanic to get an extra life or two, but all of that is PERMANENTLY wasted, because most players will simply just save scum their way through the entire game. And this is a gameboy game, so no quicksave / quickload, just turn the system off and on, off and on, until you get fed up.
It just hit me that this is very much a thing with Pokemon Centers with me. I am very susceptible to this mind-goblin habit in any Pokemon game, where I'll frequently backtrack along a route to heal my team at a Pokemon Center rather than stock up on healing items, even though it'd probably be more fun to treat the route as one long-form challenge of battling and resource management. The annoying thing is that I can't think of any reasonable solution except player-imposed challenges.
Worst part
Difficulty has no reward in Prey.
If you're an insane person who has problems with the water on it etc, then just change difficulty
12:30 - I don't really have *that* much of an issue with Dishonored on this, but Hitman Absolution fucking pissed me the fuck off with the points system so much. Kill a dude and it subtracts points, hide the body and you get points back, you still lose points. You even lose points for killing targets, but make more points on average for kill the the target. It made me so mad.
Probably the only problems I have with the new Hitman series, it just doesn't want you to have fun if you want a good score.
LFG tools in MMOs is usually a go to complaint for my friends who are into the more hardcore MMOs because they want to sit in town spamming LFG in the chat or get involved in the high school clique bullshit that is guild drama.
Wait, they bitch about tools that make it easier for people to find groups so they can just play the goddamn game?
The actual fuck?
@@Revan058 most of them got into MMOs far too late and fell the romanticism/nostalgia of "hardcore" MMO's like classic EQ, ultima online, vanilla WoW & EvE online.
the problem is that the stories people tell of those games are far more interesting than the actual games.
Dishonored 2 fixed some of the problems in 1, a part of me is disapointed they didnt give more tiers to Chaos lvl.
Imagine if the more High Chaos you gotten you were more likely to see more areas locked off or infested or boobytrapped? Or finding guards with new weapons like harpoon-guns that can stun you and pull you off ledges. Or if the Overseers showed up with "Miracles" as a way to negate and cripple your abilities. So you would have to balance the power use on the normal guards and the mundane options on the antimagic peps.
Or if in very Low Chaos, if you got spotted by a guard theres a chance theyll just ignore you cause you been doing more good and it has began to affected some of the guards or have an equivelant of this scene - th-cam.com/video/pMd4S-LkywI/w-d-xo.html -
Oh, going for peak algo manipulation on the new thumbnails. I like it
The Monster Hunter thing was ESPECIALLY frustrating for PC players because we got Iceborne six months later than console. So imagine you play base World. You grind the hell of it perfecting your build. And then all of a sudden new weapons just drop for free that take zero effort to upgrade that immediately outclass EVERYTHING you worked for so far. And unlike console players who just got to jump immediately into Iceborne where their old stuff becomes obsolete anyway, on PC we had to send six long months knowing every hunt we ever did was meaningless as everyone was eventually funneled into using nothing but the defender weapons which someone with hundreds of hours of gameplay or someone that just started playing are now at the same level.
My favorite and probably worst example of this is how obsessed I was with a single charm in Dishonored 2 called Spirit Water. What does this do?
It allows you to restore mana by drinking water from the fountains and sinks around the place. Very slowly. So you essentially have infinite mana if you're willing to waste enough time!
I did have lots of fun crafted a x4 Bonecharm on NewGame+ out of that perk and restoring my entire mana bar in a few gulps though
The shitty DLC practices of the 7th Console Generation continue to echo through time and become more and more ridiculous as years go on and people like Josh Sawyer explicitly shit on the preorder DLC from his own game.
Maybe just in my head, but felt like Pat got real defensive when people started talking about FFIV lol
No, he got *real* snippy suddenly.
"NO IT'S NOT THE PERFECTLY THE SAME BUT IS 100% ANALOGOUS BUT IT DOESN'T COUNT BECAUSE REASONS, SHUT UP!!!"
@@Revan058 I mean to be fair they *were* talking about bonuses that came with the game purchase, not really DLC...
the part about the potions and the armor is the same argument right...you dont have to use the potions or the armor.
@@leeohx7174 They are baked into the game as default options. Different from say, if theres DLC or MTX on the store somewhere that you can seek out. As they said if it was a code or a toggle outside of the game it would be a different thing.
@@leeohx7174 Not quite, jump potions in FFXIV are separate purchases you have to buy for 10 bucks separately from the game, you don't just get one for buying the DLC. If you did, the situation would apply.
I maintain that any kind of regenerating health mechanic should just increase exponentially if the player is safe for a short period. Players are going to abuse periods of safety to let their health regen anyway, so you might as well save them some real-world time.
Nah. If they want to abuse it, make them suffer for it.
You *can* do it, but it's meant to be a small bonus, so if you want to waste your time? Well, it's going to waste your time.
@@Revan058 That's stupid and accomplishes nothing.
If there really must be a downside, make health regen gradually lower the player's maximum health over time or something. That way the health gained from regen isn't really "free".
@@tbotalpha8133 Oh, it accomplishes exactly what I want: Suffering for people who ruin the experience for themselves.
It's a totally self-inflicted harm, and it's really kinda funny.
@@Revan058 Ahh good ol Ys 1 and 2... fun times. At least it wasn't old Hydlide lol
Mind Goblin critiques always pissed me off, even though I know a lot of people can't help themselves. Big examples include: "FFII/FFVIII lets me grind really easily, so it's bad", "Doom 2016 has too many collectables, I spend too much time finding them", "post-MGS2 Metal Gear is too easy, I can just kill everyone and walk through the stage", "FFXII is boring, I can just turn on gambits and let it play itself", etc.
I'm always like, just choose to have fun! You don't have to torture yourself going after every icon on the map in an open world or optimize your build like a speedrunner!
FFXII is a peak example that EVERYONE is ready to get fucked by mind goblins at the drop of a hat, I realized really quick how bad it could get so I just set it for auto attacks and casting stuff like Haste because I was to upkeep that anyways every so often or "use weakness" on a spell caster when I'm farming something.
But EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. The game comes up the shit about people spending half their playtime on working on gambits comes up and I hate it because that system is still better than most party member AI in JRPGs (Xenoblade games feel fucking terrible at times with how bad they can be holy shit) but it probably won't ever show up again.
The ability to customize the AI and cut down the micromanaging is part of the reason I actually adore FFXII. Especially because I don't play optimally, I like having the ability to designate a target, use the abilities I like and let the AI do the rest. Sure it's less engaging that something like Persona in terms of moment by moment action choice, but it lets me run around in a zone when Im grinding license points and eat a sandwich without really having to focus. Switch on 4x Speed mode and I can grind my a** up to whatever I want/need to be in way less time.
@@jariu9612 FF12 Zodiac Age was such a brilliant fix for people's mindgoblins. The game literally would not allow you to just make 6 copies of the same character without seriously hamstringing yourself.
i had the great misfortune of abandoning the gambit system and went at it manually, you can imagine how my yiazmat fight went lol
When I do something like the fountain thing, I usually get a little hit of good-feeling, because it feels like I'm tricking the game into giving me an advantage.
I find it a little silly that Pat says he throws out every pre order item as soon as he gets it but he will cheat the mass effect credit store right away
The difference is "I went out of my way to cheat" versus "The cheating is put into my inventory." One you actually kinda gotta do manually, while the other is literally Right There. Yes, it's silly, but there is a visible difference.
Kingdoms of Amalur Re Reckoning had a BUNCH of good gear for any build, that stops being useful after like level 5 because everything has better stats.
I think that's a good approach, tbh. A taste of power yet to come, but only a little ahead. You will soon find far stronger.
My personal goblins: Halo 2 specifically where I wouldn’t waste any powerful weapons like rockets or the sniper rifle on weak enemies, but never ended up using it for the entire level. And obviously the weapons don’t carry over and you only have two weapon slots.
Half-Life limited the amount of sodas from the soda machines.
I never had problems with mind goblins until I got to play online RPG games AND persona. Persona in particular made feel uncomfortable to use items outside moment I'm now about to get my ass wiped.
Normally I'm the kinda of guy who will use the weaker armor if it looks better on character
robin walker not letting players optimize the fun out of TF2 by removing the mechanic from TF classic (where demo could blow up part of the map) that made players choose between playing the game and actually having fun but losing more often, or winning more but doing a bunch of drudge work. a true master.
mind goblin deez nuts
Man these new thumbnails are getting wild
Loving these new thumbnails
Code Vein is guilty too, best cape in the game is a preorder bonus. My friend recently started and I told him to use it but forgot it was a pre-order bonus...oops
I mind goblin on that water fountain thing pretty hard, but I can't really get behind it being an objective flaw that needs to be fixed just by how a tame example it is. I think saying that it's some obvious mistake that needs to be fixed because a micro percent of us can't control it is more than a little silly.
Woolie, Woolie... REVERT THE UPDATE. GO BACK TO SLEEP. THEY WILL NOT STOP US FROM NOT HAVING FUN!
My mind goblins come from character action games. Been playing bayonetta recently and everytime I get hit, everytime I use an item or when I hit continue the mind goblins come a knockin telling me I'm a bad player despite the fact I haven't even finished my first playthrough.
I like the new thumbnail!
If you have the Ultimate Edition of New Vegas you congeal off the bed in Doc Mitchell's house with ten spears, a semi automatic pistol, an over-under break action shotgun, a 40mm grenade launcher, ammunition for all of it, a machete, a pair of binoculars, and like four sets of great early armor, all of it at full condition so the weapons don't jam and the armor confers its full protection. I'd have to check to be sure, but I think you also start with a few healing items like stimpaks and doctor's bags.
The Defender sets frustrate me so much, and it's coming to Rise as well. I think that a lot of people will have this experience when first getting into MH now, and that's really unfortunate
I get why they did it. maybe you had beaten monsterhunter, and you deleted your stuff for space. So you hear about the DLC, start a new save, and without this you think "it will take me weeks to get to that content". This item lets you skip that, and just blitz through the early content. And honestly? While it ruined it for this guy, but when you sell DLC, your target customer is a person that has already played the game, and that was a valid consideration for the deleted save guy. The real problem is that they don't make any difference for a bundled set. Maybe add in Bob the OP item vendor for that kind of stuff.
I quit Lost Odyssey for the exact reason Pat talks about. I don't feel like playing a game that demands "No you *WILL* be this level and no higher!"
Grind in Numara Atoll using Gamble on Silver Kelolons. You can grind well past level 70. I know it's too late, but that's what I did
@@Jessar16 thanks for the info, if I ever reinstall it I'll give that a try.
Dragon's Dogma. A game with a ton of classes you can switch between at inns. Problem is though that when you level up, the stats you get are based on your current class. As you can imagine this leads to a TON of frustrating min maxing nonsense where you don't play the class you want to actually play until you hit the level cap (which is 200 btw) so you have "the best" stats for the build you're playing. People always say that it doesn't matter though, your gear determines damage much more than your leveled up stats. But I'LL know I'm not "perfect" dammit, and that'll bug me forever! Especially since you only get one save file!
A good way to preventing hoarding is implementing certain mechanics such as; limit how much they can hold items in their inventory, adjust the game in a way that has the player want to use items to prevent being too full of inventory. RE4 and the Souls series do this well.
BotW in my opinion doesn't because they use weapons, which people are attached to, as one of the items that break and need to be replaced.
I think the best way to deal with the Defender armor is to also allow players that choose it to have access to more challenging hunts. That way experienced players can skip the tutorial/early game and to show new players what to expect.
I used the DLC armor in MH World and I didn't get bored. I actually thought it made the early game fun cause I didn't need to worry about grinding early.
I know that's the loop, but I could only play for a few hours at my grandparents before I left, so it was kind of neccessary.
Also I played World so I could get hyped for Rise and I loved both!
I started up World again after over a year of ignoring it and the Defender weapons and Guardian armor they gave me upon logging in is helping me in easing back into the game. From a fresh save file too since I couldn't remember anything.
I mean yeah, grinding for gear is the loop of Monster Hunter... but it is incredibly annoying and I don't want to do it so I'll wear the OP armor so I don't have to.
9 times out of 10 DLC armor/weapons usually get phased out within an hour of gameplay. yes I think it's dumb to lock it behind a preorder but it's not like you automatically win the game just because you preordered it and got a gun or something.
your grandparents had Monster Hunter?
I really don't feel like this is something that should be viewed as such a negative. Seems silly. One mechanic I can think of like this is the coffee machine and the potato chips in Subnautica. They restore a tiny bit of water and food respectively, they're infinite, and they're free. So is any fish pulled out of a fish farm someone could easily make and the special fish that can be used to filter water, both of which will give more food/ water than the coffee or the chips. Does that mean I want the chips and coffee removed just because they don't have much of a practical purpose, and someone like that person the email here was about might go crazy about trying to minmax it, such as by making dozens of coffee makers and vending machines for chips to try and make them useful through sheer volume? No, I don't, that's a weird fringe case and should be ignored because the coffee and chips are a fun novelty that add flavor and a touch of life and soul to the game. A handful of obsessive crazies shouldn't be allowed to ruin that magic for everyone else just because they want to try and optimize until the game isn't fun anymore.
MHW is definitely triggering my mind goblins, being able to just use the Defender stuff to bypass the main gear is neat but also it invalidates all the other content but also it kills grinding which I typically hate but also it let me kill a Rathian the first time I saw it before I ever had any right to.
I hate cheat armor and weapons. Especially when it comes to action games with a high skill ceiling. Noobs will get carried through the early part of the game when your supposed to be learning things like managing health stamina. Micromanaging item and equipment load outs. And most of all crafting higher level gear and items.
Then when iceborne starts they call it bs cuz it’s too hard now. The cheat equipment won’t stop banbaro from three shotting them. They then start chugging their supplies of mega potions only to quickly run out of because they never considered thinking ahead and making more for back up, (or they never considered using the crafting system because they didn’t need too). Which then becomes a slow process because they never once upgraded the harvest box, little loan use it. And now they can’t even farm beotodus cuz they don’t have the supplies, or skill to out damage him. See the problem? Cheat equipment encourages bad habits in players. In this case the defenders gear encourages players to neglect the core features that are required to enjoy the game.
Lucky for me I preferred playing pacifist in Dishonored. I guess they figured it would be harder to sell the game if there was only stealth with little-to-no flashy combat options. Those StealthGamer montages are pretty sick though.
I think dark souls 2 Scholar of the first sin deserves credit for taking all the pre-order items that would spawn in your new character inventory were instead
Moved to different vendors.
EXP takes the RP in RPG and crushes it into a thousand tiny pieces.
Could you use "Goblins" as a unit of measurement?
No because they vary in Size
I store pre-order items, until I get an item or equipment that is one or two points worse, or never use them. With Witcher 2, I had bonus items for importing a Witcher 1 save. I used the armor and sliver sword, because I felt that I earn it. The gear becomes outdated in chapter 1.
Eh, 2 star missions are Kestodon, Great Jagras, and Kulu-Ya-Ku. Defender Armor or no, those missions are easy enough that I don't think you can reasonably say the player in question even gave the game long enough for any of that to matter.
It does suck to lose the entirety of the learning experience by trivializing the difficulty of early fights, but I can't say I didn't use the Defender Armor when I played through a 2nd time on PC to play with my friends that only got it there after playing on PS4. Even then I picked up Charge Blade for the first time on that playthrough, and still learned plenty about how to use the weapon from going through all the old monsters, even if I can't say they were all that difficult with the Guardian weapon/armor. Not that a veteran picking up a new weapon can be compared to a first timer that still needs to learn all the basics, but they still served a legitimate function in making that playthrough not waste nearly as much of my time on the way to the content I gave a shit about.
why not just have it say your not thirsty any more, or give you a quenched status or something
I don't see the "OP" Gear concept as the problem. If a game I wasn't particularly interested in at launch lasts a few years and then comes around with an expansion or DLC that catches my attention or that my friends are hyping up and wanting me to join, I gladly and happily use that powerful gear because 1. I like feeling powerful where appliccable in certain games and 2. I want to be where the most amount of people and hype are. I don't want to be stuck in the vanilla content while everyone else is engaging with the thing that I'm actually picked up the game for. The mechanics and/or story should be strong enough to keep my interest even if I'm breezing through the early game content
Hot take I suppose, but if the point of your game is "It's not fun if you're not getting into the tedium of the grind" then the game sucks. That's not a game at that point, it's a job.
God, I have no idea why, but Assassin’s Creed Odyssey just jacks up my mind goblins like they’re on cocaine.
I had the friend's problem BAD when P5 Royal came out. The game doesn't even try to stay balanced if you buy the ultimate edition.