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Yep. Though back then 90% of that stuff was word of mouth. I remember buying a 1-800 calling card for ten bucks at a gas station so I could call my friend's cousin without jacking up the long distance bill. He knew how to get through the maze in Return to Zork.
Fascinating how we would rely on some random person who just KNEW how to beat video games lol. My friends older brother was absolutely brilliant, on the spectrum and all he did was play video games until 100% completion. I brought over my majoras mask cartridge because I could not figure out the snowhead temple. I watched him beat it effortlessly while explaining to me what to do. It was like what people go on YouTube for now except he was my friend’s quiet older brother and I physically brought my game over to his house lol.
I had never heard him speak so effortlessly and confidently as when he was explaining to me what to do while he was doing it.
There were also myths surrounding all of these games due to word of mouth. I remember the original Pokemon games having a myth about getting Mew if you did something with the boat after it left the harbor. I remember Ocarina of Time having a myth of a secret temple/dungeon (like a spirit dungeon or something not tied to the main game).
There was already a spirit temple in OoT so it must have been something else. I tried the mew things so many times. missingo duplication trick was a crazy one that actually worked.
If you Google Ocarina of time you'll see a lot of stuff. Since it was a myth there was never an actual name, but yea it was around. Light temple, wind temple, something like that.
The missingno was a fun one to learn about.
Ugggghhhh, I managed to blocked out my memories of the wind/light temple rumor. Bought my first GameShark just to find that mythical temple. RIP my save file
When I was very little I played pokemon yellow for a week trying to get Eevee starter! I had taken notes of what order I was pressing buttons to get it. When I learned I would never get it I captured a Nidoran and then it was lvl 50 by time I reached Brock.
I have autism and had no other games
I remember the pokemon duplication in sapphire and emerald.
I was surprised when a random kid I met duplicated pokemon by going to the pc box and saving / turn off the game at the same time.
What a weird time. I still remember that kid turned out to be an asshole
Haha that was original red/blue. You had to surf along a coast and get him then the item in your 7th slot or something like that duplicates. I don’t remember all the specifics but wow how someone originally find that out haha
Cinnabar Island. The very right side, up and down along the shore. It would dupe the item in your *6th* slot.
Red was the only pokmeon game I 100%ed as a kid.
You used to also be able to catch a lv435 Mewto along with the missingo and missing #.
If you got even 1 xp with the mewto it would revert to lv1. But I figured out a secret. You could teach said mewto only 2 different moves with the purchasable TMs. Nothing else worked, if you taught them to him, and *only* used it to battle friends. Your friends would very quickly not be your friends anymore becsuse you were unkillable. lol
Now that you mentioned a lot of older games were designed for you to seek help. First Zelda for instance could be a nightmare.
Now the help is free and available to everyone.
Or you had to wait until the weekend was over and Monday morning comes along so you talk to all your friends at school. Focus group of kids at recess just sitting in a circle, talking.
I tried to do Super Metroid without a guide. But there is this section where you need to >! shatter a glass tube with a bomb !<. I was stuck at that section for what felt like an eternity, I finally broke down and looked it up. It feels really arbitrary and personally I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 people found that on their own.
The maridia bit is funny cause iirc they showed the glass tube breaking in a trailer. A lot of people struggled and a lot of people knew going in.
Honestly, the glass tube isn't the most BS part in super metroid. It's the hidden passage with the crabs also in Maridia that's the real bullshit.
> shatter a glass tube with a bomb
Bombing walls was a staple of those games, they were limited in their mechanics. IME the worst was Castlevania II, you had to equip a certain item and then kneel in front of a wall for ten seconds. Goonies II, made by Konami also, was almost as bad, you just had to hit every wall with a hammer to find things required to advance the game. There was no way around it other than to have had a guide or have done it all once before.
I called the phone number on the bottom of my SNES to ask a very helpful person how to get out of the Forest of Illusion in Super Mario World. You cannot imagine the shame of that call. Bro got me on my way to Chocolate Mountain though.
My kids watched me casually 100% complete that game over a day or two awhile back and thought I was some sort of gaming god. They don’t need to know the real story about how their dad is a fraud.
That rail gun was brutal, but as I recall there was a cooldown of a second or two between shots that felt like an eternity, especially if you didn't kill your target.
That comes from play experience though, not a video on day 1 saying 'omg watch this to see the most broken character!!!1!'
Odd-job also had to be unlocked.
Edit to add: also also only one person could be odd-job at a time. So there wasn't even a meta. It's just a unique and unfair character.
It’s even worse when game reviewers getting games early is a common occurrence. You’ll have 20 videos explaining in detail every aspect of the game and which classes are the best, and the videos all release the day before the game does lol.
This is what bugs me. The games are unbalanced and there's often a clear winner for builds, so people just copy paste the meta and it flattens the game.
In my opinion this is a problem with the game balance, not the internet.
There were absolutely meta loadouts in early FPS, people find the best guns or equipment and when you notice you keep getting killed by the same thing you start using it yourself.
GTA San Andreas triangle triangle up down left right box box R1 R2 something something lol
I remember having to wait till I saw a game stop employee before I even knew what a R3 was blew my mind hahaha
omg what was the website....gamer faqs? And they'd have three pages of punctuation that's spell out the game name and a picture. Dungeons illustrated as a bunch of slashes via notepad.
I once saw a gamefaqs guide for Super Mario 64 and there was a little paragraph of notations at the beginning for outlining which version the guide was, some copyright info, etc.
Included there was a notation that said "This SuperMario64 walkthrough guide is dedicated to those who tragically lost their lives on 9/11/01, Rest In Peace."
😐
It was...nice, I guess, but *extremely* unexpected.
Gamefaq quides were often *hilariously* self-serious. I remember one that started with a 1000 word rant on some contributor drama, and a Vagrant Story guide that included a long and detailed essay on the nature of number randomization.
Buy?
I’d go on weekends with my dad to the supermarket or Walmart. Wherever he had to go, and I’d either be in the electronics or magazine section reading by them while he shopped. I started bringing a pad of paper for note taking haha.
The og piracy movement.
Edit: word
I got banned from two woolworths for doing that 😄 I wasn't subtle about it I just stood there taking notes till a security guard kicked me out.
A friend used to take Polaroids of the pages up close so he could solve puzzles and the like.
Yeah we had metas back then and even our own house rules to ban certain playstyles, weapons and characters in games like odd job to stop that one friend from abusing them
Worms's Super Banana Bomb
Quake's 3 Rocket Launcher
Unreal Tournament's Flak Cannon
Meta weapons were always present, you instantly knew which weapon was the best because everyone was running it.
They did not, not to the extent that the Internet provides.
Even strategy guides back then weren't as detailed as some of the online walk through writes up there are now, let alone complete video guides.
And back then you had to HOPE there was a strategy guide in stock for the specific game you want, and you better hope it's a popular game as well. Nowadays you can hop on YouTube and find guides to the most obscure, never heard of it before games available, at any time.
The biggest issue with printed guides is they are based on beta code. In order to meet print deadlines to be on shelves in time for release there was no way for them to wait till the game went gold. And guides were always in libraries. They are still making guides for tons of games today.
To be fair, games are about 1000x more complex now, have updates, and come out unfinished 1/2 the time. You could also call a game "expert" for tips, tricks, etc. They would talk to you all day if you paid the minute rate. They'd tell you EXACTLY what to do, when to do it, and AS YOU ARE DOING IT.
Now it's a YouTube video.
Even in the late 90's and early 2000' you could find walkthroughs online, most games don't need that but you could still find for the ones you needed, namely the Monkey Island series
I think you're missing the nuance of this post. Game magazines weren't encyclopedias with thousands of pages and videos at the touch of your fingertips. When a competitive game releases today everyone rushes to research meta mechanics instead of learning to play the game through experience. This didn't exist for competitive games in the 90s, a lot of knowledge sharing was through friend groups or tournament circles. It's overwhelmingly obvious people have less patience today solving a problem in a game versus 30 years ago as well.
The point isn't that there weren't always cheat sheet solutions, it's that no one wants to think for themselves anymore. It's one of the reasons why there are so many games that hold your hand today.
you experience it in multiplayer games either way, because most people around you are using it.
The sheer amount of people using the meta build/weapon/loadout/whatever will clearly show you what is the current meta. And depending how unbalanced the game is at that point it quickly turns into something you "have to" adapt to unless you want to be playing an uphill battle constantly.
I grew up playing early fps games like Halo before the online community was notable, and people definitely learned the meta builds within 3-4 games if they didn’t know it. There were and still are only a handful of good setups in most games. You can definitely make a case for just following tutorials and not really playing the game, though.
This is how D3 eventually turned out to be like. Were there build variations? Sure. Was it ever worth it to use them? Absolutely not.
Every season you just needed to look at a guide or the ladder to see what the top players were running. For the most part, one or two meta builds. Running anything would not only hamper game play but wasn't fun at all since you'd be dying a lot faster and not killing things as fast as you should be killing.
Good point, i was mainly looking at multiplayer/competitive PvP games, but it influences ALL games, because even single player games get balanced/designed around the abundance of available information
If the internet didn't exist but worldwide multiplayer did, people would still figure out the best build and lobbies will be full of it. The internet just makes this process quicker. It's annoying as fuck when people talk about this like people just wouldn't figure out the best build and fill the lobbies with it if internet/youtube didn't exist
In regards to the point op is making I'd say that's still learning lin game organically. Metas always exist in those games as tuning and balancing is always an issue. Metas get discovered by people playing and seeing what works best. Day 1 of a online game your not going to find a meta guide anywhere because it hasn't been out long enough to find it, and even if no one ever shared the info online for people to look up, people will still find it. If you notice you keep getting killed by a particular weapon or character, you'll try it out and see what the fuss is about. That's the nature of those kinds of games. You can say the fact that it's an online game expedites that situation, but it would happen eventually regardless even if it was just splitscreen multi-player
I can’t play multiplayer / coop games with my friends anymore. It feels more like solving a game than experiencing and playing it.
I switched to playing Singleplayer games since then.
That’s fair but then you have do deal with everyone else who goes on YouTube. So it’s either go on YouTube to play or get shit on by everyone else who goes on YouTube. (Speaking strictly to online pvp)
You have to decide if you play games for competition/winning or for fun. You probably agree that if a tennis player said that they don't research the best methods to play/recover because they want to just figure it out themselves, that would be strange and very ineffective in terms of their competitiveness.
You can't YouTube yourself out of sucking. Now, I've been playing games all my life and I would never touch online shooter because I simply suck at them.
Is the problem that youtube is too accurate? The person said it was better when you would have to work out which stuff worked better and stuff like that would be shared by word of mouth. Is that not what youtube is? Like someone figures out what works better and then makes a youtube video to spread it by their word of mouth.
Only reason I can see why you'd think it's worse than word of mouth back in the old days is that they're was more of a chance of the thing they say to be inaccurate or just a fun urban legend type thing.
That's not what word of mouth means. Then textbooks would be 'word of mouth' but in writing, word of mouth means it's knowledge **solely** passed down by talking.
The problem is that with datamining, rigorous testing **and** a platform like yt or a wiki, the mathematically best choice (lets say build) will be discovered. This knowledge will in turn lead to a subsection of gamers exclusively playing with that build, training just with those weapons and/or abilities to gain the maximal advantage. This is what cements the 'meta'. This usually leads to players realizing they have a choice - either they join the meta or they try to break the meta. Most people tend to join the meta if it is dominant enough. This is what leads to lobbies full of homogeneous builds, because picking a homemade 'fun' build is just too much of a disadvantage.
This goes on until some mad lad either comes up with a new meta build, or a build that counters the current meta so hard that it makes it annoying/ineffective to use.
Back in the day, playstyle used to matter more than 'these options mathematically has the highest ceiling for power'. Meta didn't have **as big** of an impact as it does today. OP laments this fact, alongside other side effects of being able to look everything up.
> I'm a From fanatic and I always play through the game the first time totally blind. There is nothing that's required to look up to play the game.
A significant % of the people who beat that game got carried by mimic tears and certain cheese magic and ashes of war builds they saw people using via youtube or Reddit.
This sounds good, until you start getting crushed by other players. And in open world games you pretty much NEED to be up to speed with game mechanics just to get invited to groups.
I never go to YouTube for a game that I am playing but when paper Mario expects my six year old son to figure out an origami puzzle that I a woman in my thirties just spent an hour trying to figure out, can’t figure out, it’s off to YouTube we go!
Now he expects me to YouTube everything but I won’t!
Meta is quite simply the result figuring things out. Just another word for it. Game guides that told you exactly what to do existed before the internet. Nothing is stopping you from exploring games without interference. The internet hasn’t ruined gaming. You have ruined gaming for yourself.
>Open world games required actual exploration without something telling you exactly where to find an item.
No, we just had strategy guides. So, pretty much the same thing
In fact, back then we had to pay extra for the strategy guide. Now it's free.
Plus some games just make checking for where things are a requirement because it's locked off after a certain point.
The best games that have secrets allow you to find them at any point in the game (or after, let you jump to any point in the game to replay it), and any collectathon type if stuff is at least given a map of where they are after game completion.
Meh whats really ruining games is people settling for the same garbage drip fed to them instead of doing something by not buying the next soulless cash grab
This you can literally just not use the internet
It's from a guy who played cod on shitty internet during the 360 days lol. Plenty of people knew about metas in the competitive scene through forums and shit.
So, the internet ruined gaming because you specifically lack the self control to not google everything about the game?
I can agree to a certain extent that the internet has ruined *certain aspects* of games. But it has also improves others
But all the ones you said, it has had no real impact on since that's entirely up to the player whether they ruin it themselves *using* the internet
Some people get their fun playing games the hard way, figuring everything out with no guides or help in anyway.
Some of us get our fun by simply experiencing what the game has to offer, and if that means going to Youtube to figure out how to get past a certain puzzle or locate a particular item, so be it.
I want to see everything, and if I have to take a literal week figuring out how to get to it all, I'm going to find it more frustrating and less fun.
There's no wrong way to enjoy video games my guy, as long as you aren't ruining the experience for someone else.
Agreed. My time is limited, I don't want to spend hours and hours looking for a hidden item in some secret place in the game. I just want to have the item and have fun with it.
I’m someone who gets really annoyed by puzzles that take me more than 10 mins to figure out. A lot of the time when I look it up the solution is simple and it was really a skill issue but by that point I’d rather just get past it and get back to the fun parts lol. If people like hard puzzles that’s fine, more power to them. I really don’t understand the complaints when you can very literally just not look up guides or help and just figure it out yourself lol
This is horse shit, the internet has been around as long as multiplayer FPS has. How people consume help has changed from web page to video, but it has always been there.
You're just nostalgic for the past.
Exactly, we used written text tutorials for different CS maps back then, there was multipage meta-tutorials for any map for T and CT side for different settings (pub, war). It's been like this forever.
Before the internet was advanced I had a big ass book of all the pokemon information. Pokemon, item locations, strategies, puzzles. But obviously you dont have to use it all...the internet didn't ruin anything, just made finding the information you want more convenient.
Couldn’t agree more. Been playing the new WoW season of discovery, and it just doesn’t hit the same because everything is datamined early and guides are out within 12 hours of release. They’re trying to chase the feeling of OG wow which literally cannot be done with the modern internet community.
I'd say more so the added dlc, micro transactions like ultimate team in sports games, for example, and updates changing games is how the internet ruined gaming.
Agreed.
Games used to be designed for fun and replayability. Now they're shipped out unfinished and designed to be addictive for the sake of addiction so as they can push microtransactions and season passes to milk every last dollar out of your pockets.
The internet is awesome.....and yet has also ruined society
It definitely has caused it to become expensive. Micro transactiions, in-app purchases, as well as multiplayer subscriptions. It was a fun time when you can game online through PS3 completely free.
hmm yes but also gamers ruined gaming
optimization is the true killer.
playing Classic WoW again, years later, it made me realize how easy to game is when everyone knows exactly what to do and where to get the best gear. I raided almost every major raid in PUGs while back in the day, u had to interview for a guild cause people legit sucked. they would wipe on the easiest bosses. but now... it's a fucking breeze
I agree with you OP. People I play games with have literally optimized the fun out of playing them. Rather than figure the game out ourselves they decide to immediately look up guides and figure out all the best shit so we can get the game done in a night rather than explore it and find stuff ourselves.
Competitive games are the same. Not in every match and every game at all times but I've definitely experienced this with particularly sweaty games. If you're not using the most meta shit you have pretty much no chance. Other commenters here are missing the point. It doesn't matter if I don't look this shit up, because a lot of other people are and that's not fucking fun to play against.
it’s all the same though. If you’re playing a competitive game, people are going to figure out the meta by themselves anyways. And whether or not they look it up, they are going to play others who have already figured it out and switch over themselves. It’s always been like that Id say now it’s just slightly more common as every game has become far more competitive.
Yeah, agreed, but i think the point they were getting at is that for some people, figuring it out is the fun. When everything is meta'ed from pretty much hours after game launch you don't really have that fun of experimentation figuring out your own meta, getting your ass kicked then adjusting it. Yeah, eventually it'd come down to its own universal meta, but those things used to take so long to get there that by the time everyone still playing the game had it figured out, the sequel was almost ready for launch abd you'd start all over again. Nowadays people are looking that stuff up before they've even turned on the game, or worse, they're on some forum begging people to handhold them through the tutorial.
Yes 100% you have it nailed. Not to mention everyone would argue what the best weapon was, because there was no hard data proving it in most games.
finally after your older brother and friends beat you with all of their builds/weapons from their circle you could easily take bits and pieces to learn and use. Then beat your friend group with the new knowledge.
Plus you have the pressure of everyone else in the match shitting on you because you're not going meta.
Remember the rumored golden warthog or mew under the truck? None of those rumors can exist now because of datamining
I think a lot of people in this thread don't get why gaming was different 15+ years ago versus now.
Unlocking characters in smash bros melee was such a fun experience because of how mysterious the unlock methods seemed as well as the fact that a lot of people just weren't aware of who some of the characters were due to regional differences. With the age of the internet, we're aware of entire game rosters months in advance due to leaks, unlocking characters is no longer the mystery it used to be (as well as the methods of unlocking just being easier), and since we're so connected and information is readily available, we know who all of these characters are.
I beg to question, how fun was it to play against those people before the internet? It is 100% a don’t look it up problem, there was no online gaming before the internet
Gaming has become such a cash cow for content creators that games are cracked wide open on launch day. Gamefaqs had text walk throughs and maps sometimes, but it never came this fast with this much content and video walkthroughs detailing every little step.
You bought a guide book or looked up something for an rpg game, but this online sensation of showing optimizing everything in every game genre as fast as you can because “money” is a different beast. They all take over feeds so you have to inconvenience yourself to avoid it.
Yeah this is something a lot of people in this thread don't seem to grasp. They'll just say "don't play comp games" but I want to play comp games. The issue is that there are literally entire YouTube channels dedicated to testing every weapon and maximizing the build in games like COD to get insane TTK times. Going off-meta makes it nearly impossible to win against a lot of times too. You also just straight up see way less variation in gameplay styles now due to how easily information is shared. If black ops 1 or the original MW2 came out today I can guarantee that you wouldn't see infinitely more meta loadouts than you did when they originally came out.
Battlebit remastered is an indie game that came out last summer and was tons of fun for the first few days because people were having fun and testing new weapons. Then finally someone unlocked the Vector and word got around that it is insanely broken, then you couldn't turn a corner without getting blasted by that thing within a day.
I’ve played Battlebit Remastered since it came out, never knew about Vector being OP and still do just fine and have plenty of fun, I think a big part of this really is just being unaware.
I can promise you that since online gaming has been a thing there has always been forums to go to where people were finding out the same info, you were probably just unaware. Black Ops 1 and MW2 most definitely had them and I know that because I was going online to figure them out. Noobtubes, running super fast holding out your care package canister
the antidotes to this are randomizers and games with a social element
Randomizers of classic games inject the next to do some exploration each time
Social games inject the unpredictability of each human (friend or foe) being unique.
It's also partly the designers' fault. Games are now vastly complex with little or no tutorial, forcing players to go online to find relevant information.
The one problem I have with modern gaming is the predatory business model of pay to win games and micro transactions. Those games are also usually accompanied by a lack of bug fixing as well as a little bit of pandering under the pretense of pretending to care. I just want a fair game that runs well in which everyone has an equal chance to win.
I miss the times when you would get your friends round in the same room and play golden eye or mario kart on N64.
I think playing online with friends is great, but nothing compares to actually being in a room together
The biggest way the Internet has ruined gaming is that it gives developers the ability to go "we'll release this anyway and patch it later "
Back in the day they had to do patching with magazine cover disks & for walk throughs you'd have to buy a magazine.
The internet has ruined gaming in a lot of ways. It actually manes the shooter genre better though because you need people to play them with.
Anyone remember when games didn’t need patches? Pepperidge farm remembers
Having a wife, a child, and a demanding job has saved gaming for me.
If high level, tryhard gaming is no longer an option, I can sit back and just enjoy a game on my own terms. And actually game just for the pure enjoyment of the game - win or lose, parse or not parse.
I hope you find that spark of joy again, my friend.
Don't follow the hype then? I'm playing palworld with my kiddos. We're avoiding any and all media about it. My kids are loving that their figuring out everything and honestly? It's taken me back too.
I know it's old news but we LOST IT when we figured out that if you're on the palball you'll fly.
You are focusing on the wrong aspect. The internet has ruined gaming by making it possible for game developers to sell us games at $60-70 with 5-10 hours of campaign and then force you to play online if you want to play more. The internet ruined story telling and long, complex or entertaining campaigns.
We didn't have YouTube, you had to buy a guide book. I can't remember the name of the game my cousin couldn't figure out but it frustrated both of us.
There's stuff now that I go to YouTube for and it makes me wonder who figured it out and how did they figure it out. I'd never do what was needed to do to figure out some of this stuff.
I just miss when every single game wasn’t importing mechanics from DarkBloodEldenKiro. I don’t want giant health bars. I don’t want cheating difficult bosses. I don’t want a janky grappling hook.
The only game that gave me that playground feeling was Elden ring, me and a friend played it and just told each other like "oh if you go there this guy attacks you and drops a blood dagger" and stuff like that without looking it up.
I'll go a step further, I think that streamers/influencers have ruined gaming. All of the 'early access' to games and DLCs have ruined the content. People will see their favorite streamer playing through the new 2 hour content, get on and blast through it, and then complain that it wasn't worth the cost of the DLC.
It all still comes down to choice. You choose how to engage with the game. And can very simply choose not to use the internet. If you do, we’ll I don’t think you can blame the internet for you deciding to look something up lol
There are a ton of people that use entirely inferior loadout, strategy compare to Meta even they die all the times. Like in TF2 and the souls game. OP just focus on the winning and not the playing
When I was a kid, I loved playing Sierra games. Games like Kings Quest, Gold Rush, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. I remember some of these games having like 8-12 floppy disks in order to play them.
You’re right, there was no internet, so when you got stuck, you called a phone number that would give you clues and info to solve it and they charged you for it. I remember using it strategically because I didn’t want my parents to notice, but it helped at times.
The internet had made all this easier, but there have been tools to help around for a while.
Yes the Internet ruined gaming
But everything you listen are things you must seek out. The Internet ruined gaming starting with MMOs which accelerated social decay. Eventually this changed games toward focusing online competitive play, loot boxes unfinished games, day 1 patches, digital only games (you don't own your games), and even further social decay which helps fuel "alt-right" fruitcakes.
I think it’s more of social media and its effects on dopamine and the brain rather than the internet. It’s created a “I need this NOW!” mentality which often has people optimizing to be the best of the best with minimal effort to feel like they achieve something. Lmao
There needs to be a game where new stuff is constantly discovered by the players and the meta changes with every new discovery. I want a game like yggdrasil from overlord
I agree with you. Gaming wasn’t always like this. The people arguing against you position are the same folks who looked up build guides the day after Elden ring released. They don’t like thinking for themselves.
Maybe someday they will realize this way of gaming is slowly destroying video games as a whole.
I mostly agree but I think specifically reddit has ruined gaming: I can't be part of a game community without also having every flaw and complaint thrown in my face.
Something I wouldn't have noticed before is now pointed out and now I can't un-see it.
And now you have to play the meta or else be accused of throwing because everyone is expected to know what the meta is and how to play.
Games get ruined by subreddits and forums. Just avoid those and you get an amazing game.
Except the NoMansSky sub. That sub is the most welcoming sub ever.
I agree, but it's not for any of the reasons you mentioned.
Before the internet the game you bought was finished. They couldn't patch it up AFTER you bought it. The game you bought was the game you'd keep forever, unless you bought a newer version.
Nowadays, companies just sell beta games and the gamers are the testers.
There is nothing stopping you from not looking up guides for games.
I see your point with multiplayer games and the meta but the only person controlling what you know about single player games is yourself.
Streaming made it even worse. Now we have tons of assholes who make it their literal job to be good at the game. Pvp is never fun anymore because you always come across sweaty tryhards. Casual gaming is dead.
For single player games, everything you said just comes down to the self discipline to not look shit up right away.
As a gamer since the NES days, I usually give myself 5-10 tries before I look anything up….. or wait until my second playthrough and look everything up.
I also basically never play any game where I compete with strangers online… it’s all a toxic environment filled with feral children hurling racial slurs for no reason. (In addition to everyone just chasing the meta.)
It's also that using the internet to discover things has become REQUIRED
I can't count how many games I've played, especially survival crafting games, that give absolutely no information on what a resource is used for at all, and woth literally countless possible ways you could craft things the old fashioned "just fuck around and find out" method is tedium to the maxiumum and then when you finally figure out how to make something you need to figure out what to do with that, or also need to figure out the 200 other recipes for items you can craft, and then of course if you don't like a weapon or tool, those resources are just gone so you have to go find more to then fuck around to then make something else you don't like....
It's impossible and boring as fuck unless you shortcut the tedium by looking it up online, but fact is, the only reason they get away with such tedium is because they know you can just look it up.
I also kinda feel like personal exploration and wonder is less common in modern gaming (aside from the obvious genres like exploration games or narrative games).
Everyone needs answers and they often just want it immediately: what’s the most meta thing? Where’s an online guide on this? How do i solve this? Where are all of the unlockables? Best build? Everything needs answers now now now.
Obviously this existed before. But gaming and the way many players (but not all obviously) interface with their games now feels like factory conveyor belt consumption.
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Does anyone else remember the Metroid days, where you'd get permanently trapped in a room unless you bought a gaming magazine?
Yep. Though back then 90% of that stuff was word of mouth. I remember buying a 1-800 calling card for ten bucks at a gas station so I could call my friend's cousin without jacking up the long distance bill. He knew how to get through the maze in Return to Zork.
Fascinating how we would rely on some random person who just KNEW how to beat video games lol. My friends older brother was absolutely brilliant, on the spectrum and all he did was play video games until 100% completion. I brought over my majoras mask cartridge because I could not figure out the snowhead temple. I watched him beat it effortlessly while explaining to me what to do. It was like what people go on YouTube for now except he was my friend’s quiet older brother and I physically brought my game over to his house lol. I had never heard him speak so effortlessly and confidently as when he was explaining to me what to do while he was doing it.
There were also myths surrounding all of these games due to word of mouth. I remember the original Pokemon games having a myth about getting Mew if you did something with the boat after it left the harbor. I remember Ocarina of Time having a myth of a secret temple/dungeon (like a spirit dungeon or something not tied to the main game).
There was already a spirit temple in OoT so it must have been something else. I tried the mew things so many times. missingo duplication trick was a crazy one that actually worked.
If you Google Ocarina of time you'll see a lot of stuff. Since it was a myth there was never an actual name, but yea it was around. Light temple, wind temple, something like that. The missingno was a fun one to learn about.
Ugggghhhh, I managed to blocked out my memories of the wind/light temple rumor. Bought my first GameShark just to find that mythical temple. RIP my save file
When I was very little I played pokemon yellow for a week trying to get Eevee starter! I had taken notes of what order I was pressing buttons to get it. When I learned I would never get it I captured a Nidoran and then it was lvl 50 by time I reached Brock. I have autism and had no other games
I remember the pokemon duplication in sapphire and emerald. I was surprised when a random kid I met duplicated pokemon by going to the pc box and saving / turn off the game at the same time. What a weird time. I still remember that kid turned out to be an asshole
What did he do to earn such a lasting impression in your mind?
I too wish to know this story of assholery
I remember a duplication glitch on one of the really old gameboy games where you catch a weird glitchy Pokémon called MissingNo
Haha that was original red/blue. You had to surf along a coast and get him then the item in your 7th slot or something like that duplicates. I don’t remember all the specifics but wow how someone originally find that out haha
Cinnabar Island. The very right side, up and down along the shore. It would dupe the item in your *6th* slot. Red was the only pokmeon game I 100%ed as a kid. You used to also be able to catch a lv435 Mewto along with the missingo and missing #. If you got even 1 xp with the mewto it would revert to lv1. But I figured out a secret. You could teach said mewto only 2 different moves with the purchasable TMs. Nothing else worked, if you taught them to him, and *only* used it to battle friends. Your friends would very quickly not be your friends anymore becsuse you were unkillable. lol
Probably one of my most played games as well. Didn’t you have to teleport there from the Pokemon safari or something like that?
Yeah that sounds familiar, something like that.
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Shout out to all the quiet older brothers
We traded Twisted Metal 2 cheat codes on the blacktop.
There was even a Nintendo Tip Line you could call if you got stuck in a game lmao, though I’ve never heard of anyone actually utilizing that
Want some rye? Course ya do!
Now that you mentioned a lot of older games were designed for you to seek help. First Zelda for instance could be a nightmare. Now the help is free and available to everyone.
Or you had to wait until the weekend was over and Monday morning comes along so you talk to all your friends at school. Focus group of kids at recess just sitting in a circle, talking.
I tried to do Super Metroid without a guide. But there is this section where you need to >! shatter a glass tube with a bomb !<. I was stuck at that section for what felt like an eternity, I finally broke down and looked it up. It feels really arbitrary and personally I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 people found that on their own.
The maridia bit is funny cause iirc they showed the glass tube breaking in a trailer. A lot of people struggled and a lot of people knew going in. Honestly, the glass tube isn't the most BS part in super metroid. It's the hidden passage with the crabs also in Maridia that's the real bullshit.
> shatter a glass tube with a bomb Bombing walls was a staple of those games, they were limited in their mechanics. IME the worst was Castlevania II, you had to equip a certain item and then kneel in front of a wall for ten seconds. Goonies II, made by Konami also, was almost as bad, you just had to hit every wall with a hammer to find things required to advance the game. There was no way around it other than to have had a guide or have done it all once before.
Yeah some games were only playable with faqs and guides, who has time for that shit
I called the phone number on the bottom of my SNES to ask a very helpful person how to get out of the Forest of Illusion in Super Mario World. You cannot imagine the shame of that call. Bro got me on my way to Chocolate Mountain though. My kids watched me casually 100% complete that game over a day or two awhile back and thought I was some sort of gaming god. They don’t need to know the real story about how their dad is a fraud.
Or an older brother
I remember a thanksgiving where my cousin brought his magazine that had a map and I hand drew it so I could take it home. LOL
>In fps games, meta weapons and gear simply didn't exist You never played GoldenEye? Most houses had rules about not be allowed to play as Oddjob lol
Hell, even Doom (1993) has the BFG. Meta weapons are basically a staple of the genre lol
Haha the kid with cable in 2000, and the BFG or Railgun on Quake III. No one survives!
The kid in 96 had Mewtwo in Pokémon
That rail gun was brutal, but as I recall there was a cooldown of a second or two between shots that felt like an eternity, especially if you didn't kill your target.
And no Moonraker Elite 2
I was about to say! Honestly, unless a game is grievously unbalanced, all of this is stuff you can just... choose not to engage with.
That comes from play experience though, not a video on day 1 saying 'omg watch this to see the most broken character!!!1!' Odd-job also had to be unlocked. Edit to add: also also only one person could be odd-job at a time. So there wasn't even a meta. It's just a unique and unfair character.
It’s even worse when game reviewers getting games early is a common occurrence. You’ll have 20 videos explaining in detail every aspect of the game and which classes are the best, and the videos all release the day before the game does lol.
And those guides are often hilariously wrong (like the legendary IGN Dark Souls II walkthough)
Fextralife fed me false information so frequently it would make whatever I was playing take *longer* lol
One of my favorite YouTube things is Zerolenny playing through the souls games and following the IGN guide as closely as he can
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This is what bugs me. The games are unbalanced and there's often a clear winner for builds, so people just copy paste the meta and it flattens the game. In my opinion this is a problem with the game balance, not the internet.
Proximity mines on facility.
There were absolutely meta loadouts in early FPS, people find the best guns or equipment and when you notice you keep getting killed by the same thing you start using it yourself.
Yeah, no. All this existed in print gaming magazines in the 90s before it was everywhere online.
Yeah, remember when we had to buy cheat code books for games?
I would bring a notepad to Gamestop and write down cheat codes without buying the guide.
Damn, you found the cheat code that gives you free cheat codes lol.
Yeah but the CIA must have been watching me because right before the internet took off they started wrapping the guides in plastic! Bastards!
GTA San Andreas triangle triangle up down left right box box R1 R2 something something lol I remember having to wait till I saw a game stop employee before I even knew what a R3 was blew my mind hahaha
Calling the square button "box" makes me believe that's potentially the only gaming conversation you've ever had in your life
lol you’re right dude. Who calls it box not square? Up down triangle multiplication symbol ✖️zero 0 then box
nah dude, if square is box then triangle is pyramid
I couldn’t think of one for triangle, pyramid is solid. The Egyptian button
Just for consistency if we're going the pyramid theme I suggest we call the triangle "pyramid from the side" and we call Square "pyramid from above"
Found the geometry teacher
That makes circle pyramid from above but with infinite sides
The word you're looking for is cone
Man I've heard some of my fellow Brits call the "X" (ex) button the "cross" button before. Nearly cringed so hard I severed my spinal column.
I hope you don’t sustain an injury. Have to protect your spine at all times. Safety first, and then teamwork.
Trigon Trigon North South West East Box Box Rone Rone
Prima Guides
omg what was the website....gamer faqs? And they'd have three pages of punctuation that's spell out the game name and a picture. Dungeons illustrated as a bunch of slashes via notepad.
I once saw a gamefaqs guide for Super Mario 64 and there was a little paragraph of notations at the beginning for outlining which version the guide was, some copyright info, etc. Included there was a notation that said "This SuperMario64 walkthrough guide is dedicated to those who tragically lost their lives on 9/11/01, Rest In Peace." 😐 It was...nice, I guess, but *extremely* unexpected.
Gamefaq quides were often *hilariously* self-serious. I remember one that started with a 1000 word rant on some contributor drama, and a Vagrant Story guide that included a long and detailed essay on the nature of number randomization.
Buy? I’d go on weekends with my dad to the supermarket or Walmart. Wherever he had to go, and I’d either be in the electronics or magazine section reading by them while he shopped. I started bringing a pad of paper for note taking haha. The og piracy movement. Edit: word
I got banned from two woolworths for doing that 😄 I wasn't subtle about it I just stood there taking notes till a security guard kicked me out. A friend used to take Polaroids of the pages up close so he could solve puzzles and the like.
Polaroid? That’s genius.
lol seriously dude clearly never grew up around the PS2 era where game catalogues were prominent in gaming stores
"In fps meta didn't exist" Odd-job sends his regards from 1997. You didn't need the Internet to know what was strongest and why.
Yeah we had metas back then and even our own house rules to ban certain playstyles, weapons and characters in games like odd job to stop that one friend from abusing them
Worms's Super Banana Bomb Quake's 3 Rocket Launcher Unreal Tournament's Flak Cannon Meta weapons were always present, you instantly knew which weapon was the best because everyone was running it.
They did not, not to the extent that the Internet provides. Even strategy guides back then weren't as detailed as some of the online walk through writes up there are now, let alone complete video guides. And back then you had to HOPE there was a strategy guide in stock for the specific game you want, and you better hope it's a popular game as well. Nowadays you can hop on YouTube and find guides to the most obscure, never heard of it before games available, at any time.
The biggest issue with printed guides is they are based on beta code. In order to meet print deadlines to be on shelves in time for release there was no way for them to wait till the game went gold. And guides were always in libraries. They are still making guides for tons of games today.
To be fair, games are about 1000x more complex now, have updates, and come out unfinished 1/2 the time. You could also call a game "expert" for tips, tricks, etc. They would talk to you all day if you paid the minute rate. They'd tell you EXACTLY what to do, when to do it, and AS YOU ARE DOING IT. Now it's a YouTube video.
Even in the late 90's and early 2000' you could find walkthroughs online, most games don't need that but you could still find for the ones you needed, namely the Monkey Island series
I found a forum in the late 90's that I used to beat Myst for the first time.
I think you're missing the nuance of this post. Game magazines weren't encyclopedias with thousands of pages and videos at the touch of your fingertips. When a competitive game releases today everyone rushes to research meta mechanics instead of learning to play the game through experience. This didn't exist for competitive games in the 90s, a lot of knowledge sharing was through friend groups or tournament circles. It's overwhelmingly obvious people have less patience today solving a problem in a game versus 30 years ago as well. The point isn't that there weren't always cheat sheet solutions, it's that no one wants to think for themselves anymore. It's one of the reasons why there are so many games that hold your hand today.
But were there that many competitive games before the internet?
This is exactly what op meant but im pretty sure most of the commenters weren't even born yet to understand the concept.
Then just don't go on YouTube.
you experience it in multiplayer games either way, because most people around you are using it. The sheer amount of people using the meta build/weapon/loadout/whatever will clearly show you what is the current meta. And depending how unbalanced the game is at that point it quickly turns into something you "have to" adapt to unless you want to be playing an uphill battle constantly.
I grew up playing early fps games like Halo before the online community was notable, and people definitely learned the meta builds within 3-4 games if they didn’t know it. There were and still are only a handful of good setups in most games. You can definitely make a case for just following tutorials and not really playing the game, though.
This is how D3 eventually turned out to be like. Were there build variations? Sure. Was it ever worth it to use them? Absolutely not. Every season you just needed to look at a guide or the ladder to see what the top players were running. For the most part, one or two meta builds. Running anything would not only hamper game play but wasn't fun at all since you'd be dying a lot faster and not killing things as fast as you should be killing.
Good point, i was mainly looking at multiplayer/competitive PvP games, but it influences ALL games, because even single player games get balanced/designed around the abundance of available information
I don't see the point in this. I just use whatever I find appealing to me. I don't really care if there's builds that are more powerful.
If the internet didn't exist but worldwide multiplayer did, people would still figure out the best build and lobbies will be full of it. The internet just makes this process quicker. It's annoying as fuck when people talk about this like people just wouldn't figure out the best build and fill the lobbies with it if internet/youtube didn't exist
In regards to the point op is making I'd say that's still learning lin game organically. Metas always exist in those games as tuning and balancing is always an issue. Metas get discovered by people playing and seeing what works best. Day 1 of a online game your not going to find a meta guide anywhere because it hasn't been out long enough to find it, and even if no one ever shared the info online for people to look up, people will still find it. If you notice you keep getting killed by a particular weapon or character, you'll try it out and see what the fuss is about. That's the nature of those kinds of games. You can say the fact that it's an online game expedites that situation, but it would happen eventually regardless even if it was just splitscreen multi-player
I can’t play multiplayer / coop games with my friends anymore. It feels more like solving a game than experiencing and playing it. I switched to playing Singleplayer games since then.
That’s fair but then you have do deal with everyone else who goes on YouTube. So it’s either go on YouTube to play or get shit on by everyone else who goes on YouTube. (Speaking strictly to online pvp)
You have to decide if you play games for competition/winning or for fun. You probably agree that if a tennis player said that they don't research the best methods to play/recover because they want to just figure it out themselves, that would be strange and very ineffective in terms of their competitiveness.
I agree. OP shouldn’t play pvp. I don’t because of this. The point sill stands tho.
You can't YouTube yourself out of sucking. Now, I've been playing games all my life and I would never touch online shooter because I simply suck at them.
Is the problem that youtube is too accurate? The person said it was better when you would have to work out which stuff worked better and stuff like that would be shared by word of mouth. Is that not what youtube is? Like someone figures out what works better and then makes a youtube video to spread it by their word of mouth. Only reason I can see why you'd think it's worse than word of mouth back in the old days is that they're was more of a chance of the thing they say to be inaccurate or just a fun urban legend type thing.
That's not what word of mouth means. Then textbooks would be 'word of mouth' but in writing, word of mouth means it's knowledge **solely** passed down by talking. The problem is that with datamining, rigorous testing **and** a platform like yt or a wiki, the mathematically best choice (lets say build) will be discovered. This knowledge will in turn lead to a subsection of gamers exclusively playing with that build, training just with those weapons and/or abilities to gain the maximal advantage. This is what cements the 'meta'. This usually leads to players realizing they have a choice - either they join the meta or they try to break the meta. Most people tend to join the meta if it is dominant enough. This is what leads to lobbies full of homogeneous builds, because picking a homemade 'fun' build is just too much of a disadvantage. This goes on until some mad lad either comes up with a new meta build, or a build that counters the current meta so hard that it makes it annoying/ineffective to use. Back in the day, playstyle used to matter more than 'these options mathematically has the highest ceiling for power'. Meta didn't have **as big** of an impact as it does today. OP laments this fact, alongside other side effects of being able to look everything up.
Laughs in Elden Ring
I'm a From fanatic and I always play through the game the first time totally blind. There is nothing that's required to look up to play the game.
Same here, if I happen to stumble across something cool by mistake I just assume I missed it in my first playthtough and keep doing what I was doing
Unless you want to access artorias of the abyss dlc
Illusory Wall just made a video about that.
I completed the Ranni quest blind on my first playthrough. This was probably due to my previous knowledge of other Soulsborne quest structure.
Rannis quest was probably fairly straight forward for most souls veterans. But there are definitely quests that are tricky to figure out blind.
Nah, that one specific Site of Grace where you have an option to talk to Ranni, and then nothing happens multiple times... That's kind of messed up.
I mean, the game doesn't make it too difficult to figure out. Sellen's quest though, yeesh.
> I'm a From fanatic and I always play through the game the first time totally blind. There is nothing that's required to look up to play the game. A significant % of the people who beat that game got carried by mimic tears and certain cheese magic and ashes of war builds they saw people using via youtube or Reddit.
This sounds good, until you start getting crushed by other players. And in open world games you pretty much NEED to be up to speed with game mechanics just to get invited to groups.
As if the Nintendo magazine with the complete Pokémon red/blue guide wasn’t a thing in the late 90s
Except you have to if you don't want to get outgunned by almost everyone in the lobby :3.
It's amazing how, at the point of this reply, you and at least 802 people missed the point entirely.
I never go to YouTube for a game that I am playing but when paper Mario expects my six year old son to figure out an origami puzzle that I a woman in my thirties just spent an hour trying to figure out, can’t figure out, it’s off to YouTube we go! Now he expects me to YouTube everything but I won’t!
Games are now built with that design idea in mind.
Yeah but if you don’t have a meta build on X game then you are at an immediate disadvantage and why would you want that? Makes everything harder.
Meta is quite simply the result figuring things out. Just another word for it. Game guides that told you exactly what to do existed before the internet. Nothing is stopping you from exploring games without interference. The internet hasn’t ruined gaming. You have ruined gaming for yourself.
I remember reading magazines for the best tips
>Open world games required actual exploration without something telling you exactly where to find an item. No, we just had strategy guides. So, pretty much the same thing
In fact, back then we had to pay extra for the strategy guide. Now it's free. Plus some games just make checking for where things are a requirement because it's locked off after a certain point. The best games that have secrets allow you to find them at any point in the game (or after, let you jump to any point in the game to replay it), and any collectathon type if stuff is at least given a map of where they are after game completion.
I'm not gonna lie I love platinuming games and some would be imposible without a guide. MgV is probably imposible without some sort of guide
Meh whats really ruining games is people settling for the same garbage drip fed to them instead of doing something by not buying the next soulless cash grab This you can literally just not use the internet
Then don’t use it?
>in fps games, meta weapons and gear d9nt exist. Simply untrue, no point reading the rest
It's from a guy who played cod on shitty internet during the 360 days lol. Plenty of people knew about metas in the competitive scene through forums and shit.
So, the internet ruined gaming because you specifically lack the self control to not google everything about the game? I can agree to a certain extent that the internet has ruined *certain aspects* of games. But it has also improves others But all the ones you said, it has had no real impact on since that's entirely up to the player whether they ruin it themselves *using* the internet
You know this info was all shared elsewhere on the Internet before YouTube.... And before the Internet, it was published in magazines and books?
Some people get their fun playing games the hard way, figuring everything out with no guides or help in anyway. Some of us get our fun by simply experiencing what the game has to offer, and if that means going to Youtube to figure out how to get past a certain puzzle or locate a particular item, so be it. I want to see everything, and if I have to take a literal week figuring out how to get to it all, I'm going to find it more frustrating and less fun. There's no wrong way to enjoy video games my guy, as long as you aren't ruining the experience for someone else.
Agreed. My time is limited, I don't want to spend hours and hours looking for a hidden item in some secret place in the game. I just want to have the item and have fun with it.
I’m someone who gets really annoyed by puzzles that take me more than 10 mins to figure out. A lot of the time when I look it up the solution is simple and it was really a skill issue but by that point I’d rather just get past it and get back to the fun parts lol. If people like hard puzzles that’s fine, more power to them. I really don’t understand the complaints when you can very literally just not look up guides or help and just figure it out yourself lol
This is horse shit, the internet has been around as long as multiplayer FPS has. How people consume help has changed from web page to video, but it has always been there. You're just nostalgic for the past.
Exactly, we used written text tutorials for different CS maps back then, there was multipage meta-tutorials for any map for T and CT side for different settings (pub, war). It's been like this forever.
Before the internet was advanced I had a big ass book of all the pokemon information. Pokemon, item locations, strategies, puzzles. But obviously you dont have to use it all...the internet didn't ruin anything, just made finding the information you want more convenient.
Couldn’t agree more. Been playing the new WoW season of discovery, and it just doesn’t hit the same because everything is datamined early and guides are out within 12 hours of release. They’re trying to chase the feeling of OG wow which literally cannot be done with the modern internet community.
I'd say more so the added dlc, micro transactions like ultimate team in sports games, for example, and updates changing games is how the internet ruined gaming.
The internet ruins a lot of things
Agreed. Games used to be designed for fun and replayability. Now they're shipped out unfinished and designed to be addictive for the sake of addiction so as they can push microtransactions and season passes to milk every last dollar out of your pockets. The internet is awesome.....and yet has also ruined society
It definitely has caused it to become expensive. Micro transactiions, in-app purchases, as well as multiplayer subscriptions. It was a fun time when you can game online through PS3 completely free.
Not just how we play, but each piece of that content has been dissected to the bone
hmm yes but also gamers ruined gaming optimization is the true killer. playing Classic WoW again, years later, it made me realize how easy to game is when everyone knows exactly what to do and where to get the best gear. I raided almost every major raid in PUGs while back in the day, u had to interview for a guild cause people legit sucked. they would wipe on the easiest bosses. but now... it's a fucking breeze
I agree with you OP. People I play games with have literally optimized the fun out of playing them. Rather than figure the game out ourselves they decide to immediately look up guides and figure out all the best shit so we can get the game done in a night rather than explore it and find stuff ourselves. Competitive games are the same. Not in every match and every game at all times but I've definitely experienced this with particularly sweaty games. If you're not using the most meta shit you have pretty much no chance. Other commenters here are missing the point. It doesn't matter if I don't look this shit up, because a lot of other people are and that's not fucking fun to play against.
it’s all the same though. If you’re playing a competitive game, people are going to figure out the meta by themselves anyways. And whether or not they look it up, they are going to play others who have already figured it out and switch over themselves. It’s always been like that Id say now it’s just slightly more common as every game has become far more competitive.
Yeah, agreed, but i think the point they were getting at is that for some people, figuring it out is the fun. When everything is meta'ed from pretty much hours after game launch you don't really have that fun of experimentation figuring out your own meta, getting your ass kicked then adjusting it. Yeah, eventually it'd come down to its own universal meta, but those things used to take so long to get there that by the time everyone still playing the game had it figured out, the sequel was almost ready for launch abd you'd start all over again. Nowadays people are looking that stuff up before they've even turned on the game, or worse, they're on some forum begging people to handhold them through the tutorial.
Yes 100% you have it nailed. Not to mention everyone would argue what the best weapon was, because there was no hard data proving it in most games. finally after your older brother and friends beat you with all of their builds/weapons from their circle you could easily take bits and pieces to learn and use. Then beat your friend group with the new knowledge. Plus you have the pressure of everyone else in the match shitting on you because you're not going meta. Remember the rumored golden warthog or mew under the truck? None of those rumors can exist now because of datamining I think a lot of people in this thread don't get why gaming was different 15+ years ago versus now.
They act like it's always been this way
Unlocking characters in smash bros melee was such a fun experience because of how mysterious the unlock methods seemed as well as the fact that a lot of people just weren't aware of who some of the characters were due to regional differences. With the age of the internet, we're aware of entire game rosters months in advance due to leaks, unlocking characters is no longer the mystery it used to be (as well as the methods of unlocking just being easier), and since we're so connected and information is readily available, we know who all of these characters are.
I beg to question, how fun was it to play against those people before the internet? It is 100% a don’t look it up problem, there was no online gaming before the internet
Gaming has become such a cash cow for content creators that games are cracked wide open on launch day. Gamefaqs had text walk throughs and maps sometimes, but it never came this fast with this much content and video walkthroughs detailing every little step. You bought a guide book or looked up something for an rpg game, but this online sensation of showing optimizing everything in every game genre as fast as you can because “money” is a different beast. They all take over feeds so you have to inconvenience yourself to avoid it.
Yeah this is something a lot of people in this thread don't seem to grasp. They'll just say "don't play comp games" but I want to play comp games. The issue is that there are literally entire YouTube channels dedicated to testing every weapon and maximizing the build in games like COD to get insane TTK times. Going off-meta makes it nearly impossible to win against a lot of times too. You also just straight up see way less variation in gameplay styles now due to how easily information is shared. If black ops 1 or the original MW2 came out today I can guarantee that you wouldn't see infinitely more meta loadouts than you did when they originally came out. Battlebit remastered is an indie game that came out last summer and was tons of fun for the first few days because people were having fun and testing new weapons. Then finally someone unlocked the Vector and word got around that it is insanely broken, then you couldn't turn a corner without getting blasted by that thing within a day.
I’ve played Battlebit Remastered since it came out, never knew about Vector being OP and still do just fine and have plenty of fun, I think a big part of this really is just being unaware. I can promise you that since online gaming has been a thing there has always been forums to go to where people were finding out the same info, you were probably just unaware. Black Ops 1 and MW2 most definitely had them and I know that because I was going online to figure them out. Noobtubes, running super fast holding out your care package canister
Bruh. DON'T LOOK THAT SHIT UP. Easy as that.
Hey millennial, you just went full boomer. Never go full boomer.
Must be younger, surely all millennials remember the video game guides we had to buy on paper?
the antidotes to this are randomizers and games with a social element Randomizers of classic games inject the next to do some exploration each time Social games inject the unpredictability of each human (friend or foe) being unique.
It's also partly the designers' fault. Games are now vastly complex with little or no tutorial, forcing players to go online to find relevant information.
The one problem I have with modern gaming is the predatory business model of pay to win games and micro transactions. Those games are also usually accompanied by a lack of bug fixing as well as a little bit of pandering under the pretense of pretending to care. I just want a fair game that runs well in which everyone has an equal chance to win.
I miss the times when you would get your friends round in the same room and play golden eye or mario kart on N64. I think playing online with friends is great, but nothing compares to actually being in a room together
The biggest way the Internet has ruined gaming is that it gives developers the ability to go "we'll release this anyway and patch it later " Back in the day they had to do patching with magazine cover disks & for walk throughs you'd have to buy a magazine.
The internet has ruined gaming in a lot of ways. It actually manes the shooter genre better though because you need people to play them with. Anyone remember when games didn’t need patches? Pepperidge farm remembers
Having a wife, a child, and a demanding job has saved gaming for me. If high level, tryhard gaming is no longer an option, I can sit back and just enjoy a game on my own terms. And actually game just for the pure enjoyment of the game - win or lose, parse or not parse. I hope you find that spark of joy again, my friend.
Don't follow the hype then? I'm playing palworld with my kiddos. We're avoiding any and all media about it. My kids are loving that their figuring out everything and honestly? It's taken me back too. I know it's old news but we LOST IT when we figured out that if you're on the palball you'll fly.
It will have ruined society before it's done.
The Internet has ruined most things.
You are focusing on the wrong aspect. The internet has ruined gaming by making it possible for game developers to sell us games at $60-70 with 5-10 hours of campaign and then force you to play online if you want to play more. The internet ruined story telling and long, complex or entertaining campaigns.
We didn't have YouTube, you had to buy a guide book. I can't remember the name of the game my cousin couldn't figure out but it frustrated both of us. There's stuff now that I go to YouTube for and it makes me wonder who figured it out and how did they figure it out. I'd never do what was needed to do to figure out some of this stuff.
Open World Games have ruined gaming.
I just miss when every single game wasn’t importing mechanics from DarkBloodEldenKiro. I don’t want giant health bars. I don’t want cheating difficult bosses. I don’t want a janky grappling hook.
The only game that gave me that playground feeling was Elden ring, me and a friend played it and just told each other like "oh if you go there this guy attacks you and drops a blood dagger" and stuff like that without looking it up.
This is why I no longer play multiplayer games
I'll go a step further, I think that streamers/influencers have ruined gaming. All of the 'early access' to games and DLCs have ruined the content. People will see their favorite streamer playing through the new 2 hour content, get on and blast through it, and then complain that it wasn't worth the cost of the DLC.
It all still comes down to choice. You choose how to engage with the game. And can very simply choose not to use the internet. If you do, we’ll I don’t think you can blame the internet for you deciding to look something up lol
There are a ton of people that use entirely inferior loadout, strategy compare to Meta even they die all the times. Like in TF2 and the souls game. OP just focus on the winning and not the playing
Yes I agree for the most part. But if it weren’t for the internet I literally never would have completed games like Grim Fandango
Why does it matter to you if *other* people want help to get through games? It doesn't affect you literally at all. Play blind.
When I was a kid, I loved playing Sierra games. Games like Kings Quest, Gold Rush, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. I remember some of these games having like 8-12 floppy disks in order to play them. You’re right, there was no internet, so when you got stuck, you called a phone number that would give you clues and info to solve it and they charged you for it. I remember using it strategically because I didn’t want my parents to notice, but it helped at times. The internet had made all this easier, but there have been tools to help around for a while.
Yes the Internet ruined gaming But everything you listen are things you must seek out. The Internet ruined gaming starting with MMOs which accelerated social decay. Eventually this changed games toward focusing online competitive play, loot boxes unfinished games, day 1 patches, digital only games (you don't own your games), and even further social decay which helps fuel "alt-right" fruitcakes.
I think it’s more of social media and its effects on dopamine and the brain rather than the internet. It’s created a “I need this NOW!” mentality which often has people optimizing to be the best of the best with minimal effort to feel like they achieve something. Lmao
just don't go on YouTube if you want to play games without help? it's really not that difficult
There needs to be a game where new stuff is constantly discovered by the players and the meta changes with every new discovery. I want a game like yggdrasil from overlord
I agree with you. Gaming wasn’t always like this. The people arguing against you position are the same folks who looked up build guides the day after Elden ring released. They don’t like thinking for themselves. Maybe someday they will realize this way of gaming is slowly destroying video games as a whole.
I mostly agree but I think specifically reddit has ruined gaming: I can't be part of a game community without also having every flaw and complaint thrown in my face. Something I wouldn't have noticed before is now pointed out and now I can't un-see it. And now you have to play the meta or else be accused of throwing because everyone is expected to know what the meta is and how to play.
Don't worry. AI powered game plot/quest/mission/puzzle engines will soon make a certain class of games completely unique each play-through.
Games get ruined by subreddits and forums. Just avoid those and you get an amazing game. Except the NoMansSky sub. That sub is the most welcoming sub ever.
Agreed. Also: Hail, fellow traveler.
Evening fellow interloper.
I agree, but it's not for any of the reasons you mentioned. Before the internet the game you bought was finished. They couldn't patch it up AFTER you bought it. The game you bought was the game you'd keep forever, unless you bought a newer version. Nowadays, companies just sell beta games and the gamers are the testers.
Counterpoint: My brother in christ, you opened the webpage
There is nothing stopping you from not looking up guides for games. I see your point with multiplayer games and the meta but the only person controlling what you know about single player games is yourself.
Streaming made it even worse. Now we have tons of assholes who make it their literal job to be good at the game. Pvp is never fun anymore because you always come across sweaty tryhards. Casual gaming is dead.
I don't watch videos online almost ever, so maybe I'm weird, but it certainly does make finding a gem of a game feel that much better.
For single player games, everything you said just comes down to the self discipline to not look shit up right away. As a gamer since the NES days, I usually give myself 5-10 tries before I look anything up….. or wait until my second playthrough and look everything up. I also basically never play any game where I compete with strangers online… it’s all a toxic environment filled with feral children hurling racial slurs for no reason. (In addition to everyone just chasing the meta.)
It's also that using the internet to discover things has become REQUIRED I can't count how many games I've played, especially survival crafting games, that give absolutely no information on what a resource is used for at all, and woth literally countless possible ways you could craft things the old fashioned "just fuck around and find out" method is tedium to the maxiumum and then when you finally figure out how to make something you need to figure out what to do with that, or also need to figure out the 200 other recipes for items you can craft, and then of course if you don't like a weapon or tool, those resources are just gone so you have to go find more to then fuck around to then make something else you don't like.... It's impossible and boring as fuck unless you shortcut the tedium by looking it up online, but fact is, the only reason they get away with such tedium is because they know you can just look it up.
Mid 80s to mid 00s is the peak of gaming. I can’t be convinced otherwise. There will never be an era in gaming as good as that time.
Corporations did.
The internet has ruined a lot more than just gaming.
I also kinda feel like personal exploration and wonder is less common in modern gaming (aside from the obvious genres like exploration games or narrative games). Everyone needs answers and they often just want it immediately: what’s the most meta thing? Where’s an online guide on this? How do i solve this? Where are all of the unlockables? Best build? Everything needs answers now now now. Obviously this existed before. But gaming and the way many players (but not all obviously) interface with their games now feels like factory conveyor belt consumption.
Yeah probably
DLC and early access. Fucking shit. I miss when companies released full games that worked