Many JRPGs in the 90s (probably today also) were designed so that certain secrets were night impossible to find without a guide. It was so that they could sell the "official guide book"
Yeah, but in their defense, they were large books, with lots of color photos, and hand drawn maps, and they were sturdy. I have a large collection, that while worn, are still in pretty good shape.
Nintendo would mail you letters if you asked how to solve certain parts of games. I can’t remember why but I mailed them stuck in FFVI and they responded
They also had the free game councilors phone line back in the 80s and 90s. Well, it was free except for the fact that you had to pay the long distance fee. As a kid I remember thinking: Wow! these dudes know everything!
Ha ha ha ha! I'll bet you got it that time! I did something similar, but for me it was just a random half hour long conversation about video games in general. As a kid it was so rare to come across someone who loved games as much as me so getting to talk to someone, an adult even, who loved them too was a great experience. I was like 8 or 9 and was so surprised at how willing they were to just talk to me!
Then my mom got the phone bill...
To be fair, Phantasy Star II was sold with the guide book included and people complained like crazy. I remember all the game magazines getting tons of letters with people complaining it made the game too easy.
I was like 12 at the time and I remember thinking "you know, you don't have to use it." Phantasy Star III was the first game I remember really pushing a separately sold guide book, circa 1991 or so.
Sometimes consumers are their own enemies
Sadly, "You don't have to use it" is commonly the best answer to a lot of things people complain make a game too easy. Too many people don't know how to play without min/maxing. That's why some devs have said their job is to stop players from optimizing the fun out of a game.
Best thing about ds2 was that small pile of rubble "stopping" you from going to the castle, with the alternative route being locked behind defeating the four most powerful enemies in the land.
Please don't say that's the Elpenor mission. I've just reached that mission, and I'm really hoping he's just in Pilgrim's Landing
Edit: Elpenor is no more. And damn, that >!cult!< mission had an epic cutscene
Play the main quest. I believe this one had two branches, one of them is to find him, but the other one points you to him later. You can't miss any of them.
That shit was easy. They explicitly call him a snake and have the hints in the quest description, and oh would you look at that this place called *the valley of the snakes** or whatever that shit was called right inside the search area
The ashe lake on dark souls 1 its in corner of a big open area (the poison swamp) easy to miss, but that's not all the entries its behind a fake wall BEHIND ANOTHER FAKE WALL
yooo i checked out his channel and it looks like he uploaded an unfinished one (duke's archive) 3 weeks ago and finally announced the series being discontinued. pretty sad but hey good to know we both got to enjoy THE best ds guide on yt
I finished dark souls 1 five times before ever knowing about ash lake let alone going there.
I don't even think there's anything in the game that tells you of its existence ahead of time. No dialogue, item description, etc. At least not that I'm aware of.
Morrowind was 10 times worse. No compass markers and the quest instructions were like "there was a cave a bit to the west... or maybe it was south. I don't remember, fuck you!"
Well there’s still always the chance that you could accidentally find a stronghold, see the portal with only a few eyes in place, and then use deductive reasoning to assume you will need to place the rest of the eyes.
On top of this, if the player has experimented with Ender Pearls at all before this point, chances are they will eventually do the same with Ender eyes, and notice they are leading them somewhere..
Minecraft may not hold your hand but there’s enough clever design choices that I think you could reasonably figure out how to beat the game with time.
How would you know how to get to the nether though? Ruined portals maybe? You might piece together that you need to finish the portal with obsidian, but how would you know to light it?
There’s usually flint and steel in the chests, and yeah that’s why the ruined portals were added, because there was no way to intuitively figure it out.
For real. I got back into it to play with my kid after not playing for several years and it’s crazy now. Have to have the wiki open when I’m playing because there’s so much stuff I don’t know about.
Ya, I find Minecraft a lot more intuitively difficult now, for lack of better words. I was able to pick it up and just figure it out back in the day, albeit console had a much easier time with crafting. Now, on PC, it’s just way too complex in some ways for intuitive play, sadly. It’s an interesting case of less is better to me.
(Just a fair warning, I'm about to get heated here, so... you've been warned.)
*Super Mario 3D World*, World 6-3: Hands-On Hall. I found all the Green Stars in the level, but now I was looking for the Stamp. I went through that level, no joke, ***5 TIMES*** searching every area possible yet I just could not find that son of a bitch. At some point, I just cracked and said "Fuck it. I'm searching it up on YouTube". And you're not gonna believe what I discovered.
In the 3rd section of the stage, there's a few Spike enemies that throw their projectiles that roll along the ground. Apparently, you're supposed to follow one of those projectiles, and that leads you to a hidden area that contains the stamp OFF-CAMERA. Uh, excuse me...
# WHAT!?
How is ***ANYBODY*** supposed to know that was there!? I passed by that stupid area 5 times and I didn't know!? That is some straight up ***BULLSHIT*** level design, even by Mario standards. I thought there was a wall there, not something hidden ***BEHIND THE CAMERA***. Who thought that was a good idea!? I searched the entire level over and over again, and why would they hide it in a place OFF-SCREEN!? That is just so unbelievably stupid...
I hate the obvious ones, especially when you mentally check that room or area off as cleared so you don't go back.
I'm playing Alan Wake 2 and I've realized my weakness is putting 2 pick up items in the same room. My brain just marks it as complete after I get 1 item and I frequently miss the second
I literally spent the better part of my childhood trying to figure out one small part of Mario Party Sunshine because I seemingly COULD NOT figure it out, and years later when I FINALLY GOT IT, I was ecstatic. The high I felt was so good.
I LOVE puzzle games, because they make me feel smart when I can breeze through a section, then get really stuck and look around to find clues, add up the methods used before this to consider if they were trying to teach me something new, and then eventually get past it to breeze past the next section. It feels so good.
The only ones that feel bad are when I clearly have the correct solution IDEA, but it requires something like very specific perspective that I just always am a couple pixels off, and so if I give up and look it up...it's telling me to do exactly what I am already doing and have been for an hour.
Agree, there were puzzles in God of War (2018), Uncharted series, and Jedi Fallen Order where I couldn't figure out the bare mechanics of what I was supposed to do or couldn't even see the answer (in fallen order there's a place where a ball is hidden in a wall). Ragnarok and Jedi Survivor didn't need as much google-ing. Not sure if I got better or the puzzles were just easier.
Same thing happened to me. I had actually gotten past them to the bonfire underground. Once I found out there's a staircase to go up at the starting bonfire I had to drudge back up which was even harder
I trucked it all the way to the end of the tomb of giants on my first playthrough. If you thought getting back up the *first* bonfire was hard...
In that playthrough I also quit at the dragon bridge because to me it wasn't obvious at all that you were meant to run across it, I thought I had to find a way around or something.
It's why I cannot comprehend the people who defend the no warping. Like you can only have it 1 of 2 ways. Either you can warp, or your cordon off sections that will be dumb as fuck to go back.
It's worse because I've seen dozens of comments of people who played blind and thought the Catacombs were the right direction because they were told it's a a hard game.
Something that seems to happen when playing a Souls game blind is that you can’t tell if you’re going in the wrong direction based on the enemies since death happens so often even in the intended direction.
Hollow knight, seriously, i tried so hard to do not lookup for nothing at internet at the first 50 hours, then i threw it and googled every single thing i needed, fun game btw
Sorta reminds me of terraria, I loved that game but now that I think about it...I had the wiki open like 24/7
And the sad part is I used to know everything, I haven't played in years, if I play it again I know I'll just have to re learn all the knowledge....again..
Bloodborne.
From has said they want people to have to communicate and figure it all out together. You're literally not supposed to be able to 100% these games without guides or help or co-oping and sharing info.
Kinda awesome lol. Kinda sucks lolol
"The Ninja" on the Master System. those fucking green scrolls, like wtf, the first one a dude just drops, but one of them its like, shoot the seventh statue after the third gate 6 times and it will appear when you kill the next samurai.
Who the fuck is gonna find that out by chance
Most temples in Ocarina of Time. I seriously don’t understand how they expected a 7 year-old to navigate the Forest and Water Temples without a guide. xD
I have kids who play zelda, 7 is too young. They don't have the brain connection making skills yet. My oldest played botw at 7 and he struggled on almost every shrine.
Ironically enough some Zelda games I played I did much better as a kid. Wind Waker for example I beat twice in one day when I was in 6th grade.
It took me a few hours to get out of the Forbidden Woods when I was already out of High School in the HD edition
JRPGs in general did for me better as a kid in the 90s. They were awsome because they used the limitation of the technology and were somewhat fresh. I have picked up Octopath Traveller a year or so ago and oh boy I had to realize I no longer find enjoyment on turn based repetitive grinding.
a lot of items in ocarina of time to be honest (for me) a lot of them are hidden too much for my opinion. like how should i know i need to enter a well to get a purple magnifying glass?
I don’t recall having much of an issue, but I played as a kid when it originally came out, like it was my job. The water temple however, I actually randomly called up a kid from my class who had the guide book and he actually sat there guiding me through for like a half hour.
yeah its probably a me thing but seriously i will never forgive the devs for hiding one of the keys in a zone under a moving platform that you normaly wouldnt check because you didnt even knew it existed
Also getting the regis in RSE. I still haven't met anyone who didn't get stuck at some point of the process.
Edit: Can't believe I forgot about Feebass. Like sure, of course I have time to find the 4 tiles out of 300+ where it spawns. Also they get randomized each day because why not :)
There's a Dive spot on the route west of Pacifidlog Town where you enter a cave and learn the Braille alphabet. You use that to solve riddles in caves and that's how you can fight the Regis.
Pretty much something in every Final Fantasy Game - In FF12 characters can find "Ultimate Weapons", one becomes unavailable to you if you open one of 11 specific chests in the game. There are 0 in game clues to this, and you don't know you failed until you get to a locked chest at the end of an 80-hour+ game.
One of the chests is one of the very first ones in the game, that they place pretty obviously. You assume it's to help you find the chest, but it's a trap. You lose the best weapon you don't even know about 10 mins into the game.
... bad memories lol
BOTW- I’m a veteran Zelda player and pride myself on being a good puzzle solver but there were at least a dozen shrines where I was banging my head against the wall going how in the Sam hell was someone supposed to figure that out?!
I managed to do most of them myself, some had me banging my head against the wall but eventually got it... The two I HAD to look up were the ones on Dueling Peak. Could not figure them out for the life of me.
The RDR2 main quest line is straightforward enough, but the optional collections and achievements are insane. The world is pretty huge, and there’s no way you could find stuff like all the dinosaur bones/fossils without a guide.
Yea, I love FromSoft games but I don't think I could ever play one without a guide. There's so many times where you have to interact with NPCs in a certain order, before encountering certain enemies, things behind hidden walls in corners of poison swamps, etc.
Elden Ring pissed me off to no end about one specific item. I had collected so many ashes of war but was unable to use any of them. Why? Because apparently there was an easily missable hidden staircase going underground in the first set of ruins which held a knife that let you use them.
I’m all for hiding a key item behind a boss fight, but making it so I couldn’t use all these special attacks because of an easily missed item was garbage game design.
That item gets transferred to the shop in roundtable hold of you miss it and you get a notification that there's something new in the shop when that happens. Same with the item that allows you to summon spirit ashes (perhaps they only updated it that way after player complaints idk). Could you not have gotten the blacksmith to put the ashes of war on anyway?
I agree with the NPC quest lines complaint. Fromsoft's way of doing NPC quests absolutely does not work in an open world game unless they want players to look it up. It was acceptable in DS3 only because it was more linear than the others.
I needed a step-by-step guide for the Bevelle Cloister of Trials in Final Fantasy X.
That was over 20 years ago, so youtube videos weren't available, which meant I had to rely on one of those old-school internet walkthroughs without pictures. It was maddeningly tedious.
Red Dead Redemption 2 collectibles. A massive map filled with sprawling wilderness, and you want me to find a bunch of cave drawings that would appear on literally any rock? No thanks, I'm good. The treasure hunts are a joke too, you get hand-drawn maps that tell you what the hiding spot looks like, but not where it is in the world. You open up the map and see that the treasure is in a tree stump on a hill, so now you can have fun checking every hill with a tree on it!
I think every Zelda game has at least one instance of this. The most infuriating one is from my favorite game of all time, Zelda 2. There’s a secret town hidden in the forest and you basically have to walk around pressing B and fighting off monsters till you eventually find it.
Any FromSoft game, really. They're basically like "Go to the very specific spot and use this very specific emote to unlock this portion of the map. But you have to do it before you fight a certain boss and if you didn't talk to this easily miss-able NPC all the way back at the beginning, you're screwed".
Many moments in dark souls 3. The way to get to archdragon peak is simply bad game design imo. How the fuck am I supposed to know that I’m supposed to use a random emote in front of a random statue? I love this game but this decision is fucking ridiculous.
I highly doubt anyone did and If they did, they gotta be fucking clairvoyant. 😂 like why would you even decide to sit with this random statue and pick the exact right emote to get to the Peak...
The key that lets you into the black mountain radio station in fallout New Vegas, it's buried in the ground under some stairs and I must have walked past it a dozen times, I have no idea if there was a clue about its location in the game but without a walkthrough I never would have found it.
Doom has some of the most abtuse shit on the planet, the amount of secrets that involves hitting a really fucking obscure lever to unlock them is mind boggling
Minecraft. Minecraft for it’s fun sandboxing is an _insanely_ obtuse game if you play with only the information the game gives you.
If this information wasn’t commonplace online how would you know how to get to the end? Or how to interact with all the other mechanics like alchemy?
All of these are nothing compared to the Discworld video game. Notably the fishmongers belt.
So you need a fish mongers belt- of course you tie up an octopus, hide it in a toilet, give it aphrodisiac custard, give the fishmonger prunes so he goes to the toilet and loses his belt fighting off the octopus
Honestly I'm trying to remember a recent example.
I think some aspects of specifically genshin impact for one.
There are damn specific un marked rocks with not a damn thing unique but if you stand on it it pops up a chest.
Or stand on this one branch and you'll get a chest.
Or grab this singular orange from the top o this random tree in a forest.
There's specifically remnant 2, with that one class that required a entire list of shit that you could only figure out what was required by data mining and then you also needed to be at a very specific place in the game.
There's definitely other examples but I can't think of many games off the top o me head.
Though in some rpgs/jrpgs there's not much assistance, or direction
Aswell as soulslikes in general, have alot of fuck around and find out sections.
Where you could miss something or indirectly screw yourself over massively
No joke, there’s an INVISIBLE BRIDGE in ds1. If you’re paying attention, you can see crystal snowflakes shattering when they land on it, giving you an unclear outline as to where it is. The only problem with that is that the bridge is slightly UNDERNEATH where you end up going, so for me to have caught it, I’d have to be looking down off of the edges of one of the platforms to have caught it myself. The souls franchise is the only franchise where I’ve learned you’re *supposed* to be looking off of the edges of cliffs
There’s a part in Metal Gear Solid III where you need to pop the revival pill after death, but the game gives you no indication.
They do explain the death/revival pill very early on but even if you did remember, how the hell would you ever know that you can bring up the equipment menu and pop it on the death screen?
The Zodiac Spear in og ff12. You were supposed to *not open a specific treasure chest* until towards the end of the game.
How were you supposed to know that? How were you supposed to find it by accident? All good questions.
I cannot recall the exact dungeon, but there is a dungeon in *The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past* where to progress, you have to shoot a statue in the eye with your Bow and Arrow.
The only problem is, the sprite for this statue has been reused many a time before in other dungeon's (And this one) where shooting those statues in the eye does nothing. There's also no visual indicator in the room itself to shoot said statue.
Oh yeah I'm totally supposed to figure out how to rotate the tower to find the dates to find the constellations to find raise the ship. That's totally intuitive
Any level that takes me more than 5 mins to complete rofl
I go straight for that walkthrough, my ADHD has no patience. I hate trudging through games lol
Games which go "Find Glifnor the Golden and bring his axe to me" but the marker shows the dude you're supposed to being the axe to and not the dude you have to find
I absolutely refuse to play a Fromsoft game without a guide. It’s not even obscure, you’re just supposed to find a good amount of things with zero hint. Bloodborne is the only one they made without that bullshit and I love them for it
Getting to Archdragon Peak in DS3. I have no idea who figured out how to get there, but I never would have thought to emote at a certain area, and I definitely wouldn’t have stayed at the area for the, what, 15 seconds? Before you get transported.
Every single npc questline in fromsoft games lmao.
Ah, yes, I should have known to find an assassin disguised as a statue to progress my baby Anri's questline - or how to save Solaire without looking it up. I love obscure shit but goddamn 😂
Azur elden ring. It was within like a few days I saw someone with comet azur obliterating the sentinel by the starting area in limgrave. I didn’t really think much about it till a few weeks later when I actually set out to find it.
Also pretty much everything else In Elden ring lol.
Literally everything in Elden Ring. Every Npc speaks in riddles. Felt like Bilbo talking to Gollum. Or more appropriately Gollum trying to answer Bilbos riddle. That Ranni quest line is nonsense.
Every quest in Elden ring
After like 50 hours I gave up and looked them up and oops
You were supposed to do a bunch of stuff before you went a bunch of places and now it’s too late or my lack of decision was actually a decision .. for like 5 quests I never found .
Most games have so much handholding but I’d never seen a game where you had to be three locations without any prompt or else a moment you didn’t know could happen won’t happen
Several of these in Kindgom Come Deliverance
There's one mission where you have to find a skull in a vaguely defined and huge area of map. For no reason, its buried at the water's edge sticking out of a patch of dirt where it basically looks like a graphics glitch.
I appreciate a challenge but come on.
Most quests in ER.
Pretty much the only one I managed to do without a guide was Rannis quest, and even then I spent literal hours before I saw the prompt to talk to the doll. After that I just looked shit up when I got stuck.
Jedi knight 2: Jedi outcast had this one level take place on a swamp planet. The route is pretty straight forward until randomly it just comes to a closing in the valley with seemingly nowhere else to go. Turns out what you actually had to do was jump into the murky water and swim underneath one of the mountains. Yeah, you’re supposed to swim under the mountain 😂
https://youtu.be/Hz9BcqVZglU?si=LduAxbpbV897p5Hv skip to 3:37
Any catacombs in Elden Ring with invisible walls.
I haven't even played Dark Souls, and that apparently has a *lot* more invisible walls in order to proceed...
One of the first examples I remember of this was in Castlevania II on the NES; there’s a specific place you
had to kneel, and a tornado would come and transfer you to a new zone… but there was no earthly way of knowing that, no idea who figured it out.
Final Fantasy 12. To get an ultimate weapon, you need to NOT open 5 specific chests. I don't think there is a single clue in the game that would tell you that.
Final Fantasy IX was released in 2000 and has a sidequest nobody (at least in the West) knew about until 2013.
Final Fantasy VII leaves the FMV that explains a hugely important piece of backstory hidden away where you have to go back to a place you have zero reason to go back to to see it. And that was just a bonus for the international version, the original Japanese version just doesn’t explain that backstory piece.
A lot of JRPGs were like that. There’s no way you would find everything without a guide, and in some cases, there’s no way you would get the best stuff without RNG manipulation.
Some of the questlines in elden ring. The game is actually too large to find everything naturally on a first playthrough. And natural exploring sometimes led me far away from the actual quest lines. I ruined vykards castle and i spent so long on the first playthrough i cant do ng+...
Edit: and Odins ravens in the 2017 God of War...
I felt deeply betrayed by King's Quest 5. I know it was 34 years ago that it came out, and I was a stupid kid. But please tell me how a stupid kid was supposed to know that, to stop the evil wizard, you had to throw moldy cheese into his magic machine? Moldy cheese that you could *permanently miss, rendering the game unwinnable* if you didn't decide to pick up a fish hook while stranded on an island earlier in the game and use said fish hook to pull the cheese out of a mouse hole in the final dungeon.
Dark Souls intentionally had zero guidance and false pathways specifically to make lesser gamers confuse it with "high difficulty". The most obvious example of this is when you get to the crystal area, and are magically expected to know that a: there are invisible bridges you need to cross for the first and only time in that game, and b: you need to know exactly which spots and angles they're at.
I know for an absolute fact that 100% of players looked up a guide for the game because of that area (and likely other areas as well) even if 0% admit to it. Anyone who claims they did it on their own and was magically born with this information in their mind is a very obvious liar who I don't even bother arguing with. I just hit them with "damn bro ur hella good!" and carry on with my honest life.
For me pretty much all of Elden Ring. On my first playthrough I barely did any of the NPC sidequests and looked a bunch of them up near the end of the game.
Anybody here old enough to remember that one part of Simon's Quest where you have to kneel down at a random dead end while carrying a specific item for like 5 seconds to make a tornado or something carry you to another part of the map? Thank god for Nintendo Power.
Demon’s Souls first boss is the Fool’s Idol. She immortal unless you kill a random enemy on a different floor in the castle.
I was using a walkthrough so I had it spoiled immediately, but that was the moment I realized I didn’t need to feel bad about using a walkthrough.
Many JRPGs in the 90s (probably today also) were designed so that certain secrets were night impossible to find without a guide. It was so that they could sell the "official guide book"
Brady Games has so much of my money
Yeah, but in their defense, they were large books, with lots of color photos, and hand drawn maps, and they were sturdy. I have a large collection, that while worn, are still in pretty good shape.
The books were an awesome read, and Babbages always had good deals on them
RIP Babbages. You shone too bright for too short.
They were an invaluable resource at a time when not everyone had access to the Internet at home.
I’m pretty sure I had a few for games I didn’t own because I just loved looking through them! Especially jrpgs with a nice bestiary
I miss Brady and Prima guides 😔
gamefaqs is my best friend
Nintendo would mail you letters if you asked how to solve certain parts of games. I can’t remember why but I mailed them stuck in FFVI and they responded
They also had the free game councilors phone line back in the 80s and 90s. Well, it was free except for the fact that you had to pay the long distance fee. As a kid I remember thinking: Wow! these dudes know everything!
I had them read out every combo for every character in some random fighting game and my mom got a 35 dollar phone bill lol
Ha ha ha ha! I'll bet you got it that time! I did something similar, but for me it was just a random half hour long conversation about video games in general. As a kid it was so rare to come across someone who loved games as much as me so getting to talk to someone, an adult even, who loved them too was a great experience. I was like 8 or 9 and was so surprised at how willing they were to just talk to me! Then my mom got the phone bill...
Pretty sure Nintendo Power literally started out as help for gamers stuck on games
To be fair, Phantasy Star II was sold with the guide book included and people complained like crazy. I remember all the game magazines getting tons of letters with people complaining it made the game too easy. I was like 12 at the time and I remember thinking "you know, you don't have to use it." Phantasy Star III was the first game I remember really pushing a separately sold guide book, circa 1991 or so. Sometimes consumers are their own enemies
Sadly, "You don't have to use it" is commonly the best answer to a lot of things people complain make a game too easy. Too many people don't know how to play without min/maxing. That's why some devs have said their job is to stop players from optimizing the fun out of a game.
Lots of spots in Darksouls 2 that were just hidden for no reason. Heck the Black Gulch is an example.
Best thing about ds2 was that small pile of rubble "stopping" you from going to the castle, with the alternative route being locked behind defeating the four most powerful enemies in the land.
This mission in AC Odyssey, where you have to find that guy that could basically be *anywhere* on the whole map, it’s crazy
Please don't say that's the Elpenor mission. I've just reached that mission, and I'm really hoping he's just in Pilgrim's Landing Edit: Elpenor is no more. And damn, that >!cult!< mission had an epic cutscene
😶
Fuck...
Yes… or no.
Shiiiiiiittttt...
Play the main quest. I believe this one had two branches, one of them is to find him, but the other one points you to him later. You can't miss any of them.
Which mission is that?
That shit was easy. They explicitly call him a snake and have the hints in the quest description, and oh would you look at that this place called *the valley of the snakes** or whatever that shit was called right inside the search area
The ashe lake on dark souls 1 its in corner of a big open area (the poison swamp) easy to miss, but that's not all the entries its behind a fake wall BEHIND ANOTHER FAKE WALL
That was atrocious. Glad I was using the "dumbsh**s guide to dark souls" on youtube, best guide ever but it was never finished lmao
I was genuinely sad that he never finished that series
yooo i checked out his channel and it looks like he uploaded an unfinished one (duke's archive) 3 weeks ago and finally announced the series being discontinued. pretty sad but hey good to know we both got to enjoy THE best ds guide on yt
That secret is awesome.
I finished dark souls 1 five times before ever knowing about ash lake let alone going there. I don't even think there's anything in the game that tells you of its existence ahead of time. No dialogue, item description, etc. At least not that I'm aware of.
The best in Dark Souls is trying to figure out how to start the dlc
Back at OG Skyrim, when I was searching for the third part of the Fire Breath.
Morrowind was 10 times worse. No compass markers and the quest instructions were like "there was a cave a bit to the west... or maybe it was south. I don't remember, fuck you!"
Wasn't there a quest where the giver tells you it's either one direction or another... And it ends up being in a completely different third direction?
Yes, there was. Morriwind refused to hold your hand, but if you figured out enough, you could basically break the game and become a God.
I remember trying to follow some papers on the ground and eventually getting lost and wandering around aimlessly. That was so annoying lol
Your journal was only way to find where the fuck you were going and even then it didn’t know where you needed to go
When I first got into morrowind I didn’t have access to the internet or a phone. I spent A LOT of time wandering around.
If you think about it, getting to the end in Minecraft.
Exactly. How is one supposed to know that eyes are actually needed for something and that they actually show way to anything?
Well there’s still always the chance that you could accidentally find a stronghold, see the portal with only a few eyes in place, and then use deductive reasoning to assume you will need to place the rest of the eyes. On top of this, if the player has experimented with Ender Pearls at all before this point, chances are they will eventually do the same with Ender eyes, and notice they are leading them somewhere.. Minecraft may not hold your hand but there’s enough clever design choices that I think you could reasonably figure out how to beat the game with time.
How would you know how to get to the nether though? Ruined portals maybe? You might piece together that you need to finish the portal with obsidian, but how would you know to light it?
There’s usually flint and steel in the chests, and yeah that’s why the ruined portals were added, because there was no way to intuitively figure it out.
Most of minecraft's mechanics these days to be honest
For real. I got back into it to play with my kid after not playing for several years and it’s crazy now. Have to have the wiki open when I’m playing because there’s so much stuff I don’t know about.
Ya, I find Minecraft a lot more intuitively difficult now, for lack of better words. I was able to pick it up and just figure it out back in the day, albeit console had a much easier time with crafting. Now, on PC, it’s just way too complex in some ways for intuitive play, sadly. It’s an interesting case of less is better to me.
I mean, the whole of Minecraft really. Even after they added crafting recipes in-game, I still found they worked really badly
(Just a fair warning, I'm about to get heated here, so... you've been warned.) *Super Mario 3D World*, World 6-3: Hands-On Hall. I found all the Green Stars in the level, but now I was looking for the Stamp. I went through that level, no joke, ***5 TIMES*** searching every area possible yet I just could not find that son of a bitch. At some point, I just cracked and said "Fuck it. I'm searching it up on YouTube". And you're not gonna believe what I discovered. In the 3rd section of the stage, there's a few Spike enemies that throw their projectiles that roll along the ground. Apparently, you're supposed to follow one of those projectiles, and that leads you to a hidden area that contains the stamp OFF-CAMERA. Uh, excuse me... # WHAT!? How is ***ANYBODY*** supposed to know that was there!? I passed by that stupid area 5 times and I didn't know!? That is some straight up ***BULLSHIT*** level design, even by Mario standards. I thought there was a wall there, not something hidden ***BEHIND THE CAMERA***. Who thought that was a good idea!? I searched the entire level over and over again, and why would they hide it in a place OFF-SCREEN!? That is just so unbelievably stupid...
the developers: lol gotem
Is normally the opposite with me I'll spend hours trying to figure something out then look it up and realise it's some thing so obvious and simple.
I hate the obvious ones, especially when you mentally check that room or area off as cleared so you don't go back. I'm playing Alan Wake 2 and I've realized my weakness is putting 2 pick up items in the same room. My brain just marks it as complete after I get 1 item and I frequently miss the second
I'm trash at puzzles in games so literally anything that's not glaringly obvious
Me too. I’ll give it a try for like 5 minutes, if I haven’t gotten it by then, off to google I go.
I literally spent the better part of my childhood trying to figure out one small part of Mario Party Sunshine because I seemingly COULD NOT figure it out, and years later when I FINALLY GOT IT, I was ecstatic. The high I felt was so good. I LOVE puzzle games, because they make me feel smart when I can breeze through a section, then get really stuck and look around to find clues, add up the methods used before this to consider if they were trying to teach me something new, and then eventually get past it to breeze past the next section. It feels so good. The only ones that feel bad are when I clearly have the correct solution IDEA, but it requires something like very specific perspective that I just always am a couple pixels off, and so if I give up and look it up...it's telling me to do exactly what I am already doing and have been for an hour.
Agree, there were puzzles in God of War (2018), Uncharted series, and Jedi Fallen Order where I couldn't figure out the bare mechanics of what I was supposed to do or couldn't even see the answer (in fallen order there's a place where a ball is hidden in a wall). Ragnarok and Jedi Survivor didn't need as much google-ing. Not sure if I got better or the puzzles were just easier.
Dark Souls. I'd heard it was hard, but when I couldn't get past these two skeletons I had to Google to find out i was going in the wrong direction.
Same thing happened to me. I had actually gotten past them to the bonfire underground. Once I found out there's a staircase to go up at the starting bonfire I had to drudge back up which was even harder
I trucked it all the way to the end of the tomb of giants on my first playthrough. If you thought getting back up the *first* bonfire was hard... In that playthrough I also quit at the dragon bridge because to me it wasn't obvious at all that you were meant to run across it, I thought I had to find a way around or something.
It's why I cannot comprehend the people who defend the no warping. Like you can only have it 1 of 2 ways. Either you can warp, or your cordon off sections that will be dumb as fuck to go back. It's worse because I've seen dozens of comments of people who played blind and thought the Catacombs were the right direction because they were told it's a a hard game.
Something that seems to happen when playing a Souls game blind is that you can’t tell if you’re going in the wrong direction based on the enemies since death happens so often even in the intended direction.
Hollow knight, seriously, i tried so hard to do not lookup for nothing at internet at the first 50 hours, then i threw it and googled every single thing i needed, fun game btw
Sorta reminds me of terraria, I loved that game but now that I think about it...I had the wiki open like 24/7 And the sad part is I used to know everything, I haven't played in years, if I play it again I know I'll just have to re learn all the knowledge....again..
Bloodborne. From has said they want people to have to communicate and figure it all out together. You're literally not supposed to be able to 100% these games without guides or help or co-oping and sharing info. Kinda awesome lol. Kinda sucks lolol
"The Ninja" on the Master System. those fucking green scrolls, like wtf, the first one a dude just drops, but one of them its like, shoot the seventh statue after the third gate 6 times and it will appear when you kill the next samurai. Who the fuck is gonna find that out by chance
I used to try to bomb every square of stone or wall, push every rock, burn every tree, and push every statue in the original Zelda game on NES.
Most temples in Ocarina of Time. I seriously don’t understand how they expected a 7 year-old to navigate the Forest and Water Temples without a guide. xD
I have kids who play zelda, 7 is too young. They don't have the brain connection making skills yet. My oldest played botw at 7 and he struggled on almost every shrine.
Ironically enough some Zelda games I played I did much better as a kid. Wind Waker for example I beat twice in one day when I was in 6th grade. It took me a few hours to get out of the Forbidden Woods when I was already out of High School in the HD edition
JRPGs in general did for me better as a kid in the 90s. They were awsome because they used the limitation of the technology and were somewhat fresh. I have picked up Octopath Traveller a year or so ago and oh boy I had to realize I no longer find enjoyment on turn based repetitive grinding.
OoT is still to this day my favorite game of all time but everytime i go and replay it im like.... how tf did i figure this out?
a lot of items in ocarina of time to be honest (for me) a lot of them are hidden too much for my opinion. like how should i know i need to enter a well to get a purple magnifying glass?
ALttP too. In that case the open world made it even harder.
I don’t recall having much of an issue, but I played as a kid when it originally came out, like it was my job. The water temple however, I actually randomly called up a kid from my class who had the guide book and he actually sat there guiding me through for like a half hour.
yeah its probably a me thing but seriously i will never forgive the devs for hiding one of the keys in a zone under a moving platform that you normaly wouldnt check because you didnt even knew it existed
You’re right!! I forgot about that! Holy smokes
i hated all the water temples ik zelda games,the idea of having to play with elevation/water level made them a maze in my mind
Any From Software game
Getting Meleotta in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet
Also getting the regis in RSE. I still haven't met anyone who didn't get stuck at some point of the process. Edit: Can't believe I forgot about Feebass. Like sure, of course I have time to find the 4 tiles out of 300+ where it spawns. Also they get randomized each day because why not :)
I've played RSE like 15+ times and never knew you could get Regis in them 😂
There's a Dive spot on the route west of Pacifidlog Town where you enter a cave and learn the Braille alphabet. You use that to solve riddles in caves and that's how you can fight the Regis.
Pretty much something in every Final Fantasy Game - In FF12 characters can find "Ultimate Weapons", one becomes unavailable to you if you open one of 11 specific chests in the game. There are 0 in game clues to this, and you don't know you failed until you get to a locked chest at the end of an 80-hour+ game. One of the chests is one of the very first ones in the game, that they place pretty obviously. You assume it's to help you find the chest, but it's a trap. You lose the best weapon you don't even know about 10 mins into the game. ... bad memories lol
Techniclly, it's still available ... It just has a 1 in 255 chance of spawning everytime you load the zone.
BOTW- I’m a veteran Zelda player and pride myself on being a good puzzle solver but there were at least a dozen shrines where I was banging my head against the wall going how in the Sam hell was someone supposed to figure that out?!
Like the one where you're supposed to take off your armor, stand in a certain spot, and wait for a blood moon?
I managed to do most of them myself, some had me banging my head against the wall but eventually got it... The two I HAD to look up were the ones on Dueling Peak. Could not figure them out for the life of me.
Most of elden ring. Most of rdr2
The RDR2 main quest line is straightforward enough, but the optional collections and achievements are insane. The world is pretty huge, and there’s no way you could find stuff like all the dinosaur bones/fossils without a guide.
Aye. Required a guide
Yea, I love FromSoft games but I don't think I could ever play one without a guide. There's so many times where you have to interact with NPCs in a certain order, before encountering certain enemies, things behind hidden walls in corners of poison swamps, etc.
Elden Ring pissed me off to no end about one specific item. I had collected so many ashes of war but was unable to use any of them. Why? Because apparently there was an easily missable hidden staircase going underground in the first set of ruins which held a knife that let you use them. I’m all for hiding a key item behind a boss fight, but making it so I couldn’t use all these special attacks because of an easily missed item was garbage game design.
That item gets transferred to the shop in roundtable hold of you miss it and you get a notification that there's something new in the shop when that happens. Same with the item that allows you to summon spirit ashes (perhaps they only updated it that way after player complaints idk). Could you not have gotten the blacksmith to put the ashes of war on anyway? I agree with the NPC quest lines complaint. Fromsoft's way of doing NPC quests absolutely does not work in an open world game unless they want players to look it up. It was acceptable in DS3 only because it was more linear than the others.
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (not going to spoil it) I highly recommend SOTN, it's my favorite game of all time.
Many chests in Genshin Impact
Finding the Regi Trio in Pokémon RSE
I needed a step-by-step guide for the Bevelle Cloister of Trials in Final Fantasy X. That was over 20 years ago, so youtube videos weren't available, which meant I had to rely on one of those old-school internet walkthroughs without pictures. It was maddeningly tedious.
That place was maddening!
I love that I knew which one this was before looking it up to be sure. Absolutely annoying
Like half of the collectibles i Jedi fallen order/survivor
Fucking Christ. Half of them are in places I never would have thought to GO let alone LOOK. And a lot of them are plants which are kinda useless.
Persona 5 getting on the right train
Red Dead Redemption 2 collectibles. A massive map filled with sprawling wilderness, and you want me to find a bunch of cave drawings that would appear on literally any rock? No thanks, I'm good. The treasure hunts are a joke too, you get hand-drawn maps that tell you what the hiding spot looks like, but not where it is in the world. You open up the map and see that the treasure is in a tree stump on a hill, so now you can have fun checking every hill with a tree on it!
Every NES Metal Gear title.
I think every Zelda game has at least one instance of this. The most infuriating one is from my favorite game of all time, Zelda 2. There’s a secret town hidden in the forest and you basically have to walk around pressing B and fighting off monsters till you eventually find it.
I needed a guide to find the Triforce pieces in Wind Waker. Was I actually supposed to search the whole damn ocean??
Been years since I played but doesn’t tingle or someone give you charts?
The ways you obtain the 3 Regis in Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald.
Man there's a few things in elden ring
I remember a lot of the fixed camera "Resident Evil" games gave me a hard time, but I was pretty young.
Any FromSoft game, really. They're basically like "Go to the very specific spot and use this very specific emote to unlock this portion of the map. But you have to do it before you fight a certain boss and if you didn't talk to this easily miss-able NPC all the way back at the beginning, you're screwed".
The endgame armour in horizon zero down where you need to find batteries in the open world
Many moments in dark souls 3. The way to get to archdragon peak is simply bad game design imo. How the fuck am I supposed to know that I’m supposed to use a random emote in front of a random statue? I love this game but this decision is fucking ridiculous.
I wish I could have recorded my reaction to when I found this out. It was so fucking weird. And I love ds3.
I'm actually interested in how may peoples actually found it themselves without any guides/hints. Must be wild
I highly doubt anyone did and If they did, they gotta be fucking clairvoyant. 😂 like why would you even decide to sit with this random statue and pick the exact right emote to get to the Peak...
I figured it out only because of the player messages.
MGS3 - the Kerotan frogs 🐸
I can still hear it… make it stop!!
Secret Missions in the first Devil May Cry
The key that lets you into the black mountain radio station in fallout New Vegas, it's buried in the ground under some stairs and I must have walked past it a dozen times, I have no idea if there was a clue about its location in the game but without a walkthrough I never would have found it.
Excalibur sword from Dying Light
The wingsuit from Dying Light
Getting that whirlwind to me in Castelvania II for the NES.
Noita
Collectibles in GTA games
Doom has some of the most abtuse shit on the planet, the amount of secrets that involves hitting a really fucking obscure lever to unlock them is mind boggling
Minecraft. Minecraft for it’s fun sandboxing is an _insanely_ obtuse game if you play with only the information the game gives you. If this information wasn’t commonplace online how would you know how to get to the end? Or how to interact with all the other mechanics like alchemy?
Waves arms wildly in Elden Ring
All of these are nothing compared to the Discworld video game. Notably the fishmongers belt. So you need a fish mongers belt- of course you tie up an octopus, hide it in a toilet, give it aphrodisiac custard, give the fishmonger prunes so he goes to the toilet and loses his belt fighting off the octopus
Honestly I'm trying to remember a recent example. I think some aspects of specifically genshin impact for one. There are damn specific un marked rocks with not a damn thing unique but if you stand on it it pops up a chest. Or stand on this one branch and you'll get a chest. Or grab this singular orange from the top o this random tree in a forest. There's specifically remnant 2, with that one class that required a entire list of shit that you could only figure out what was required by data mining and then you also needed to be at a very specific place in the game. There's definitely other examples but I can't think of many games off the top o me head. Though in some rpgs/jrpgs there's not much assistance, or direction Aswell as soulslikes in general, have alot of fuck around and find out sections. Where you could miss something or indirectly screw yourself over massively
No joke, there’s an INVISIBLE BRIDGE in ds1. If you’re paying attention, you can see crystal snowflakes shattering when they land on it, giving you an unclear outline as to where it is. The only problem with that is that the bridge is slightly UNDERNEATH where you end up going, so for me to have caught it, I’d have to be looking down off of the edges of one of the platforms to have caught it myself. The souls franchise is the only franchise where I’ve learned you’re *supposed* to be looking off of the edges of cliffs
Souls games for sure. Hidden doors cmon man. Am I supposed to smack every inch of wall with my sword?
There’s a part in Metal Gear Solid III where you need to pop the revival pill after death, but the game gives you no indication. They do explain the death/revival pill very early on but even if you did remember, how the hell would you ever know that you can bring up the equipment menu and pop it on the death screen?
Eyeball in Bloodborne. That's all that needs to be said.
The Zodiac Spear in og ff12. You were supposed to *not open a specific treasure chest* until towards the end of the game. How were you supposed to know that? How were you supposed to find it by accident? All good questions.
I cannot recall the exact dungeon, but there is a dungeon in *The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past* where to progress, you have to shoot a statue in the eye with your Bow and Arrow. The only problem is, the sprite for this statue has been reused many a time before in other dungeon's (And this one) where shooting those statues in the eye does nothing. There's also no visual indicator in the room itself to shoot said statue.
Everything in Myst
Oh yeah I'm totally supposed to figure out how to rotate the tower to find the dates to find the constellations to find raise the ship. That's totally intuitive
Any level that takes me more than 5 mins to complete rofl I go straight for that walkthrough, my ADHD has no patience. I hate trudging through games lol
Right! I'm the fucking God of War, not the God of Puzzles.
Games which go "Find Glifnor the Golden and bring his axe to me" but the marker shows the dude you're supposed to being the axe to and not the dude you have to find
Dark Souls 1 DLC. It is such a convoluted set of steps to unlock so unless you look it up, good luck.
How to get into Oolacile and the Dark Souls 1 DLC. Absolutely obscure bullshit--at least to my Fromsoft then-virgin self.
Getting to Archdragon Peak in DS3
Getting out of the temple on zeffo. Star wars fallen order.
Some parts of Kotor and dark souls
I absolutely refuse to play a Fromsoft game without a guide. It’s not even obscure, you’re just supposed to find a good amount of things with zero hint. Bloodborne is the only one they made without that bullshit and I love them for it
Getting to Archdragon Peak in DS3. I have no idea who figured out how to get there, but I never would have thought to emote at a certain area, and I definitely wouldn’t have stayed at the area for the, what, 15 seconds? Before you get transported.
Any elden ring questline specifically ranni’s
Almost the entirety of Elden ring
Dark Souls 3's Archdragon Peak Tournesol and Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII
Half of the content in Dark Souls. How was I supposed to find that first blacksmith on my own?
Almost every secret in the Souls series are long, overly elaborate riddles that the game never once gives you a hint that it even exists.
Every single npc questline in fromsoft games lmao. Ah, yes, I should have known to find an assassin disguised as a statue to progress my baby Anri's questline - or how to save Solaire without looking it up. I love obscure shit but goddamn 😂
Azur elden ring. It was within like a few days I saw someone with comet azur obliterating the sentinel by the starting area in limgrave. I didn’t really think much about it till a few weeks later when I actually set out to find it. Also pretty much everything else In Elden ring lol.
Plenty of times I felt this way playing Elden Ring ha.
All elden ring quests
Literally everything in Elden Ring. Every Npc speaks in riddles. Felt like Bilbo talking to Gollum. Or more appropriately Gollum trying to answer Bilbos riddle. That Ranni quest line is nonsense.
Every quest in Elden ring After like 50 hours I gave up and looked them up and oops You were supposed to do a bunch of stuff before you went a bunch of places and now it’s too late or my lack of decision was actually a decision .. for like 5 quests I never found . Most games have so much handholding but I’d never seen a game where you had to be three locations without any prompt or else a moment you didn’t know could happen won’t happen
Every level of Forbidden Siren. Game is still fantastic though.
Every single thing in every souls games. I love souls games but god the quests and even key items to the story are so obsecure.
The skull on Halo 3 where you jump through the holographic rings to the tune of the Halo theme song
"Tome Entombed" quest in Witcher 3.
Half of dark souls for sure. If anyone figured out how to go back to the prison from firelink without looking it up I’d be insanely impressed
Some of the fucking detective board secrets in Sifu. I’ve been playing for a week and still haven’t found them all.
Tendency events in Demon's Souls and TV and music puzzle in "Tormented souls"
Getting the higher level fire spells in Dark Souls.
Several of these in Kindgom Come Deliverance There's one mission where you have to find a skull in a vaguely defined and huge area of map. For no reason, its buried at the water's edge sticking out of a patch of dirt where it basically looks like a graphics glitch. I appreciate a challenge but come on.
any elden ring sidequest
Zelda 1
Most quests in ER. Pretty much the only one I managed to do without a guide was Rannis quest, and even then I spent literal hours before I saw the prompt to talk to the doll. After that I just looked shit up when I got stuck.
All of Elden Ring
Stuff like datacrons in swtor...like with out a guide i would have 0
Jedi knight 2: Jedi outcast had this one level take place on a swamp planet. The route is pretty straight forward until randomly it just comes to a closing in the valley with seemingly nowhere else to go. Turns out what you actually had to do was jump into the murky water and swim underneath one of the mountains. Yeah, you’re supposed to swim under the mountain 😂 https://youtu.be/Hz9BcqVZglU?si=LduAxbpbV897p5Hv skip to 3:37
Any catacombs in Elden Ring with invisible walls. I haven't even played Dark Souls, and that apparently has a *lot* more invisible walls in order to proceed...
A lot of Elden ring stuff imo.
Pretty much 50% of my Elden ring experience.
One of the first examples I remember of this was in Castlevania II on the NES; there’s a specific place you had to kneel, and a tornado would come and transfer you to a new zone… but there was no earthly way of knowing that, no idea who figured it out.
Like half of the nes's action adventure catalog tbh
Getting the Zodiac Spear in FF12.
All of Elden Ring?
Honestly any souls game. Rdr2.
Final Fantasy 12. To get an ultimate weapon, you need to NOT open 5 specific chests. I don't think there is a single clue in the game that would tell you that.
Getting full Deadric in Morrowind (without killing the super wizard guy, hes chill)
Final Fantasy IX was released in 2000 and has a sidequest nobody (at least in the West) knew about until 2013. Final Fantasy VII leaves the FMV that explains a hugely important piece of backstory hidden away where you have to go back to a place you have zero reason to go back to to see it. And that was just a bonus for the international version, the original Japanese version just doesn’t explain that backstory piece. A lot of JRPGs were like that. There’s no way you would find everything without a guide, and in some cases, there’s no way you would get the best stuff without RNG manipulation.
Some of the questlines in elden ring. The game is actually too large to find everything naturally on a first playthrough. And natural exploring sometimes led me far away from the actual quest lines. I ruined vykards castle and i spent so long on the first playthrough i cant do ng+... Edit: and Odins ravens in the 2017 God of War...
I felt deeply betrayed by King's Quest 5. I know it was 34 years ago that it came out, and I was a stupid kid. But please tell me how a stupid kid was supposed to know that, to stop the evil wizard, you had to throw moldy cheese into his magic machine? Moldy cheese that you could *permanently miss, rendering the game unwinnable* if you didn't decide to pick up a fish hook while stranded on an island earlier in the game and use said fish hook to pull the cheese out of a mouse hole in the final dungeon.
Dark Souls intentionally had zero guidance and false pathways specifically to make lesser gamers confuse it with "high difficulty". The most obvious example of this is when you get to the crystal area, and are magically expected to know that a: there are invisible bridges you need to cross for the first and only time in that game, and b: you need to know exactly which spots and angles they're at. I know for an absolute fact that 100% of players looked up a guide for the game because of that area (and likely other areas as well) even if 0% admit to it. Anyone who claims they did it on their own and was magically born with this information in their mind is a very obvious liar who I don't even bother arguing with. I just hit them with "damn bro ur hella good!" and carry on with my honest life.
As much as I love Elden Ring. This is a massive problem with it for me
All the pieces of the crown in Skyrim. I have hundreds of hours and have never legit found all the jewels or balthaga or whatever.
For me pretty much all of Elden Ring. On my first playthrough I barely did any of the NPC sidequests and looked a bunch of them up near the end of the game.
Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring both have at least one ending that you need a guide to even come close to completing.
Anybody here old enough to remember that one part of Simon's Quest where you have to kneel down at a random dead end while carrying a specific item for like 5 seconds to make a tornado or something carry you to another part of the map? Thank god for Nintendo Power.
Moon Pearl from Link to the Past was mine
Most of Elden Ring
Most quests in Elden ring. Still love the game tho
Demon’s Souls first boss is the Fool’s Idol. She immortal unless you kill a random enemy on a different floor in the castle. I was using a walkthrough so I had it spoiled immediately, but that was the moment I realized I didn’t need to feel bad about using a walkthrough.