Games designed to be one thing, but are commonly played other than intended?
Not sure how to title this better 😅
Are there any games that you tend to play contrary to how they are intended?
What prompted this question was playing Project Zomboid; but I am all comfortable and snug in my home base that it doesn't feel like playing a zombie survival game anymore. I feel like I am just playing The Sims with a character that mimics my introverted ass. I never leave the house and just spend all day reading, watching videos, learning new crafts, and just staying alive. I have no need to scavenge since I am loaded up with tons of armor, guns, ammo, food, a source of water, a generator and acess to a near limitless supply of fuel from an underground fuel tank generated in the basement.
How 'bout y'all? Do you prefer Surf to actual Counter-Strike? Have an unconventional way of playing Pokemon? I wanna know! 😃
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Do randomizers count?
If so, I play through Link to the Past using unintentional methods about once a month.
I'm from a time when complex games could lead to softlocking your progress if you made the simple mistske of assuming the game was programmed logically, so I avoid using those myself because I don't want to get half way through the game only to be unable to go the rest of the way becsuse RNJesus forsook me. 😅
But yeah, they count.
Every randomizer I've played has logic built-in to prevent that exact thing from happening. If there is a game you know inside and out, there might be a randomizer for it that can breathe new life into a title you love.
But with LttP specifically, you can set the randomizer to use a few different modes when placing items which range from "make everything accessible with vanilla item behavior" to "I'm a freak and walls are merely a suggestion"
In addition to what other people have pointed out, I'll also add that most decent randomizers are very configurable -- you can usually make things as random (or as not random?) as you want. And typically you can also get a "seed solution" which will tell you exactly how to complete it (or if you've configured it to allow impossible seeds, it can tell you if it is even possible to do so). And there are many more options to use besides that. If you only want certain aspects or elements or sections of the game randomized, or you only want them randomized in a certain way or according to certain rules you can usually do that too. And you can usually either search for or tell it to generate specific seeds that will give you certain things early to give prompt access to the whole world if you want. These are called "open" or "very open" seeds. For speedrunning they can even be a significant challenge, as there is little guidance on where you need to go to get the next item when the whole map is almost immediately unlocked. The opposite, so-called "linear" seeds, have a very direct a->b->c->d progression path (much like the original game probably did) where as soon as you get an item, you know exactly what your next goal must be because the particular combination of items you possess might only give you access to one new location each time. But you may only realize this once you become intimately familiar with the game mechanics (and sometimes the randomizer's mechanics too).
Randomizers are really powerful tools for replaying a game you've otherwise mastered but they're not intended to only be hard. Sometimes they're actually very easy, especially if you tune them to be. And that's part of what's fun about them, the flexibility of being able to play some of your favourite games again in ways you always dreamed of doing, or ways that you never dreamed of doing. It's not just a challenge it's also a sandbox. It allows you to do new things that you never would've been able to do in the game without cheating, but it doesn't necessarily remove all challenge the way cheating normally would.
the "big list of randomizers" actually does not allow randomizers that are prone to softlocks
that wouldn't be a randomizer, it would just be random lol
I'm not sure where that common misconception of randomizers softlocking came from, it would be considered a bug
I've seen plenty of Dark Souls randomizer runs that have to be restarted before leaving the asylum at the start because it didn't spawn the key needed to leave. But that also was quite some time ago when these things were fairly new.
Also remember that randomizers often have a lot of settings to customize, and sometimes they'll have an option to disable the logic checks, so the players might've been doing this to themselves lol.
I know the Zelda, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, and Deus Ex randomizers are very robust against softlocks.
TIL about randomizers. Time to go back into the cave with my favourite games from the past, tyvm