Skip Navigation
Gaming @beehaw.org
helenslunch @feddit.nl

How are you all playing these insanely complex games?

Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur's Gate.

I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.

I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it's an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.

So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?

E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!

149 comments

  • Personally I just hop in an wing it. In the case of baldurs gate I already understood most classes and races because of DND but in general when it comes to games like that yeah I just wing it and hope for the best

    • This is it basically. Especially for the first time you don't really need to minmax anything and still have a good time.

  • Here's a fun thing you can do: just stop thinking about stats and make a character you'd like to bang, then just ooga booga it.

    Baldur's Gate 3 may be very daunting at first, even with its genius tooltip system, so I just went straight into it with a Dragonborn barbarian with no real thought put into it other than "he's hot and totes my new fursona". You'd be surprised at how far you get and how much you pick up naturally over the next 80 hours of gameplay.

    That being said, it's still not for everyone, as much as it tries to be, and if even Overwatch is too complex for you already, it might just be that the evolving game design in the industry is becoming more misaligned with your tastes, and that gamers are becoming more and more serious about the video games they play.

    • I wonder how long before someone starts getting offended on behalf of cavemen for the phrase Ooga Booga.

      Seriously though, perhaps RPG's just aren't for OP. Some people get enjoyment from taking things slow, learning all the mechanics, and building the most powerful character possible within the limits of the game.

      Many people choose not to cheat in games like this to give yourself max stats because that's where the fun is, as opposed to a a game like borderlands, where an already maxxed out character can still be challenged with the endgame content which scales to their level.

  • BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don't need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it's too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It's fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The "GaMeR" police aren't going to kick down your door.

    The answer to the wider question is: No, I don't. I like learning systems and I've practiced learning systems very rapidly. I've been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what's in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don't work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I've played in the last couple months, I'll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don't need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.

  • I just pick a character class that looks interesting, make them look like me, and get going.

    Figure it out as I play, and just have fun. I pretty much never watch videos or read anything about games unless I get really stuck, or have already finished the game and am curious about other playstyles.

  • Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic and Overwatch are complex?

    I play Dwarf Fortress. And I got into it before the Steam version gave it a functional UI. Maybe I'm just spoiled. I've been gaming since I was 3 or 4, so like 90% of what most games require is already ingrained in me. That last 10% is the stuff unique to a particular game; and recently I'm finding these unique things to be the only things not taught in a tutorial. And that is pretty annoying that they will teach the basic controls, which even a non gamer could figure out in mere seconds, but not a mechanic unique to that specific game that no other game has done before.

    • Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It's relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

      Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.

  • Experience. I’ve been playing video games for 40 years. Many of them of any given genre tend to follow a familiar formula. While I also wing it, like others have said, it usually doesn’t take long to recognize the patterns of the formula.

  • BG3 is based on arguably the most user-friendly version of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (5e). Larian themselves also do a fantastic job at easing you into the mechanics via gameplay, so you can honestly jump in and just play something that sounds cool to you without worrying about having to min-max or optimize your character. The game lays out what you get on each level-up pretty well and it defaults you to being a single class, so you won’t have to worry about multi-classing unless you want to - and because it’s based on 5e, you can honestly get away with not optimizing your build that much, if even at all, and manage to do fine as long as your main damage (STR for melee, DEX for ranged and Finesse weapons)/casting stat (INT for Wizards, CHA for Bards/Sorcerers, and WIS for Clerics/Druids) is high.

    Can’t speak on OW2, but with games like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide, I found it’s best to just play it and figure stuff out slowly from experience. A lot of it can sound complicated, but I found it’s easier to digest the complexity of the mechanics and systems a bit at a time as your experience with the game grows. Like with Vermintide, as an example, I recently started really diving in deep with Cleave, Stagger, and Frontline/Heavy Frontline/Tank property mechanics and numbers for melee weapons; you literally cannot see these things from the game’s UI, and starting out I had no idea these things even existed, and it only really matters once you start playing on the hardest difficulties, Legend and Cataclysm. If I had to figure out all that stuff early on, I would nope out of the game super quick lmao.

  • Deep Rock is good at letting you ignore what you don't care about. I've never needed a wiki for it. It's just fun and silly co op action, with massive complexity mostly about trivial things.

  • Lol, some of these replies...

    I think you know what it is you enjoy, so you've just got to remember not to fall into that trap of "well, everyone says it's good, so I must try it".

    The great reviews come from the people who already enjoy that kind of game. Like, reviewers on a site usually favor specific genres. If something gets a good review, you've got to put it into the context of whether or not it's something the reviewer usually plays.

    You're not often going to see an RPG review by someone who mostly plays platformers.

    So if an RPG is good to an RPG-enjoyer reviewer, and most of the people picking it up are already RPG fans, then good reviews are always going to be biased in favor of people who enjoy that gaming experience.

    My advice?

    Take a look at the tags on Steam. I know they're user-submitted and "RPG" is on like every fucking game now, but things like "turn-based", "tactical", "simulation", "crafting", and a few others I'm forgetting will most likely be the things you'll want to avoid (maybe there will be some exceptions here and there).

    Also, wait a bit. No need to play games immediately. Play some stuff you enjoy for a year and then see if you still want to play it.

    As for how and why people play these games... Just preference really. It comes down to the energy and time someone's willing to commit. Neither a good thing or bad thing. Some find that thrilling, others find it chore. Both perspectives are perfectly valid.

    Sometimes, people just enjoy them as is without getting too deep and never bother with "the meta" or whatever. Usually one of two things happens here: either they really enjoy it because they don't have people backseat gaming them and telling them how to play and they're finding creative ways to do things, or they find it a miserable experience because it's just not fun if they don't like the core mechanics.

    I personally don't have the energy for "deep complex games", despite enjoying RPGs and immersive sims. I don't ever bother with crafting or strategy games (although I did get into Civ V for a while, which was nice).

    Over the years, I've learned what I like, what I don't like, and just wait things out. Game Pass and deep sales help a lot here, actually. (Also other options, but not strictly ones people necessarily approve of for various reasons.)

  • Yeah - I just jump in and wing it.

    At the risk of inviting the internet's wrath, when people talk about the difference between serious gamers and casuals, this is the sort of thing they're talking about.

    "Serious" gaming involves a particular set of skills and interests, such that the person is willing and able to just jump into some complicated new game and figure it out. And it's not just that "serious" gamers can do that - the point is that they want to. They enjoy it. They enjoy being lost, then slowly putting the pieces together and figuring out how things work and getting better because they've figured it out. And they enjoy the details - learning which skills do what and which items do what, and how it all interrelates. All that stuff isn't some chore to be avoided - it's a lot of the point - a lot of the reason that they (we) play games.

    You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything, and I can't even imagine doing that. To me, that's not just obviously bad strategy, but entirely missing the point - like buying ingredients to make delicious food, then bringing them home and throwing them in the garbage.

  • I like to just jump in and wing it, learn on the fly. Actually hate playing with people who expect everyone to "have done their research". Games do build on top of knowledge of previous ones, to an extent... but it's figuring out the rest what gives me a thrill.

    As for complicated games, I think you forgot World of Warcraft... which I can repeat to you what I told someone who called it a game "for nerds": according to their IQ, 2% of the world population are "gifted", there are 8 billion people, WoW had slightly over 10 million players at its peak.

    In an ideal world with equal opportunities for everyone, you could expect a potential audience of 160 million "nerds"... so yeah, some games are going to be more difficult that candy crush.

  • Yeah, I'm with you and it's keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It's a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

    While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That's not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that's less than a month for a full time gamer, it's about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It's frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I'll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I've got that going for me.

  • Sounds to me like you just don't want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don't either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads

    BG3 specifically: It's D&D 5e, so... yeah It's gonna be complex.

    Complex systems more generally:

    The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You'll never learn everything at once, so don't try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you've carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don't even need to care about whether you'll understand everything eventually.

  • First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it's almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.

    A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the "Send to camp" option for items. Grab them whenever, they don't take up inventory space.

  • Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you've gained from prior experimentation.

    Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it's an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren't particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.

    A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.

    Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.

  • Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.

    The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.

    • I love both Baldur's Gate III and fighting games but disagree. I think both are woefully inadequate at explaining their rules to players. Larian games need to not only make BGIII's rules as clear as a rulebook but also make tactics and strategies plain and clear to the user. Otherwise, it is very easy to fall back on decades of video game expectation only to realize your expectations are wrong. I had a co-op game of BG3 with a friend. My friend couldn't understand why he had to position his units anywhere. Didn't understand why inventory wasn't just immediately being teleported to a shared infinite item box. Didn't understand the basic mechanics of D&D combat (which even then, Larian changes to various degrees) Didn't understand why decisions had any meaningful consequences. Didn't even understand what he was supposed to be doing narratively despite there being a quest log and having us recap the story up to the point we were.

      While fighting game tutorials have gotten better, I still have yet to experience one that explains very basic things that the FGC takes for granted. Things like health bars being identical physical lengths but representing different numerical values. Things like "waiting for your turn." Things like meter management.

      Complex games are great. But complex games need to recognize that they have a larger duty to teach than simpler games. I think video game design needs to take a page out of tabletop game design and provide some analog to the tabletop rulebook: complete with not just rules but detailed explanations, sidebars, and examples of play.

      • I agree that fighting games haven't made it where they need to be yet. In fact, I've only ever found one that explains how to defend against a command grab, which is a very basic thing they should be doing better. As you agreed though, they're getting a lot closer, with a lot of intermediate steps along the way.

        I disagree that the teaching tools are insufficient if they never teach you about something like positioning in Baldur's Gate. For one, you can observe that your opponents are doing so, and you can observe which things that makes easier or harder for you and why, like now it's harder for your melee character to hit them when they run away. That's way better than someone telling you about it, and it's better onboarding to not info dump all the rules at once.

  • Insanely deep rpgs are a bit of an issue for me as well. And I generally do love rpg games, but I feel like the good ones should ease you into decisions a bit better than dropping you into a character creator.

    So it's a mixed bag for me.

  • It's just lots of experimentation. Lots of complex games are games that are not designed for you to make it through successfully on your first go. They're designed to be complete game overs that you learn from and make it further the next time. Lots of games also have a lot of moving parts that you have to master each one individually before you can tackle the whole thing. There's a reason Hitman speedruns are like 1 minute each level when most regular players can take well above an hour.

  • Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun. I get analysis paralysis pretty badly (I'm the guy who is always worried he will be out of consumables when he needs them so he never uses them in the first place!) so researching a little beforehand helps me enjoy myself more. I don't need to min/max the fun out of a game, but knowing I'm on the right track is really good for my enjoyment levels.

    And this is very much a me thing, and that's okay. We play games to have fun so play the way that's the most fun for you. If you don't like doing research before you play, but the game seems to require it, then play something else. It's okay to not like a game. (I wasn't super into BG3... shhh! Don't tell the internet or they will burn me alive! Good game, but not for me.)

    Personally, I really like rogue-lites these days. They're games where you are meant to replay them and every run will be randomized in some way so that each one ends up being unique. (Hades, FTL, Nova Drift, those sorts of games.) The randomness makes it so that there's no WRONG way to play, just better or worse choices for a given run, which takes that "stress" of making a wring choice away for me.

    You gotta find what floats your boat and don't worry about the other games.

149 comments