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  • When I played the original AoE2 I was completely unaware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different units. I just build whatever I found to be coolest and wondered why I struggled so much.

    Only when I bought the Definitive Edition much later I looked that up.

    For my defense, I was ten back then.

    • Who wanted soldiers when elephants and catapults were so much cooler? Ooo flaming archers!

  • I played a substantial amount of Zelda TotK without the paraglider which made quite a few adventures a lot more treacherous, some borderline impossible, and some actually impossible. 😂

    • Wow, that's awful lol. I explored a little and very quickly encountered a shrine where I figured out there must have been a paraglider cause it needed it (that might have been purposefully placed?).

      But also, no paraglider means no map. I can't imagine going for too long without progressing the story till you can reveal the map!

      Heck, it felt like it was taking too long to give me the photo mode feature. I knew it had to be there, but I was expecting to get it much sooner and didn't like missing opportunities to take photos for the compendium.

  • When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren't the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie's portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody's materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.

    I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because "I've played this game before, I know how it works." I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn't until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that's when all the systems fell fully into place: you're supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.

    Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there's a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.

  • Hammerwatch. You can reach the end of the game and be unable to proceed if you didn't collect specific things. I believe it was wooden boards.

  • Fallout New Vegas, I still haven't figured out how to gain xp effectively.

    • Ugh. Yes. It's one of those games where the devs thought we would learn by doing stuff, but instead (imo) I was really flailing around, guessing what to do 90% of the time.

      I got stuck once when I attacked a Caesar location and beat them, but then would be randomly killed by this group of three soldiers who would appear anywhere I went. That whole game was frustrating for me.

    • The best way to level up in New Vegas is doing the powder ganger glitch right at the beginning of the game.

      Basically if you do the first quest in good springs with Ringo and the powder gangers in a specific way, you can keep turning the quest into the powder ganger leader dude indefinitely. Max out your entire character in like 15 minutes.

  • When I first started playing WoW in 2006,I always wanted to play Balance (as it was the only caster option for Night Elves), but I thought that the point of the druid was to shape shift. So I had this janky hybrid build with the goal of collecting all the shape shifting appearances. I also thought that back then Blizzard was converting agility to spell power, because that was the only explanation for the lack of intellect leather. I though I had to only wear leather, but always believed that the gameplay was to cast until I ran out of mana, then switch to feral, and to bear if I needed additional armor and then back to casting when my mana bar recovered or if I needed to heal myself.

    I leveled to 40+ with this funky build. Eventually a guild member was helping me on a quest and asked me if my build was “purposeful” because it was a garbage build. That’s when I learned about how specs work. He offered to make a dedicated set, but needed to know what spec. I told him I always wanted balance, and so he made me my Big Voodoo set, which lasted me until well into Outlands.

  • My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn't realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.

    Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.

    And that's how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.

    During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.

  • In Elden Ring, my first every playthrough, I got the Baldichin's Blessing basically immediately and played through the entire game with that nerf. It wasn't that bad though! Powerstance halberds for the win.

  • Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn't put any points into it. Later on there's a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn't even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.

    I never finished it.

  • In Red Dead Redemption 2 on PS4 the deadeye button was kind of inconveniently placed and barely explained. I didn't realize how useful it was until I played on PC. On console i was struggling so hard in the shooting sections

    • This is what I was coming to post. I never figured out dead-eye until my second playthrough.

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