Oh yeah.
Back in the (dial up) day, amongst the neighborhood kids?
If you looked up a GameFAQs guide to a game, if you had to do that, to beat it?
You were cheating.
Only possibly acceptable if it was a game with an onbnoxious amount of hidden collectable type items, and you were just now doing a full completionist run.
Nowadays, you’d have to basically make a whole lot of your game procedurally generated, to get back to that kind of a paradigm, (hence the existence of roguelites, i suppose) but yeah its absolutely totally normalized now that just looking up a guide or a playthrough is totally acceptable, whereas pre-mass-internet-adoption, doing that was largely seen as cheating.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Personally, I never cared about the cheating aspect, I was never particularly good at gaming and I’d definitely prefer cheating over not finishing a game or trying to bruteforce whatever I’m stuck on for 10 hours. The issue is that looking up stuff casually like many people (including me) do today has a high risk of reducing the fun for no real reason. And I feel like games today tend to be easier and less grindy than they used to be in the dial-up days, too, so there’s also less reason to look anything up in the first place.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Ah ok ok, yes, what you’ve said is all true as well, removing the sort of comepetive aspect and just focusing on a single person playing a game as an experience.
Absolutely yes, in general, nowadays, most single player games are simpler, easier, power fantasies, as opposed to legitimate challenges.
While I do not miss the bullshit ‘difficulty’ of grinding, healthbar sponges… I do miss the actual lower amount of tactical/technical complexity and risk/rewark of a lot of modern AAA games.
Its possible for gameplay itself to be actually complex and engaging, instead of having essentially a metagame of stat min maxxing wrapped around it, basically to compensate for the actual shallowness of the rest of the gameplay.
But, most people seem to prefer a dopamime stream, over a challenge of both intellect and dexterity.
And also yes, even without comparing your skill at or experience in a game to others… yeah, if looking at a game guide is basically the same as having substantial portions of a movie or book spoiled for you… yeah, that’s a problem for any kind of game with a narrative structure that weaves into its gameplay as well.
If you can’t be surprised in any real, impactful, shattering kind of way, its not a very compelling experience, at least in my opinion.