When you have to be true to your gaming values, no matter what kind of game you're playing.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/hard-wired-to-play-the-wrong-way-in-todays-open-thread
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/hard-wired-to-play-the-wrong-way-in-todays-open-thread
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I stop at stoplights and stay on the road in GTAV. Some people do this for fun, but I do it because itās right.
I also pretty much stealth everything. Breath of the Wild was spent almost exclusively in sneak mode with the Sheikah suit. Fallout 3, NV, and 4 were all spent in perpetual crouch mode. Metal Gear Solid was all about not getting caught. I am loud and boisterous in real life, so maybe itās a roleplaying thing? I dunno.
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I didnāt play GTAV because Iāve kinda fallen out with the series, but I remember when I started GTAIV I really, really wanted to be a good guy.
I was just an immigrant, hopeful for the future, so I would obey traffic (as much as I knew how to, I donāt actually drive), and try to be on the straight and narrow until the game wrenched me out of it, and I found it really hard to go from just being some guy, to being a guy that did these crimes but there were some mitigating circumstances I guess, to somewhere along the line just being a criminal for itās own sake and no longer seeming to care.
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Yeah, I find that weird as well. I really liked True Crime: Streets of LA and Sleeping Dogs for allowing me the GTA feel but allowing me to be a good guy like I wanted to be. In Bethesda games Iām kind of a thief but otherwise a standup guy (who will steal your stuff because digital hording is more acceptable than doing it IRL). More realistic games need to just let you be genuinely good.
Canāt ever hurt animals or excuse somebody else for doing so 
will completely break out of character to right animal wrongs. Will reload any save no matter how far back if harm comes to my animal companions
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As for me, I donāt know whether this qualifies, because none of these games MAKE you pick romances, usually, but in a game where you can only have straight romances, I sort of prefer to romance nobody than pick one of the straight options.
So Iāve never had a romance in a Persona game despite doing 3 of them now, and whenever I get conversation options I always pick ones that indicate I am not interested in talking about what my ātypeā is, etc.
And I didnāt romance anyone in Mass Effect until the 3rd game.
I donāt think itās really intended as a āprotestā against the lack of these options, itās just thatā¦ I dunno. When they only provide one kind of romance option, it feels like the designers didnāt make this bit of the game āforā me, in a way. Iām not the audience, so I justā¦ choose not to participate.
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I think the rub for me is when a game implies I am prone to violence, like how some talk of Niko I react with a āhey fuck you and your pigeon holeā and try to be as upstanding as I can be, which creates serious dissonance with the main campaign.
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In most games with consumables Iām afraid to use them.
I think this stems from playing Pokemon as a kid. In Pokemon Red youāre given a master ball half way thru the game. I didnāt understand that it was a 100% catch rate and used it to catch Zapdos.
I realized after reading an issue of Nintendo Power that I wasted it basically and from then on became a digital hoarderā¦
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Always active reload. Even though 99.99% of games I play donāt reward pressing any buttons during reload, I do it anyways and it makes me feel good. Iāve placeboād myself int obelieving jamming R when reloading makes it go slightly faster in any game. Itās kind of terrible.
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I actually have this quirk in a lot of games. It makes playing games like XCOM and Fire Emblem really tough. I canāt stand the idea that one of my crewmates might die. I scrub my way through these games trying to preserve ever person in my group. Each battle is more of a puzzle that I have to solve to get all these people through in one piece.
Weirdly this doesnāt hit me as hard in games like Mass Effect where certain decisions can lead to the loss of a character. I guess there it fits more in shaping the story to be more tragic?
Another quirk I have is saving items. This happens a lot in JRPGs. It started back in Final Fantasy, where I would save up all my megaelixirs and the like waiting for that moment where Iād really need them. Of course this time never comes and I complete the game basically playing on a harder difficulty because I refuse to just drink the potion an heal myself. This has carried over to other games, though, where I wonāt sell equipment becauseā¦ Well, I donāt know why. Cause Iām weird!
For the longest time, if a shooter had cover, I would play it exactly like Gears even if that wasnāt the ārightā way to play it. I feel like Iām the kind of person who always wants to āplay it safeā instead of just running in.
In hindsight I used cover way, WAY too much when I played Vanquish years ago, which is probably why I didnāt love it as much as I had hoped. Thatās why Iām excited for the PC port so I can give in another shot and just go hog wild instead of ducking and covering.
I like to think everyone ends every Final Fantasy with 50 Megalixers.
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I definitely have a perfectionist streak.
A game I often go back to once a year or so is SWAT 4, and Iāll usually find myself playing the same mission 4 or 5 times because I wonāt let myself move on until Iāve completed it āperfectlyā; all suspects arrested instead of killed/incapacitated, no officers or civilians injured, etc. etc.
Even when games make allowances for you to mess up, I will instantly load the last quicksave/checkpoint as soon as anything goes wrong. Modern stealth games like Dishonored or Splinter Cell Blacklist are famously generous with letting you be a gun/sword-slinging badass if enemies see you; but I still play those games the same way I played the original Splinter Cell. Immediately reloading as soon as anyone spots me.
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Something I have a hard time with is not making use of the best tools at my disposable, which makes a lot of games get long in the tooth much earlier than they should.
A recent example was MGSV. The gameās AI and stealth system allows for even routine outpost-captures to feel like measure, expert attempts to outsmart and outflank enemiesāif you ignore the Stun Arm, the cloak, D-Dog, Quiet, suppressed tranquilized snipers, most lethal weapons, most vehicles, and the fact that rolling while prone is treated the same as moving while prone. And if I could ignore all those things it wouldāve held my attention much longer, but even if I jump into a mission without them, knowing that I had to purposefully restrict myself to keep the game interesting on my first playthrough makes most accomplishments feel insubstantial.
I think it crops up more with stealth gamesāeven Invisible, Inc. suffers from it. Magic systems in CRPGs suffer from it, too. It not only feels like Iām playing the wrong way, but like the game itself doesnāt know what the right way would be. It just throws tools at me and assumes Iāll cobble something together.
This is kind of the opposite to playing the āwrong wayā, but I think it still counts. I have to play games optimally. If Iām given a decision between mechanically distinct abilities or upgrades, I need to run numbers and look around for analysis and determine which is better. I donāt ever run with the party of characters I want to use, but the one that is most powerful.
Itās not that Iām an elitist or hate losing. I love games like Dwarf Fortress where losing is supposed to be part of the fun. I just get incredibly stressed, unhappy and all-around have a bad time when I am knowingly (or suspect I am) making decisions that are worse than my alternatives, even if I think the alternative sounds much more fun or interesting.
Itās ruined a lot of games for me, where the optimal strategy is not fun for me but not doing it stresses me out so much that the game becomes miserable to play. But hey, at least I always know what Iām doing in WoW raids!
Ditto to āI never use consumablesā, I reached ending A of Nier, ran out of healing items on the final boss and decided to spam the effect items that I had stockpiled. I have no idea if it helped.
I have the opposite problem of liking to rush into things rather than prepare. I hated Gears of War when I played a couple games with a friend ten years ago, because he was taking cover and I just walked up to him and got shot. I was so frustrated because I want to be able to move in a game. The movement in Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch is the only reason I like those shooters, as soon as Iām told to stay still I get frustrated.
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I had a moment a few years ago when I realized that I actually didnāt āhave to beā a completionist, and I was 100% free to leave side quests undone either if they didnāt seem fun to me, or if I didnāt agree with the choices presented.
It feels like I used to treat open world games like I was just moving from left to right across an all-you-can-eat-buffet, gorging joylessly on each separate thing egardless of whether it appealed to me or if I was hungry, because I āhad to.ā Once I started to pick and choose, it made the whole experience a lot better. It seems obvious in hindsight but giving myself room to justā¦ not do thingsā¦ for either moral or enjoyment reasons fundamentally changed the way I play those games.
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Iām right there with you on the stealth thing. If a game lets me be stealthy, I will always do that, even if the gameās stealth mechanics arenāt good. Itās kind of absurd, actually.
Iāll sneak past trainers in Pokemon, just to turn around and challenge the trainer to a battle. Getting around in Baldurās Gate takes forever, because my party is in stealth 90% of the time.
I touched on this in the āDo you role play in RPGs?ā thread. While Iām most often prone to this sort of thing in an RPG where Iām consciously roleplaying with a sort of personal headcanon for my character, itās started to seep into how I play other games too.
Like Robās article, I can relate through my XCOM experiences, getting attached to my squad (especially if Iāve named and personalized them!) and jeopardizing the overall mission to attempt to save everyone. In open-world RPGs, or any game that offers a degree of player choice, I try to veer toward character consistency, even if that means making a choice to preserve the integrity of how Iāve decided I want to play a character at the sacrifice of a mechanical, in-game benefit.
This can be most jarring when a game simply forces you to play a certain way. I think more than anything, I donāt like being shoehorned into a particular style of game play where thereās only one way of solving a problem. Thatās a simple enough issue when weāre just talking about game mechanics, but when it gets into the deeper ethical questions of character behaviour and choice, I find that forcing me into only one course of action can leave a bad taste in my mouth. I was determined to stick to a pacifist style of gameplay in Fallout 4 for as long as possible, but thereās simply no way to do this in the main story ā almost immediately, youāre forced to kill. (I guess thereās as much to be said about painting a realistic picture of an unforgiving wasteland, but why not give your players some agency in your supposed sandbox?)
Itās important to note that thereās a key difference between forcing me to make a difficult decision for narrative benefit, and forcing only one choice on me because thatās just how that game works. If a gameās story says āYou have to take this action, even if goes against your value system, because itās the only way to save everyone,ā then that can create fantastic character development. If itās āYou can only take this action because reasons,ā thatās lazy game design to me.
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I try to avoid killing animals whenever possible, rabbits above all else. This actually almost kept me from playing Assassinās Creed 3 entirely, since a required part of tutorial is skinning a rabbit. But in BotW it was just an interesting wrinkle, as I basically had to play without elixirs.
