How was I meant to know THAT?!

[In Search of Username]

Most of the mechanics of Dark Souls. Seriously, they say 'At this bonfire you can perfom the rite of unhollowing' and give ZERO EXPLANATION OF WHAT THAT MEANS. I love the game's difficulty in general, but difficulty created by simply not explaining the basic concepts of the game at any point is just bad game design.

I'm right there with you. I recently bought the game and DO enjoy it....but i'm sick of people saying the game is hard but SUPER TOTALLY FAIR.

Just because the combat system works and the game being apperantly bug free, it has nothing to do with fair if information about the game is largely dependent on user created content (wikis and soapstones) and punishes you hard for going somewhere you are not supposed to (in an open world that happens to be mostly linear unless you are stunningly awesome at this game)

Spoiler

For example i love how when i got though the graveyard (with skeleton-enemies) near the starting area without problems, that i was immediately punished for trying to go further by getting stuck with the next area...wich also has skeletons, but apperantly you cant kill them with regular weapons

I played that for the first time the other day, and I asked my (experienced) friend what it meant to be Hollowed. He said it meant I had no Humanity, which also meant fuck-all to me. I just kind of asked, "Oh, so should I unHollow myself?" And he said no, not when you're entering an area you'll probably die in, or else you'll lose it. Okay, so, apparently Humanity is important enough that I shouldn't lose it, but I still don't know what the fuck it does. I didn't really play it past the tutorial (I don't own it, so I was playing it at a friend's house to get a feel for it) and I figured I'd have learned its use eventually, but like what.

FYI, Unhollowing gives you SOMETIMES different dialogue options with certain NPCs (they are generally nicer if you don't look like a Zombie), heightens the quantity and quality of weapon drops from enemies, MAYBE increases your resistance slightly and gives you the ability to summon other players or NPCs to fight with you.
On the other hand, it also gives other players the ability to invade your game and kill you in an ambush.
Its useful alright, but given how fast you can lose it by dying i rarely unhollow.

Most importantly IMO, with the use of an additional "humanity" you can kindle bonfires, wich doubles your estus flask refill.

Yeah, I've started using a policy of 'if stuck on hard enemy, don't look up what to do on the wiki' but 'if utterly confused about what to do or what this means, look it up all you fucking want'. Honestly I wouldn't mind if the game at least had a substantial manual to explain stuff (like a certain other difficult game, the Witcher 2) but nope, it's like six pages long. So yeah, I love the game and I'm trying to stay with the spirit of it, but I don't think including a map and a proper tutorial would really constitute 'hand-holding' the player or detract from the game's hardcore-ness.

 

[PinkiePyro]

Skyrim :dawnguard

Spoiler

just last night I couldn't figure out how to feed from the frickin moth priest

I looked it up on google but goddamn it skyrim you should of told me that vampire lords feed diffently from normal vampires and worse its bugged

 

[WanderingFool]

I'm going to just cite the trope "Guide Dang It" and move on. That's basically the answer to this thread.

And im putting a link to that page [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuideDangIt].

Cause I feel like being evil today...

 

[Blade1130]

I remember for the PS3, (at least for a while, they might've changed this), they made it so Circle was accept and X was cancel / back. After playing on the Xbox for so long this bothered me so much. I get it symbolically, but the bottom button on the controller is always accept, while the right button is cancel. I thought that was universal!

Also, I keep thinking of that one Metal Gear Solid puzzle, you know the one. The "package" one.

Spoiler

You're told you contact this girl named Merryl, but she recently changed her number, so no one has it. You're told her number is "on the back of the package", but no one has any idea what this "package" is. Turns out, the "package" is the package the game came in, the game box IRL. On the back of it is a picture of you talking to Merryl and it shows her number for the call. How the hell was I supposed to know that!?!? There's MGS for you, breaking the 4th wall every time.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Most of the mechanics of Dark Souls. Seriously, they say 'At this bonfire you can perfom the rite of unhollowing' and give ZERO EXPLANATION OF WHAT THAT MEANS. I love the game's difficulty in general, but difficulty created by simply not explaining the basic concepts of the game at any point is just bad game design.

Did you figure out how to cast magic? Because that was what killed the game for me. I got to level 50-something and could never figure out how to use magic. No instruction beyond, "Oh, just equip a staff/spell." Okay, so why, when I equip said item, does my character stand there and scratch his head? I thought, "Oh, just increase my stats. Probably don't have the right point level for that." Nope. Increased everything magic-related, and still just head scratching. A tutorial would have been an amazing help--just a simple healing spell would have been enough. Instead, I try asking for help and got this:

"I don't want to ruin the game for you."

My friends, and anyone else I asked, gave me a vague idea of how to do it, but no one ever told me HOW to do it. The game was already ruined when every time someone attacked me, they could kill me from half way across the field. People would often ask, "How are you level 58 and don't know how to use magic?" Because the game never TOLD me how to use it. Clearly there was more to it than just getting a staff. Considering this, I'm surprised the game told you what button was used to swing your damn weapon. As you said, a game that is hard because it's HARD is fun (I like my Ninja Gaiden games), but a game that's hard because nothing is explained is not fun, it's annoying.
I gave up and traded the game in without a second thought.

 

[piinyouri]

There is a lot of stuff they flat out do not tell you in Brutal Legend.
Like how to open the Legend landmarks or how to ungag the dragon statues.

I was halfway through the game when someone else told me I could have been collecting them from the start.

I'll just take this time to say this as well.
Psychonauts aside(since I have not played it), if I were to judge Tim Shaeffers ability to design games based on Brutal Legend alone, I'd have to think he was an amateur.

 

[elvor0]

Final Fantasy IV: So, I have to fight the Dark Elf, who kills all my party members in one hit. Don't worry, the guide says, 'cause Edward will come and save your ass by playing the flute.

Excepet he didn't. I just got a game over screen. Instead, I have to explore an obscure part of the allied castle that contains practically nothing else! The find Edward and talk to him! THEN he will bother rescuing you.

The actual boss was pretty easy. Silence-> Focus ->Focus for more turns -> Kick. Instant win.

Yeah that was total bollocks. Especially considering how you think he'd dead at that point, what reason would you have to go searching for him, or expect anything to happen other than you go fight the dark elf and take the crystal back?

 

[Dango]

It took me a long time to figure out that double clicking the button to open your pip-boy in Fallout: New Vegas actually turns on a lantern.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

FFX: who in there right mind would dodge 200 consecutive lightning strikes without knowing they got Lulu's most powerful weapon? (or part of it)

FFVI: Two words, Paladin Shield.

Zelda - A Link to the Past: This one may have just been me, but at the time my friend who was also playing it didn't figure it out either. This was back in the mid 90's. In the Skull Woods, or whatever the 3rd Dark world Dungeon is called, to progress you need to go through a door with a statue that you need to put on top of a button to open it. Problem being that the statue was in the way.

Up till that point you had never needed to PULL an object other than those Handles sticking out of the walls, which had just been introduced in the same game btw, in a Zelda game before. I had never been able to, and therefore stopped trying, to pull the basic square blocks in the simple block puzzles like the one before you get to the Sanctuary.

So how were we supposed to know that statues, unlike blocks and lacking any obvious differences like handholds, could be PULLED as well as pushed. The pushing bit was obvious, and has been since like forever in the history of THINGS in general.

When we had an older friend help us, we felt like complete idiots. I mean it was like a dog discovering it had a tail for the first time lol

 

[In Search of Username]

Most of the mechanics of Dark Souls. Seriously, they say 'At this bonfire you can perfom the rite of unhollowing' and give ZERO EXPLANATION OF WHAT THAT MEANS. I love the game's difficulty in general, but difficulty created by simply not explaining the basic concepts of the game at any point is just bad game design.

Did you figure out how to cast magic? Because that was what killed the game for me. I got to level 50-something and could never figure out how to use magic. No instruction beyond, "Oh, just equip a staff/spell." Okay, so why, when I equip said item, does my character stand there and scratch his head? I thought, "Oh, just increase my stats. Probably don't have the right point level for that." Nope. Increased everything magic-related, and still just head scratching. A tutorial would have been an amazing help--just a simple healing spell would have been enough. Instead, I try asking for help and got this:

"I don't want to ruin the game for you."

My friends, and anyone else I asked, gave me a vague idea of how to do it, but no one ever told me HOW to do it. The game was already ruined when every time someone attacked me, they could kill me from half way across the field. People would often ask, "How are you level 58 and don't know how to use magic?" Because the game never TOLD me how to use it. Clearly there was more to it than just getting a staff. Considering this, I'm surprised the game told you what button was used to swing your damn weapon. As you said, a game that is hard because it's HARD is fun (I like my Ninja Gaiden games), but a game that's hard because nothing is explained is not fun, it's annoying.
I gave up and traded the game in without a second thought.

I enjoy the game too much to give up on it, so I've just taken to looking everything up on the wiki that I don't understand. Probably not in the spirit of the game, but whatever, I'd never get anywhere otherwise.

 

[Rawberry101]

How to solve the Regi puzzle in Pokemon Gen III. As a kid, that shit was hard as hell.

Oh dude yes. I was in third grade when Ruby and Sapphire came out. My friend and I spent 2 days trying to decipher that thing. Why in a kids game??? Although it was fulfilling when we did accomplish it. It seems like each generation, for the first 3 at least, that the 3 legendary pokemon got harder and harder to find/catch.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Lamest example ever. It's like saying it's microsoft's fault that you don't know how to click up the start menu when you've never used a PC before. "Durr, how do I click? OH IT'S A LEFT-CLICK, WHY DIDN'T THEY TELL ME?!". Your example further fails on the fact that DOTA 2 isn't even out yet. It's still in beta...

1. It's right-click.
2. You're straw-manning.
3. With all that money Valve has been spending on tournaments for a game that's in beta, they could have already made a decent tutorial, or at least a pop-up box.
4. Windows XP at least said "Click here to begin." when you moused over the Start menu.
5. You're clearly a fanboy.

 

[JonnWood]

A certain puzzle involving an inner tube in The Longest Journey. And another one involving candy, and another one involving a junction box, which require the protagonist to do things that are completely unintuitive and, in fact, actively dangerous.

It's even worse because the game generally avoids those "rub everything in your inventory on everything" puzzles.

 

[Overusedname]

I would be incredibly surprised if there wasn't some random NPC hidden somewhere that told you how to evolve Pikachu.

I think there was, but when you're a kid, you don't wanna talk to strangers, ya wanna make the thunder guy make the other guys go boom.

 

[SextusMaximus]

Ctrl+Space on Mount and Blade Warband to 3x speed the campaign map.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Currently having that happen with the L4D level in Payday the Heist. I listen to the doctor, it's really obvious which one is the infected patient. Then nothing. The objective screen doesn't change, Bain doesn't tell you what to do, and no matter how fast I kill the guards the alarm goes off. Doesn't help that the first segment of that mission is tedious as hell.

You can hotkey spells (or items) in Skyrim. After 30 hours playing a fire/resto mage a friend told me. I was shocked.

...Are you shitting me?