"Wait, I can do that?"

[Whateveralot]

A lot of the skyrim features. Seriously, the game leaves you in the dark about most of its features from the start. It barely explains how the favourite system works. That said, it wasn't that much of a nuisance.

 

[mrF00bar]

I thought Jedi Outcast was an unnecessarily difficult game when I found myself with 2hp and no ammo in the very first level. Then I found out by coincidence that the canisters you pick up throughout the game can heal you and the glowing green and orange box thingies which casually stand around all over the place replenish your shield and ammo respectively...

Oh man you just brought back so many memories. I rage quit that game so much before I realized I could heal lol.

 

[ABLb0y]

from Siren Bloodcurse I didn't realise you could sightjack Shibito not in your immediate line of sight until the fifthteenth or so time I failed at the hospital level.

 

[Mr Pantomime]

In the beginning of Skyward Sword, after diving my bird into the ground like an idiot for a few minutes, I realised you had to press the "Down" button on the remote to jump off. I felt pretty stupid, as you might imagine.

I did this too. I did find that pressing a button works better than slamming the bird into the ground and swearing at it.

For me, Bioshock, Z is zoom. Never actually learnt that ingame, someone mentioned it on a similar thread.

Edit: You know what I really hate about these threads? Now im going to be super paranoid about missing things when I play something for the next week.

 

[irani_che]

My friend genuinely thought portal ended when glados puts you in the oven

 

[MetalDooley]

I went through most of the Riddler object challenge...thingies in Arkham City without even realizing that you can hold down the pressure plate with exploding gel.

What??I never knew you could do that.I'd given up trying to get those.Might go back and try again now

OT:I was around 12 hours into Fallout 3 before I found out that holding down the B button activated the light on the Pip-boy.Had just been stumbling around dark tunnels before that

 

[Patrick Buck]

I went through most of the Riddler object challenge...thingies in Arkham City without even realizing that you can hold down the pressure plate with exploding gel.

SHIT REALLY?
That'll make the game easyier then..... THANK YOU!

 

[Farson89]

In fallout 3 it took me a million years to realize that holding down tab (the pip-boy key for me) would activate a flashlight.

In my defense, "hold down the main menu to activate a flashlight" is a pretty stupid way to do it.

...

WHAT.

I put about a hundred hours into that game and I never realised you could do that. Well, now I feel fucking stupid.

 

[Jamash]

There's a sprint button in Skyrim! O.O

This blew my mind when I first realized.

IT BLEW MINE TOO!

I noticed that there was a blocking perk that mentioned sprinting, so I checked the control menu and nearly yelped. This was 50 hours in.

I discovered something awesome about the Shield Charge perk and sprinting yesterday... you can sprint and shield charge whilst sneaking but most importantly... it doesn't break invisibility!

If you cast Muffle then Invisibility, you can remain completely undetected and shield charge your way through a town or hideout like an angry gust of wind, knocking everyone out of your way without them having a clue what just happened.

As a combat tactic it's slightly broken, but as a mischief tactic it's the best.

I suspect it probably won't work on certain scripted events (like interrupting Roggvir's execution), but I'm going to test it out and try to find the biggest concentration of people I can find and see how many I can knock over with one charge whilst remaining undetected, kind of like Phantom 10-Pin Bowling.

I can't wait until I next encounter a nice orderly line of 3 Thalmor and their prisoner...

 

[MahMahnator2992]

When I was first playing MGS3 several years ago, my no kill/alerts/continues would have been SO much easier if I had known about the soft reset. I didn't find out about it until I gave up on the escape from Groznyj Grad on Extreme and looked for a guide online.

 

[PatrickXD]

On my third play through of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I realised that you can simply activate Silent Footsteps and Cloak and sprint through any room. Yeah, it kinda stopped being hard at this point.

 

[thelonewolf266]

This was my friend actually, but he played through the entirety of Dead Space without knowing about stasis.

Aren't there some puzzles that you need to use stasis to complete and so you can't proceed through the game if you don't?
Unless he just didn't know you could use it in combat.

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

My friend genuinely thought portal ended when glados puts you in the oven

That's hillarious. It's not even like they give you a special ending there.

 

[wottabout]

Less extreme than other people's, but for some reason I didn't try to flee battles in FFX. I just assumed that there was some sort of consequence for fleeing, so I immediately put the option out of my mind and fought everything. I got a lot of experience, but I am sure that I would have gotten through things much faster if I hadn't gone through so many pointless battles.

 

[RamirezDoEverything]

I kept myself in the dark to everything related to Skyrim and sorta went through the game like a mad man granted I sank in over 200 hours and counting but it wasn't until 150 hours in or so I found out the game has fast travel, yeah so I quickly realized that my 200+ hours are easily brought down to 30 hours at most.
No wonder I wasn't liking this game like everyone else

I'm guessing you've never played the Elder Scrolls before?

I'm guessing he's never played an RPG before...

I kid.. I kid..


OT: Age of Empires 2:
I spend so much time sending raid after raid of battering rams at the enemy's walls, only to have them slaughtered by cavalry and towers, I found that after advancing to the imperial age, you could build trebuchets.
Trebucheting the fuck out of everything from far away is so much easier.

 

[FateOrFatality]

Dragon Age Origins, the final fight. I didn't realise there was a few ballista things sitting around you could fire. I died so many time before that...

Also, like others I didn't discover Skyrim's sprint button until many hours in. Only reason I did was because I'd just been playing New Vegas before, using a sprint mod mapped to the shit key. Was so excited when I accidently tried to sprint, only for it to actually work.

 

[iLikeHippos]

When I realized you can hold down SHIFT in Warcraft III to order units in a linear order. Such as, "Build that Farm now, than go back to mining."

It was such a pain to play Humans up until that point. And no, this isn't taught at any given point.

 

[irani_che]

My friend genuinely thought portal ended when glados puts you in the oven

That's hillarious. It's not even like they give you a special ending there.

I facepalmed myself into a coma
he thought he had done something wrong and re-played it wondering why glados was still mad at him

he thought it was done as karma for the companion cube

 

[feeback06]

I love playing JRPGs. For those of you who remember FF8 and FF9 and the like, probably remember the tutorials for weapons and equipment, various powerups and gems used to do this or that...And I remember when I was 12 when I got my first console. I got Final Fantasy 8 and barely paid any attention to the instructions, partially because I was impatient, partially because I didn't really get it (mostly because I wasn't willing to take the time to consider the meaning of the words I was reading), and partially because I didn't think it was important (12 year olds, think they know everything).

Imagine my surprise when I'd come up to a boss I couldn't defeat and I didn't understand why. Hmmm maybe it's the fact that you haven't upgraded weapons or powers dumbass. So imagine my further surprise when a few years later I'd replay FF8 and find that it's actually quite simple if you just read the tutorial and pay a sliver of attention.

I had a moment like that in FF 8 too, on my first play through I didn't know how to use the GF ability boost until I accidentally hit select during a boss fight in Ultimecia's Castle.

 

[Plinglebob]

Looking at this thread, I think the mystery of why FFVIII is such a love it/hate it game has been solved! Thankfully I had a mate who'd played it before I did so he helped me out a little re: Junctioning, but I remember in FFVII essentially making things up as I went along regarding Materia as didn't have much of a clue.

More On-Topic. I was playing World Of Warcraft for almost 5 years before I found out you could eat and drink at the same time. As a healer class I rarely needed to eat and if I had to do both, I just did it one at a time or used buff food (which restored both health and mana). First found out when it showed up as a loading screen tip. Not quite sure how I had not figured it out and be in 3 raiding guilds without anyone noticing.