Put 30 hours into Skyrim, occasionally getting level up message, before I realized there was a skill tree and you actually had to go and choose a stat before you got any advantage out of your levels.
I started playing Pokémon Red before I even knew how to read. I had no idea how to save and just assumed I would find a save point eventually like a bunch of other games. I have no idea how many times I dejectedly had to turn off the GameBoy halfway through Mt. Moon. I was convinced the save spot had to be on the other side.
When I first played I didn’t know what Pokemon centers were. Everytime I needed to heal I ran all the way back to Mom’s house in palette town
As a stupid 7/8 year old I couldn’t figure out how to catch pokemon on red/blue. I just figured that if I kept playing the game I’d eventually acquire pokemon(similar to the anime). I wound up playing the entire game with a charizard and nothing else.
It was brutal. Imagine my surprise when my friend showed me his team of 6 pokemon.
That poor charizard only knew HMs.
How did you get to Cinnabar Island? That poor Charizard!!
I think I may have gotten the Lapras as a gift? Or maybe it was a magikarp as a gift. I honestly can’t remember, but I distinctly remember only having Charizard in the Elite 4.
And the old man part in Veridian city never clicked? Haha
I was a very, very stupid kid
I beat the original dark souls without realizing there were different weight thresholds for rolling. I fat rolled the entire game. Also didn’t realize boosting vigor was important for hp. I did 99% strength/stamina and only as much dex as required to weild my weapons.
Didn’t realize holding dodge would make me sprint in Elden Ring for like ten hours! oof
The stats like strength and stamina have a cap too after which they don’t really add anything.
I played Valhiem early in its launch for like two weeks on my own server. Once I finally got my friends to join they were dismayed as to why I had dozens of broken copper pick axes in storage boxes.
I had no idea you could repair things and kept mining barely more copper than was needed to make a copper pickaxe.
The game got a lot easier after that.
I’m surprised you lasted that first two weeks
Skyrim. Was well into the game and was walking everywhere instead of using fast travel.
That’s just dedication, right on!
Bruh… I’ve never used fast travel. I think I should start doing that.
When I was a kid, I used to “play” Operation Flashpoint. I remember being too dumb to realise that the mouse was used to move the camera so it was basically me moving around with arrow keys and strafing to see a little to the left and right.
Ah yes, the transition point when video games moved to assuming people have a mouse. A similar thing happened to a lot of people when games assumed you have a soundcard.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I was almost done with the game before I realized you leveled up in camps and inns. Game went from really hard to pushover easy in 5 minutes.
That combat system is dope once you get like 25 hours in lol
Really? I didn’t do it on purpose because I knew it’d fuck up my fun with the game. And I was right. Friends told me it was too easy for them and meanwhile I was micromanaging everything. This had the neat effect that, once I had the perfect setup, I even finished the superbosses easily.
It’s extremely easy to entirely not understand a huge amount about that game because it outright doesn’t tell you most things, at least not very well
One of the first computer games I’ve ever played is StarCraft. For context, the game is about human battle with aliens similar to Starship Troopers. The game story has three acts, each from different point of views. It is supposed to start from human pov, and then alien pov, and lastly another alien species. However due to English being my second language, I somehow started with the alien pov first. So my first impression of the game is that I play as a disgusting xenomorph alien species battling mankind. It’s not until later that I realized I missed an entire human chapter of the game.
Bloodborne… totally ignored that the gun is there to parry attacks and stun enemies on my first playthrough attempt
oh damn, that’s one of the most important gameplay elements!
Though I remember Bloodborne being super obtuse about teaching mechanics
I played through a fair amount of Sniper Elite 2 before a friend saw some of my gameplay footage and was like “Damn dude, you don’t even zoom your scope in?”
Turns out I’m just bad at reading instructions…
I am pretty sure in Witcher 3 I missed like half of the combat features - flasks, signs, rolling lol.
I apparently fucked up my W3 playthrough by sleeping with the first person who wanted to fuck in the first act.
This is fairly recent, but I was playing through a good chunk of Zelda TotK after the training area without the glider. I thought going towards the castle was supposed to be towards the end, so I wound up crawling up the great plateau to the old temple of time hoping to find it.
I was trying to play without spoilers, but luckily a friend set me in the right direction
The glider placement was a lot less obvious in TOTK for sure.
Similarly, I was completely ignorant about what the chasms were for until 2 days in when my friend casually drops that she’s been exploring [redacted because spoiler markdown isn’t working for me] and I went “Wait, there’s a WHAT?”
I’d missed a pretty critical side quest and I probably wouldn’t have noticed if my friend hadn’t told me.
Times like these are when our inclination to ignore quests for later really bites us in the behind…
I also ignored them for way too long.
When I finally decided to drop down and discovered the old mine with everything else that place has to offer (trying not to spoil), I was a bit pissed for not exploring earlier.
It also took me waaaay to long to realize the maps are “connected” and so are shrines/lightroots…
Just randomly noticed it after probably 50 hours in-gameThe game even gives you hints that the connection is there on the loading screens 😁
If you follow the side quest introducing that area, I think there’s an NPC that mentioned that tidbit. Though, my friend didn’t remember that until I brought it up too, so you may have just not encountered it.
I played through more than half of Red Dead Redemption 2 before I accidentally discovered there was a thing called dead eye for shooting. For some reason the game just assumes that you know the concept exist, since it isn’t featured in the early tutorial missions.
Not me, but a friend’s mom, this was back in 97-98 and I had been playing the Diablo demo for hours and knew the mechanics quite good and the two first levels.
So I visited my friend and his mom had bought the game and was playing a lot, and she was quite deep down, I think like 15 levels down… that’s when I asked why she hasn’t placed here last level up points… Turns out, she hadn’t placed any point at all 😱🤔🤣.
