Ghorpm: Sure, I can give you an answer but I'm afraid it won't help you much because I think we have different characters ;)
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Your reply is very insightful, thanks! Despite the circumstance that I most likely have considerably less brain power than you, I can make use of your mode switch principle if I learn to employ it the right way. It's not that this is new to me, I have often broken the 4th wall to think "ok, what could a turd game designer have thought of here" but the difference to your approach is that I usually don't actively switch into that mode, it happens more organically and doesn't always happen when it needs to happen or I can't sustain it for long enough even if it does happen. You see, immersion is the main goal why I play in the first place, it's mainly not about the challenge but about escapism and beating the game is only secondary at best. By switching into break 4th wall mode I destroy immersion and enter challenge mode which makes it a chore, even if I succeed. Because RL has enough challenges and actual rewards for its challenges whereas the sense of award or satisfaction from beating games isn't very big for me, highly secondary to the goal of immersion. But I still want to beat the games as a secondary goal, not because it makes me feel great but mainly because it prevents me from feeling stupid. Hence, I'm caught in a dilemma.
If I keep up immersion I won't find the solution as I'm limiting myself within the game's logic and my own sense of logic but if I break immersion and use "emulate game designer" logic then I automatically fail in my mission to do escapism properly which leads to quitting the game and then triggers the feeling stupid part due to not achieving the secondary goal of beating the game.
Ghorpm: I'm not a masochist though. There are some games I finished with a help of a walkthrough or even cheats. 95% of those games I consider to be bad so I didn't feel entertained by them so I used a shortcut to get them finished fast and I'm not even ashamed of that. I refuse to play anything that do not entertain me and in those cases I don't even get any fun from the challenge factor.
An ingenious self-defense mechanism. Blaming factors outside yourself: "Game is badly designed!"
Makes perfect sense but I'm having trouble doing that as I usually seek blame with myself first. Example: I gave up on trying to beat Crimsonland on hardcore difficulty because I got stuck in one level that is so aggravating that you need luck, first and foremost in the form of getting the right weapon from the first kill. No chance to succeed if that doesn't happen, regardless of your skill.
Now unfortunately, there are many players out there who did succeed not only in hardcore but even in grim difficulty. So while I have sufficient arguments to claim bad design on the game and win a design debate, I still have to blame myself for not succeeding because other players managed to beat the game on all difficulties. Perhaps I'm missing not just skill which is as I said not the only factor here but patience as well. Restarting a level 20 times in hopes of getting the right weapon and the right upgrade drops at the right time in the right places isn't fun to me and certainly not immersive. I can have immersion without fun but without immersion, I don't want to go on at all - even if I shift blame on the game at this point.
I could simply cheat to get past the difficulty spike but cheating here would result in me finding it pointless to continue because if I cheat once then I might as well cheat again at the next spike and that gives me an overall sense of pointlessness. So I simply abandon the game instead, in this case not a big problem as I beat Crimsonland on normal and achieved my secondary goal of completing the game. Unfortunately, there are games I abandon even before trying the harder difficulties so those games end up making me feel stupid even if I blame it on bad design, as explained above.
Ghorpm: There are some exceptions, for example Discworld. I loved this game but I had to use a walkthrough. Why? Because I didn't want to lose all story-related fun as I expected it to be greater than challenge-related fun.
Ah...Discworld...I'm still working on that one. Haven't played it in months though, this gonna take years :'D
But I'm stuck in much easier adventures too so I can't blame it on the game.
Ghorpm: And you have to remember that I'm not a completionist. I only care about being entertained. Let me give you an example: Anna Extended Edition, a game which can be very hard and extremely illogical. I've finished it without a walkthrough and had a blast playing it. Did I get the best ending? No, of course not. Did I learn everything I could from the game? No, of course not. But I don't see myself playing it again because I wouldn't get much fun out of it so I'm satisfied that I've already finished it. Case closed ;)
Never heard about Anna so I looke dit up just now, ah one of those 1st person horror games, those are not at all my area of expertise, have hardly played any of those games.
But I had a similar experience with Bad Mojo which is a great classic but I only got 2 of the bad endings and simply couldn't achieve the good ending. I finally gave up and watched the good ending on Youtube and then got angry because I tried to do what one needs to do but the game didn't let me do it. No idea if I missed something and could therefor not perform the needed action or if it was a bug (no pun intended) or what. Either way, I did finish it so "case closed" even if I only got burned in the end - literally!
Ghorpm: So yeah, I can assure you that you may solve a lot of problems when you are not immersed in a game, your brain will work so much better then. The question is: is it worth it? For me - yes, I still have a lot of fun. But I would never recommend it to anyone because I think a lot of people value immersion.
At first I thought you meant I can't use your method because I'm more dumb and that you used "character" as cover to politely express that circumstance but I see that you meant character as in personal trait and that actually makes sense. Truly, I don't know if I can pull off your method as immersion is key to my will to continue. I don't care if a game is enjoyably hard and I often have to reload several times but if I must break immersion - which interestingly is called
metagaming - then I'm not sure I can do this. You'll of course say that this popular term has nothing to do with meta and we'll be back in the "muggle meta vs the real scientist meta" discussions of your other thread :)
Anyway, there are games where I'm stuck regardless of whether I break the 4th wall or not, Prelogate being a good example which I got after reading your review. This is a game that I consider to be a very good game indeed, but I find it hard to immerse myself into it and at the level where I left it off, I could not proceed even in non-immersed mode. In this game, it's pure logic that's needed, no cheap shots from the designers so it appears that I'm in fact less capable of logic than e.g. you. I could try to make excuses and say I need a more spiffy presentation so as to be motivated but if my brain was more powerful I would ace those levels before lack of immersion became too noticeable. As a comparison to another puzzle game, I very much enjoyed
Rush which is all about logic as well. The easy levels I aced (they're insultingly easy), the medium levels I enjoyed as just having the right kind of resistance. Some occasional cursing from me: "this is bullshit!" followed by "oh...well...that wasn't so hard after all".
Same for more than half of the hard levels but with the other less than half levels, things are starting to get iffy and I'm having great trouble to stay immersed. And therefor haven't played the game at all for a couple weeks now, despite being only half a dozen levels or so away from glorious victory. I so frustrate! I'm fairly sure you would complete this game without great trouble in your Christian Bale in Equilibrium mental mode.
To summarize: Your reply was very insightful and even helpful, although it was technically only insightful but not helpful to me due to my "must stay immersed" limitations. I would like to thank you again, mostly because maybe someone reads your reply and can use it for themselves so even if I can't do it maybe others will learn and profit from you. Which is why I asked this via forum and not PM. Anyway, thanks you. Always a pleasure!
