I might look for info to check if I am doing something significantly wrong if I play something that I find really not fun, in case I have misunderstood something. But then also only look for general hints rather than any optimized/detailed builds.

Also, all this talk of unoptimized builds rather makes me want to go play the Champions MMO again. It’s just full of unoptimized builds, most of which could be quite fun as long as one never PvPed. (Then again, PvP in that game was probably the worst I’ve seen for cookie cutter one build to rule them alls.)

So, for example (not having played Dragon Age) – say, you can be a “good” mage or a blood mage. If you unlock blood mage and consort with demons your character becomes more personally powerful, but your ickiness puts off potential allies and you get less support along the way. Come the final battle with evil, a good mage has an army of peasants with pitchforks at their back. If you’re the blood mage, the peasants see nothing to choose between the dark lord and yourself and stay at home instead. If the fight’s tuned right, it’s about equal difficulty either way but you get a different story based on player choice. If it’s not, then one way is an easier way to finish the game and being a blood mage wasn’t actually an interesting choice because it could be seen as “gimp yourself or not”.

The problem, if there is one, with optimization in video games is about how EASY and FREE it is to optimize, and bypass the “what do I do now” part of games. That’s the part that everyone remembers as fun 5 years ago, but that everyone hates when they’re actually doing it.

And it does seem as if (at least in the blogosphere) fewer people are playing games to have fun, as much as they are to write about it or at least KNOW about it. And that requires playing as many games as possible, as efficiently as possible.

Why not just be able to take my stable of optimized, familiar toons and play any game I want with them?

There’s also the trouble I’m having with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I don’t know how much money I’ll be earning, or how much I’ll be needing, nor do I know how best to optimize my characters to make a team that can actually *finish* the game. Some of that is due to the typical sudden difficulty spike that tends to come in FE games in the final mission, some of it is simple unfamiliarity with the game’s unique quirks.

Playing that sort of long-term metagame is crucial to success in FE games, because you can’t retrain units or recover lost allies. Without a good idea of how that metagame can shape up, though, you’re stuck with either multiple playthroughs of the entire game or looking to FAQs. It will be easier to play and plan ahead on another playthrough… but when I’m lacking time to play a whole game, hearing from others who have played through already is very beneficial.

It borders on broken design, as it is quite possible to make a team that cannot finish the game, but you’ll only know at the end of the game, when it’s too late to make a difference.

So… I’m usually very happy just doing my own thing and playing a game on its own terms, but when it throws a curve at me in the final hour of a 40-hour epic, and the only solution is to go back 20 hours or start over, yeah, I’m less than pleased. I don’t think that’s terribly common, but it’s common enough that I have a tendency to check out FAQs at least for the broad strokes of a game to make sure I don’t get tripped by that sort of stupid design, blowing tens of hours of play.

…but that’s not a social pressure I’m caving to, it’s a desire not to waste my time. *shrug*

I think the Bioware games provide more scaffolding and while the characters may not be balanced, all of them are fun in their own way and of course the difficulty slider allows one to play through with a “gimp” character.

In my 2nd play through of DA2 (first as a mage on normal), I consulted a guide and played as a 2h fighter on hard. It was a totally different experience, made more so as I chose different dialog options.

There is value in both ways of design, but I felt that FO3 was “drinking water out of a fire hose” as it gave me too much all at once. I wonder if the DA2 demo wasn’t genius as it previewed what one’s character could become.

Many of my friends stopped playing for pure enjoyment, for a time at least. We’ve wandered back to our roots as of late, where getting trophies and what not are a neat plus, but not a goal in an of themselves.

I think single player games have the advantage of difficulty sliders too, which MMOs do not. If I chose a terrible class build in Oblivion, I could just lower the difficulty so that I could still enjoy the game playing whatever class I wanted.