Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Elevator7009@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.

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secret300@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I guess risk of rain 2.

I’ve fought the boss before but never any of the new ones. I don’t touch lunar items I just get to the last teleporter and loop around again and again. I rarely end the game I just play until I get bored and then close the game.

Still got like 400 something hours in the game on steam and on PS4 that I don’t even know

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tatann@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I played stealth games like Hitman like a mass murderer.

I also play the “infiltrator” class in Mass Effect without tactical cloak. I mean it’s a mix of soldier and engineer, why should it be focused on stealth ?

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- DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My cousin and I spent a summer messing around in hitman blood money when we were younger. There’s a level that takes place in a neighborhood with a cul-de-sac. We managed to kill every single npc undetected with the snare wire and dump theoe bodies into the sewer to leave no evidence. After each level, the game generates a newspaper article to describe the events and it basically said everyone in the neighborhood just vanished.
  
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  - Elevator7009@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I love when game developers think of unintended things players might do and implement responses accordingly. Warning for TVTropes link.
    
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- AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Absolutely a fun way to play Hitman. Definitely makes the game so much more fun, especially if you are playing on a crowded map and are trying to take out every single person possible without dying on harder difficulties.
  
  We don’t need stealth where we’re going!
  
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Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Who amongst us hasn’t played GTA at least once while trying to drive around and follow all the traffic laws for absolutely no reason at all

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- kratoz29@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Is there any mission as of nowadays that forces you to drive according to traffic laws in any of all the entries?
  
  If not I propose a very annoying one like the Driver tutorial as the GTA VI tutorial.
  
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  - YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Fucking driver! WTF is solemn‽
    
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  - CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    People talk about getting filtered by fromsoft bosses but the goddamn driver tutorial was the hardest shit ever; especially since it used a lot of movie terms so if you weren’t really into american movies about cars half the stuff on the list was kind of gibberish.
    
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  - gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sorta? Multiple that make you watch your speed, for sure
    
    Driver’s law mechanics in a mission/mode of GTA would be amazing, wanted level system from 2 included (with a way to clear your on-foot wanted, of course)
    
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- Elevator7009@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There’s a wonderful contrarian-but-is-it-really-considering-it’s-making-the-lawful-choice delight in trying to follow the rules in a game about breaking rules.
  
  No-commentary video of someone just driving in GTA trying to follow the rules of the road. I’m usually really not a video person, but just watching this feels nice somehow.
  
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- Agrivar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Every time I log into that game I like to pick a car from my garage, smoke a fatty (in RL), and then drive all slow and chill from my apartment to the golf course. Pretend like I’m afraid of getting pulled over! Then I play a quick 9 holes. Generally, after that, I’m done with GTA for another month or so.
  
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- MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Oh, yeah! Get a car, find a quite park, turn on the radio and chill.
  
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- forrgott@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Hmm. Nope.
  
  That’s what Streets of SimCity was for!
  
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  - QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well unless you did sunday driving… And put weapons on your car so you could go around demolishing the buildings you had built up in Sim City.
    
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Nefara@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
For a while, I played the MMO Guild Wars 2 as a music simulator. It has playable in game musical instruments that you can equip, and play with the number keys. A-G are represented as numbers 1-8 with 9 and 0 swapping an octave lower or higher. Killing monsters? Doing dungeons? Raids and world bosses? Nah I’m just chilling in a beautiful forested cliffside near a waterfall figuring out an arrangement for the Lord of the Rings theme.

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Omgboom@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the “observe” console command let’s you play as a spectator, you can use the “play” command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.

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- Jayjader@jlai.lu ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sorry for necroposting, but OP linked your reply in a recent post and I wanted to directly respond to it.
  
  You might enjoy The Ellimist Chronicles, a companion book to the Animorphs series. The novel’s protagonist has a similar interest in getting things done with the minimum of direct intervention.
  
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  - Omgboom@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Neat, I will check that out.
    
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- Elevator7009@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is such a cool idea. Nudging a few things around and trying to see what ripple effects they have…
  
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rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m playing Overwatch but actually having fun while doing so /s

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- zo0@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Banned
  
  The player exploited the game mechanics to achieve an unintended side effect.
  
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fargeol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I did that with RTS like Starcraft or Age of Empires II. I would just build a city, develop every upgrade, build good defenses and basically play it like Sim City

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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I played the story in GTA a few times.

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madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is pretty much the basis for the entire speed-running community. Maybe not totally different (like walking around as a peaceful tourist in Hitman), but definitely not utilizing mechanics as intended

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Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I mostly play according to the intended game design. The only exceptions that come to mind at the moment are:

Open world games (GTA, Fallouts, Elder Scroll series etc) - I tend to act like a normal, civilian part of the world. I eat and drink, travel like a person rather than player (i.e. safely, without quick travel), avoid violence and do peaceful tasks when possible. I also go on trips and take screenshots of the scenery.
Finally, if there’s an equipment system I limit myself to “reasonable” amount of baggage (both in terms of weight and volume).

Mirror’s Edge and Portal - the only games I learned to the point of speedrunning. I’m nowhere near the level of being able to compete with professionals (nor am I interested in that) but I can get through both pretty quickly and without issues.
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Console_Modder@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Some friends and I play multi-world randomizers together. Randomizers modify a game so that important items/unlocks are in different locations or are obtained in a different way. I usually play Ocarina of Time and a randomizer changes all the “treasure chest” items found throughout the world, so instead of finding the bow in the Forest Temple (where it should be in the game), it could be found behind a rock in a cave in the middle of the field. I constantly have to ask myself “What items don’t I have yet?” and “What areas do I have access to that I haven’t searched yet?” It turns the game into a kind of puzzle game. There is a website we use called Archipelago.gg that lets you connect randomizers together. I can play an OOT randomizer and my friend can be playing a Pokemon Emerald randomizer, and when I open a chest I can find items from his game and he gets a gym badge, an HM, or something else dropped into his inventory. And it works the other way when he beats another trainer, he could get one of my items and I get some rupees, or a hookshot dropped into my inventory.

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Lupo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Splatoon

Play dualies, focus purely on anniahlating children with complete disregard for the objective.

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MrEC@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I play Trailmakers which is like Legos where people mostly build planes and tanks to shoot each other, but I build cranes, forklifts, trucks and boats and fill them with the barrels and crates from around the maps and move them to other places. Very peaceful and rewarding to me.

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FilthyHands@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I used to play Jet Moto solely to do tricks. I remember there being level geometry that could send you hundreds of feet in the air.

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andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.

My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recollect the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)

Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”

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- ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I thought that was the Sims intended playstyle?
  
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  - andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Will Wright after seeing everything he owned in ashes after a series of major wildfires in the Palisades: “what if I made a virtual dollhouse for people to explore sexual and violent fantasies that would make Freud say, ‘no, that’s too much.’”
    
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- mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
  
  lolwtf
  
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  - andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    The prison mod is great for running the “re education” camps in the Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. I usually rezone all of the lots in Downtown to residential, and then explode a series of bombs across them (+ enhance with some assets ripped from the Fallout games). Occasionally I add in a zombie apocalypse to shake it up.
    
    My Utah Mormons I play out the generation after they moved from Nauvoo. Clothing is period accurate, as much as possible. The goal is to populate an empty map, and find something to do with all of the extra men (wars, Indian raids…)
    
    When I was ten and playing the original Sims, it was Roman families with historically accurate slavery (minus the sex stuff.)
    
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- SendMePhotos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m not into mods but if I remember right, isn’t Lady Rae the one who left the modding community and started making music?
  
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  - andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.
    
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- Elevator7009@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I always like to see people who go all in on the roleplaying in RPGs.
  
  I do wish people would leave mods that aren’t for them alone. There are a bunch of mods extremely not to my taste that I just scroll past instead of intentionally clicking to tell the mod author just how much it is not to my taste and that they should not have made it because I am uninterested in the content.
  
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  - andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Modding is a really under appreciated art form.
    
    Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol)
    
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thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Most games I play that I don’t plan on playing a lot of. I use trainers hacks and cheats on things I find grindy or just feels pointless. Or unnecessary hard games.

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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Speedrunning

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Elevator7009@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There are a few mobile or web idle/incremental games I have used as a substitute for a Pomodoro Timer. Oh, I am really into the game and it only progresses if this is the focused tab? I really want to make progress, but I am in a period of the game where active play isn’t that rewarded, and just watching the screen while I wait to earn the upgrade is pretty boring? How about we just leave my phone with that as the active tab, and I check back when the upgrade should be earned? Keeps me off my phone and doing the actual things I should be doing instead. Somehow, “abusing” games like this works better for me than the Forest app which has the explicit intention of making sure you do not touch your screen for a set length of time and instead do something else off your phone.

I also “abuse” Pokémon Masters EX in a similar fashion. You’re expected to level up with some combination of putting them through battles that cost stamina to play through, and some pretty easy-to-obtain level-up items. And although there is an Auto option I have a feeling you are intended to manually do the battles in-game. Instead, I start story mode battles which cost no stamina to play through, that still reward me with XP no matter how many times I repeat it, and have the game fight the battle for me with the Auto setting. I check back when the battle is done and restart it. I have essentially turned this into an idle/incremental game, albeit one with a pretty short time between waiting and checking back in on the game. Free level-ups! Even though it does take much longer than the intended way, which is why I suspect nobody tried to prevent this method from working.

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- Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Huh, never knew my approach to work had an actual name. That’s neat! Thanks for teaching me something new.
  
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FelixCress@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Like playing Gwent instead of fighting monsters as the witcher?

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- SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I felt that way about blitzball in final fantasy 10 (I think). Never finished the actual game.
  
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- who@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  An argument could be made that Gwent offers better gameplay than the larger game in which it resides.
  
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  - BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    There is no argument if the statement is objectively true
    
    The Witcher 3’s gameplay was so bad that I couldn’t finish it (and the map so uninteresting, but that’s another story). Gwent was pretty cool though
    
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  - FelixCress@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    An argument could be made that you are a genius. Both arguments would be equally wrong.
    
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  - Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Are we certain Witcher is the larger game in which Gwent resides and not the other way around?
    
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  - takeda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Then you purchased a wrong game and should just play solitaire.
    
    Witcher 3 is absolutely great, but if you just go through only the main quest, won’t explore the world and won’t do side quests then I can see you ending up disappointed.
    
    What I like is that side quests can impact the main quest and even the ending.
    
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PonyOfWar@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Assassin’s Creed. The actual gameplay is almost never as interesting as just walking around a meticulous recreation of ancient civilizations as a digital tourist.

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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  you and i play the same. I’m never getting to venice before it sinks, but i got my digital museum
  
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