StaceyPowers

What game franchises have you quit? What would make you come back?

Do you deliberately handicap your character (i.e. by choosing harder skills) or make in-game decisions with harsh consequences to make games harder?

A couple times over the past month, I had to redo sections of open world games because of bugs. In both cases, I found that what took me a week the first time took me 1-2 days the second because I fast travelled. It’s crazy how much time I now realize I spend just walking around game worlds!

What is the most dramatic thing you have done to protect your console? This question applies mostly to people with kids and pets. I dove between my cat and my PS5 and let her vomit on me to spare my console.

I am guessing most of us do not complete every single quest in every game we play, especially open world games. If you do ignore quests, what causes you to skip them or abandon them? Usually for me it is having to do unethical things in-game, but sometimes I skip fetch quests because they bore me.

As a completionist, I can sympathize. I collected everything I could for a long time before switching to collecting only certain minimal items to preserve my sanity =D

If you push the wrong button in a game, do you go back to fix your mistake? For instance, I accidentally killed someone in a game last night. But I chose not to fix it, The mistake felt genuine, even though it was stupid.

If you can persuade/intimidate/lie your way out of a fight in a game, do you? In what scenarios?

Have you played any games that were hard for you to beat on a replay, even if you didn’t raise the difficulty?

What games have the most interesting items? Like as presented in the menus. I love the items in The Outer Worlds; they have funny descriptions.

Have there been times in games that even though you killed a hostile NPC, you still felt like a murderer? I feel this way any time the NPC is cute (i.e. a mudcrab in Skyrim).

I like decorating my houses in video games. I was surprised to find that in some ways though, I’ve had even more fun watching The Outer Worlds decorate my ship for me. There’s no creativity involved on my end obviously, but I am often delighted by the unexpected details and surprises. I always look forward to coming back to the ship to see what has been added or changed. Which do you think is more fun—decorating your in-game home or the game doing it for you?

Did a video game you played ever change the way you saw something in another franchise of any sort—especially one you followed for a long time? For example, after playing Mass Effect, the Reapers made me consider the Borg in Star Trek in a new light. It made me visualize a different direction they could go, which actually ended up happening recently in the franchise.

What items do you bother picking up in the games you play? I always pick up ammo of any type along with money. I generally pick up health-related consumables. Aside from that, I only pick up things I plan to use myself and/or items I feel sort of sorry for—i.e. the teddy bears in Fallout. But I don’t collect much else. It rarely seems necessary to pick up other items to sell after one is done being a newbie.

I play long video games on a rotating schedule from week to week. I notice some games are super addicting and just impossible to tear myself away from. Mass Effect was like this when I played it, and right now, it’s hard for me to put down The Outer Worlds. What are some games like that for you?

Almost every open world game I’ve played is extremely buggy. The only exception so far for me has been Red Dead Redemption, which I don’t think had even a single major glitch. What are some other open world games that run very smoothly?

Nope. To some though 🙂 I sure wish one had recommended it to me! =D

I've read there has been a kind of mass crisis regarding psych studies not being replicable: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248 My guess is that the reason for this is that there are likely so many individual factors that vary that it is simply hard to conduct psych studies. What works for one person with OCD with neurotype X and cultural belief Y may not fit another person with OCD and neurotype Z and belief Q. I don't think that necessarily means the study data isn't sometimes potentially valid and useful--just that it may apply to a narrower slice of the population than assumed in some cases.

I think that the ability of video games to induce "flow" also exists across a wide range of hobbies, and could account for many of their potential mental health benefits. I am suggesting though that I think video games may have a particular and unique effect for OCD based on a specific mechanic involving hijacking a malfunctioning reward system and putting it to better use. That is not necessarily applicable across all hobbies. Video games are programmed with our reward circuits in mind. Again, I do not get this effect from my other hobbies. My friend's therapist did actually suggest she play video games to manage her OCD.

What are some games you just HAD to get and anticipated for many months … and then discovered were even better than you’d hoped for?

If you could go back in time and give your child self one video game available today, what would it be and why? I would gift my childhood self BioShock Infinite, because I think it would have done the most to help expand my mind. My second choice would be Skyrim, because all child me wanted to do in games was explore.

Is gaming the best part of your day? It is for me. It is the time of day that I get all to myself with no distractions or issues, and I finally get to decompress and relax.

Are there any choices you make regarding armor, weapons or combat styles across all or almost all games you play? For example, I don’t think I have ever deliberately used heavy armor, no matter what I am playing. But I am a lot less consistent with weapons choices.

On average, it seems to me like open world games tend to have a lot more bugs and glitches than linear games. Does anyone know why this is the case? Is it to do with the sheer amount of data in open world games and all the variables being juggled? Or is there just more quality control with linear games?

What do you want from A Plague Tale: Requiem? In terms of story, I feel like I can answer this in one word: answers.