Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how?
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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.
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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I thought that was the Sims intended playstyle?
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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I used to only do something called "surfing" in the Counter-Strike: Source days.
There are dedicated servers that only run surf maps.
100% of my CS playtime is surfing it's so fun.
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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.’”
I get the tone is jokey but I wasn't sure if that was a hypothetical alternate universe proposition with a different Will Wright, or something that happened in real life, so I looked up the wildfire thing.
Wright's house was caught in the Oakland Hills firestorm.
Rebuilding his life, and having to reacquire so many of his basic possessions, fed into the idea for The Sims.
Yep, real life and not just hypothetical, ouch.
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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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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.
I love when game developers think of unintended things players might do and implement responses accordingly. Warning for TVTropes link.
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I was part of some exploration guilds in World of Warcraft with the aim to explore every inch of the Azeroth, get beyond every instance border and just climb hard terrain even if there was an easier way up.
The early days of wow were a magical time. I loved jumping around and getting stuck in the most random, remote areas of the map
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Yep. I played an earlier version but it's the same game.
The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it's divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.
Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don't know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.
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There's a great level of detail mod that can keep distant structures and terrain loaded in. I think it's called Distant Horizons. That and a render performance improvement are the only mods that I play with, makes such a big difference.
On Bedrock you can just edit a text file to increase the loaded distance. I feel like there's probably something similar for Java
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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.
I've done this a few times in different Civilizations games to see how the computer would react to things like an abundance of gold or over powered for the current turn units.
A lot of the time it was underwhelming with them not really utilizing what was given to them or switching up their strategy. With gold they wouldn't buy units or tiles and would still demand gold during trades or for peace for example.
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