T w e n t y S i d e d
In addition to Dark Souls and Dave the Diver I’ve been playing All The Mods 10, the Minecraft modpack. I have probably thousands of hours of Minecraft experience but I’ve never worked through a big modpack like ATM10 until now. Recently I had a realization, though. I had spent dozens of hours in this pack optimizing and automating my way to being incredibly overpowered without doing much exploring. I can now wander around one-shotting basically everything. There’s no challenge anymore. I’m bored.
Now, the title is a joke. There’s nothing tied to masculinity that pushes me to minmax my way to boredom in games. It’s not even something I’m prone to doing too frequently. For instance, it’s well known that you can break Skyrim within an hour of play. Whenever I feel the urge to revisit the game I just don’t feel the desire to go out of my way to power level or exploit the game’s flawed blacksmithing and alchemy mechanics. It’s dull to me. There’s dozens other RPGs that have a particular method to get a massive head start and I typically avoid it, unless the early game sucks. I don’t often revisit Fallout 4 but when I do, you bet your ass I spend the first 30 minutes spamming shelves to pop up 10 levels or so.
On the other side of things, I go out of my way to do everything I can to get “OP” in Dark Souls short of using glitches. Insane base stats for a weapon? I’m rushing for it. Free early levels and resources from cheesing a boss? I’d say “Watch me,” but I already went there and got back, idiot. Keep up. My point is that I’m not afraid to beef myself up when the game is playing unfair first. The community around the Souls games entirely agrees with me too. I would say that’s a pretty fair assessment of some of the JRPGs I’ve played as well. Sometimes you get dropped into areas where the difficulty curve hits a spike and if you don’t want to repeat fights, grinding or finding some shortcuts are the way to go.
My problem in games and modpacks like ATM10 is that the grind is more rewarding than the actual gameplay. I want to see the number go up. I build my base, mine up resources, build machines, build BIGGER machines, then get completely lost as to what to do and eventually fall off. At this point, I think it’s more of a feature than a bug, though. Maybe the grind is the attraction, like with many MMORPGs and gacha games.
I’m sure there’s plenty more examples of games that create their own expiration date due to the grind being more engaging than the actual gameplay. For that I will trust you kind fellows in the comments. I’m far from an expert on games. I’m just an idiot that someone mistakenly trusted with a keyboard. So I genuinely have enjoyed reading what you all have to say. So lay it on me.
My greatest enemy and ally simultaneously in ATM10 is the 16GB of RAM on my laptop fighting for its life to keep it running.
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I think the grind being rewarding is sort of the idea behind so-called ‘incremental’ games, innit. Things like Synergism, Recursive, Horripilant, et cetera. And it’s probably also the attraction for those who are into GregTech: New Horizons (a Minecraft modpack which would take one several thousands of hours to complete) or Frackin’ Universe (a Starbound mod which adds enough content to extend a playthrough a hundred times over).
Taking an unusual path to get strong early like you talk about in relation to Dark Souls reminds me of how I like to dive into Bitterblack Isle in Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen at the earliest opportunity. By beating 2 bosses one can shoot up to like level 70 of the absolute maximum of 200 (though actually getting to level 200 turns into a bit of a slog as eventually even the more easily grindable bonus superboss doesn’t give as much EXP as I’d like).
Finally, on the topic of jRPGs I have to get this off my chest: levelling in Breath of Fire 2 on the Super Nintendo was crap. Enemies would give like 8 experience when Ryu would need 370 to go from level 5 to 6.
I’m a big fan of getting absurdly powerful out the gate. My last FF8 playthrough still got 100 Tornados before Dollet, which lets you one-shot the early “superboss”. Disgaea’s Item Worlds are the main game, really, and then you come back from there and smash the story missions with your second-smallest toe. Clair Obscur has Stendhal.
Can always do an Initial Equipment run or something, if you want challenge. Which I don’t.
I like when there are different approaches to grind. In Palworld for example you need tons of leather/wool/elemental glands. There are three ways to get those:
1. Putting the right Pal in your cattle farm and wait. You can enhance those Pals with other materials so that they produce more materials in a shorter amount of time. But then you have to grind for those other materials.
2. Hunt wild Pals to get those materials dropped. And with the right Pals in your party you can enhance the drop rate. While on the hunt you might come across the materials to enhance your farm Pals.
3. Buy them in spades. But then you need millions of coins. Fortunately there are different ways to grind for coins …
I personally do not mind there being glaringly obvious exploits or powerleveling techniques in a game that make it MUCH easier. (Naturally, this is for single player games. Multiplayer games where balance is a much more important factor is a different story altogether.) The choice of how difficult a player wants to make their game is always in their hands, so if they feel it makes the game too easy, just… don’t do it? Personally, I like to play games in a way that ticks all the right boxes in my brain, which means I usually mod the hell out of it anyway, so difficulty usually goes right out the window. If I find the game too easy, I just install mods that make the game more difficult. :)