That would be pretty unreasonable of me to get mad that bugs are being found when I'm the one that put them there.
Oh, I didn't mean about the bugs, just... anything, in general. I'm always paranoid of finding myself in another situation where I thought everything was good and everyone was having fun, but then it turns out I crossed a line somewhere a while back and kept going without realizing it.
There's also the thought that I'm already putting a frankly unhealthy amount of time into the game and I don't really want to encourage others to do the same for free (not that I'm really getting paid much either)
If it's any consolation, this is probably the most productive I've felt in a while, and I was just hoping to keep that ball rolling. I... have a lot of things getting in the way of being able to do anything worthwhile, so I was excited to contribute.
because the hints are dictating the way people are playing. Rather than ever having something new and novel happen organically they're coming up due to the player grinding any requirements away so that they can check everything off the content list. It's like I understand wanting to be able to find everything if you're enjoying it and wanting more, but at what point did video games become tasks that we approach in such a way as to systematically wring all content out of them and put it all up on a wiki so that other people can do the same?
Well, first off, the issue with the skills and curses has actually been that the
lack of information has made me afraid to take a more natural path through the game. I believe I mentioned this before, but I actually hate min/maxing "builds" in games. In games where all available skills and whatnot are transparent, I tend to play at my own pace and just "lean" in the direction I want to go. But here it's like, "I need to build my knowledge base first, and to do that I need to always be picking up the curses".
Meanwhile, the events with the checklist have actually been the opposite of how you described it. I can progress through them naturally, but once I'm pretty much "done" with playing the game that way, I go through a checklist to see all the stuff that I missed. Knowing that I can do that takes a big weight off my mind, and I don't feel the need to wring every bit of it out of my "natural" playthroughs to make sure I didn't miss something I didn't know I was missing.
As for your "at what point did video games become" part, I honestly feel like games have been trending in the opposite direction for a long time now. As you may have guessed by now, I'm Autistic, and the way I do things is how I've always done them. I want to experience everything a game has to offer, which is why I've always hated stuff like missable and mutually exclusive content. And I've been playing games and studying game design long enough to say that games used to be more suited to that kind of thing, long before "wikis" ever became a thing. But at some point there was a big push towards that being treated as "wrong", and that games should be all about every player having a different experience, with the idea that you would never see all the content by playing through organically. RPGs got hit especially hard by this, which sucks because they used to be my favorite genre. But the irony is that, for people like me, it makes things like walkthroughs and checklists more necessary, because otherwise I feel like I'm missing out on the content I want to experience. And it's especially bad for particularly long games where I'm only going to want to play through once. Where I might previously have felt safe going through a game blind and seeing everything it had to offer, now I have to check a guide in the hopes that it'll tell me what I need to know without giving too many actual spoilers.
Anyway, I think I just started rambling off on an unrelated tangent from what you were referring to. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you look at this playstyle as something you should be fighting against, you could end up doing the opposite of what you're trying. Some people see those things as a safety net, and in the absence of having that, feel the need to play in an overly cautious way.
Edit: In fact... there are probably ways to design a game in a way that encourages playing through "naturally" in order to unlock a more "controlled" experience for future playthroughs. This would probably be too much work to consider reworking the game around right now, but as a thought experiment, suppose that instead of spending time to research things at the camp, going through the dungeon would earn you "research points" based on how far you made it before dying/winning, and you spent those to unlock new research notes and hints for events (individually, not the current "two researches and you see all the hints"). You could also reveal aspects of character developments like skill prerequisites, and other stuff like that. And since the way to get more research points is just to "get as far as you can", players are encouraged to play through organically without focusing their run in any particular direction, which in turn enables them to do the opposite if and when they want to. It's just a thought on how the two seemingly conflicting approaches to the game can be integrated with each other. (Now that I think of it, it's actually similar in philosophy to a system I had in mind for a rogue-lite game concept I've been toying around with. Although in that case you unlocked "Destiny Points" which actually allowed you to control certain elements of the world generation that would otherwise be random, allowing you to see certain events and progress the overarching storyline.)
Edit 2: Actually, if you're gonna be adding more stuff to the camp that just affects the current run instead of being a permanent unlock, it might really be a good idea to move the research system out of the camp entirely. If you give people the choice between spending a "currency" (time) on something temporary and something permanent, they'll be inclined to pick the latter until they have it all, and then it's no longer a part of the cost assessment at all.
